I had a phone conversation with my good friend Doris. Doris has an interesting and rich life. She was one of the founders of the Food Network, is on the Board of a large University, earned a PhD later in life, traveled the world, and is politically active (for a time she called the White House daily). She is a daily tennis player, lives in three places in the US, and has such a busy social schedule you must book her well in advance. Did I mention she’s 83 (and her husband is a robust 93)? [Read more…]
Protect Your Job in Challenging Times — 10+ Steps
Manage Up: Have as much contact and visibility with your boss and boss’s boss as possible. Make interactions mostly business and put in some casual conversation. (It can be very lonely and isolating at the top.) Do what I call casual encounters — except you plan them. [Read more…]
Life Transitions — We’re All in Them, Including You — Part 2
Everyone is in a life transition, particularly during these challenging times.
In my last Competitive Edge Report; I introduced the research of Bruce Feiler, the bestselling author of “Life in Transition — Mastering the Change at Any Age.” I studied his work, which involved the interviewing of people who had made significant changes in their lives, how they coped with the life transition process and flourished in the outcome. Feiler showed how non-linear our lives can be and that “disruptions” (which occur, on average, every 12 – 18 months) can be voluntary, involuntary, personal, or community-wide. For most of the interviewees there was a “lifequake.” These are dramatic, chaotic, even catastrophic, occurrences in our lives that cause upheaval and bring about change, a new sense of self and renewal. [Read more…]
Life Transitions — We’re All in Them, Including You
Life transitions — those voluntary or involuntary changes we make, personally or as a community, is the basis of the book “Life is in the Transitions – Mastering the Change at Any Age.”
Some of you know the work of Bruce Feiler, a New York Times best-selling author, who made his mark with a book called “Council of Dads.” (It later became a highly respected television program.) Bruce was diagnosed with a serious, potentially terminal, illness. He assumed he was not going to see his twin girls grow up. He gathered six key men in his life and asked them to form a group that would guide his children into the future. It was a brave, insightful, and creative project embraced by many worldwide. FYI — he survived and thrived. [Read more…]
Power of Resilience in the Workplace
I stumbled upon a TEDX Talks, given by Lucy Hone, the Director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience. You learn in the program she had been studying the area of resilience before the famous earthquakes in Christchurch of 2011. Working with victims and communities post event helped her create practical applications of what she had learned academically. In 2014 she suddenly and tragically lost a young daughter in a terrible car accident. It was then she realized she needed to teach herself what she knew professionally if she wanted to move forward and help her sons. Her continued research and personal experience helped her narrow her understanding of resilience into three categories of mindset and behavior. [Read more…]
Make Stress a Positive Part of Your Life
In challenging times, it is not hard to imagine many peoples’ stress levels being high, some extremely high. Everyone is talking about it. The media is relentlessly analyzing it and there are times you are probably having a conversation with yourself that goes something like this, “I really need to get a grip on my stress.” You are not alone. [Read more…]
Identifying and Understanding Feelings in the Workplace
In another career, in a different decade, I worked as a mental health clinician serving a diverse group of adults. Many of them were unable to articulate what they were feeling, though a good number of them acted out their emotions in less than productive ways. One of the tools we used was the feelings chart. [Read more…]
Personal Leadership — What is It, How Do You Benefit from It?
In past issues of the Competitive Edge Report, I discussed many aspects of leadership: Leadership in Times of Chaos, Leadership Advice — Leadership Not Management, and Leadership Lessons from Captain Sullenberger (“Sully”). Recently several of my executive coaching clients have been faced with extraordinary challenges — layoffs, regime changes, downsizing, employer realignment, illness, natural disaster, and now this pandemic. [Read more…]
A Career Wake-Up Call
Times of crisis and significant stress can bring great clarity to our lives. What is important at home and in work becomes obvious because demands are immediate and sometimes life changing.
It can be a career wake-up call for both satisfaction and a need for action.
Here are some of the positive and negative things I see as possible career questions and opportunities presenting themselves because of the situation we are now dealing with. [Read more…]
Leadership in Times of Chaos
“The managerial rule book fails us… when people are searching for meaning and reasons to hope for the future.” So were the views of Dutton, Frost, Worline, Lilius, and Kanov in their January 2002 Harvard Business Review article “Leading in Times of Trauma.” Published just four months after the 9/11 attacks, the authors called for compassion on the part of senior leaders. The opportunity for employees to bring pain into the office, virtually or in-person, is not always seen or encouraged in the workplace. The authors argued compassion for others, particularly by leaders, “not only lessens their (the staff’s) immediate suffering… but enables people and the organization to recover from future setbacks.” [Read more…]
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