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It’s no surprise that Google, now part of Alphabet, loves data, and the company’s execs frequently share the revelations they find, such as their insights on mobile web use. But some of us would be surprised to discover that this unicorn company often turns its eye inward, analyzing information about its people to help improve its operations. A group of employees from Google’s People Operations section, the equivalent of an HR department, decided to complete an analysis to answer one question: What makes a Google team effective? Here’s a look at their approach and the startling revelations they had along the way.
Via The Learning Factor
Your brain is a comparison engine. In every new situation, it automatically rifles through your memory of every other situation you’ve encountered in the past. It swiftly finds one or a few that are similar to the current scenario, then uses that information to figure out what to do next. Most of the time, you do this without you ever realizing it. Sometimes this cognitive reflex works to your advantage, and sometimes it doesn’t. But since it’s always happening anyway, you might as well make it work for you more often than against you–at least as best you can. Here’s how.
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We may live in a digital world, but soft skills like communication, problem solving, collaboration, and empathy are becoming more valued than technology, says Paul Roehrig, chief strategy officer for Cognizant Digital Business, a business and technology service provider. “People skills are more and more important in an era where we have powerful and pervasive technology,” he says. “It sounds counterintuitive, but to beat the bot, you need to be more human.” When evaluating their hiring plans for 2017, 62% of employers rate soft skills as very important, according to CareerBuilder. But a recent survey by the Wall Street Journal found that 89% of executives are having a difficult time finding people with these qualities.
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Imagine you could have a skill where--in any given conversation with colleagues, clients, or subordinates--you could be keenly aware of, and even experience, their feelings and thoughts. Sounds like some X-Men-like psychic superpower right? Well, what if I told you that anyone can have this uncanny ability and use its strength and charm to have successful conversations? Well, you can. The superpower I refer to is called empathy. But this skill--and it is a learned skill available to anyone--is often misunderstood because there are variations of it. I'll get to the science of it shortly.
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We're already more than a week into January, but I'm still slowly working my way through all the "best of" year-end lists out there (there are so many of them!). Combing through these recommendations may be time-consuming, but it's worth the commitment, I've found, as sometimes you turn up an absolute gem you missed earlier in the year. Take the post titled "The Two Minutes It Takes to Read This Will Improve Your Writing Forever," by marketer Josh Spector, for example. As short as it is useful, the piece is one of the most recommended posts of 2016, Medium informs me. It's not hard to see why. Spector offers five dead-simple changes you can make to basically any piece of writing in a matter of seconds that will make it more forceful and compelling. We'd all enjoy reading a bit more if more writers followed his tips.
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Sometimes, being asked the right question at the right moment is a powerful motivator. Case in point: My dad said to me at college graduation, "We know what you can do. But who are you going to be?" At the time, I wanted a job and hadn’t yet realized how connected employment is with happiness and life’s purpose. I was a bit too hungover to come up with a good answer in the moment. However, the question stuck with me, and it resurfaces when I'm off-track.
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You probably don't need research to tell you that people are feeling more and more overwhelmed and overscheduled, but if anecdotal evidence isn't enough to make this clear, studies do exist. Americans tell pollsters they struggle to find work-life balance and generally feel like they spend their days on a slightly too fast treadmill scurrying to catch up.
But no worries--this problem has an obvious solution, right? All we need is better time management--get more done, choose and batch tasks more wisely, keep tabs on our to-do list more carefully, etc.
That seems reasonable but it's totally wrong, according to a fascinating article by business psychologist Tony Crabbe that appeared on Quartz recently. The in-depth piece looks at the history of the relationship between work and time (hint: we weren't always so clock obsessed) and goes on to argue that, as we've misdiagnosed what ails us, the prescribed treatment--time management--is actually making our problems worse.
"Time management, we believe, is the solution to our busyness: if we could organize our time better, we'd be less overwhelmed, happier, and more effective. We are completely wrong on all three counts, and it's damaging our lives and our careers," Crabbe writes.
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Over the course of an hour, Mashable covered an array of questions, ranging from how employees can demonstrate successful leadership in the office, to the key questions employees should be asking their supervisors in performance reviews. Several career experts and entrepreneurs shared their insights on the topic, including: James Caan, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Hamilton Bradshaw Group; Laurie Ruettimann, HR writer, speaker and advisor; Lisa Gates, negotiation consultant and executive coach at SheNegotiates.com; Dr. Marla Gottschalk, senior consultant at Allied Talent; Suzy Welch, business journalist and bestselling co-author of The Real Life MBA; Trish McFarlane, CEO of H3 HR Advisors, and The Muse, an engaging job-search and career-advice website. Check out highlights from our chat.
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You’re ready to deliver a talk or presentation or take on a new project. It’s the culmination of a great deal of preparation and hard work. Then, without warning, all of your hard-won faith in yourself evaporates, and you’re facing a crisis of confidence at the worst possible moment. Most of us have been in situations where our fearlessness waned just as we were about to realize an important accomplishment. When you’re in those minutes before a presentation or up against an important deadline, what can you do to get your confidence back? We turned to the experts for advice:
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Doctors use the “universal pain assessment tool” to measure how uncomfortable their patients are. It’s a simple mechanism made up of smiley (and sad) faces. At one end of the spectrum is “pain free,” and on the other is “unimaginable, unspeakable pain,” with “tolerable” and “utterly horrible” falling in between. It’s not terribly scientific, but the tool helps medical professionals download your pain data from a little chip in your brain, so to speak, making it one of the best and fastest assessments at doctors’ disposal. It’s not just pain that’s difficult to quantify–so is the human experience generally. But researchers have devised tools to study other mushy concepts, too, including creativity. And in the process we’ve learned there’s at least one thing that tends to nudge people into measurably more creative thinking: boredom.
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1. Learn something new, even if it's stressful: Mastering a new skill means more stress now but more happiness later. If you are willing to push through a bit of added stress in the short term, you can experience huge gains in happiness for the long term. So learn a new skill. Though you'll take on a bit more stress, research shows you'll be happier on an hourly, daily, and long-term basis. The gains from this investment in time and energy were documented in a 2009 study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Participants who spent time on activities that increased their competency, met their need for autonomy, or helped them connect with others reported decreased happiness in the moment yet increased happiness on an hourly and daily basis. The key, according to the study, is to choose the right new skill to master, challenge to undertake, or opportunity to get out of your comfort zone. The greatest increases in happiness come from learning a skill you choose, rather than one you think you should or feel forced to learn.
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Many of the most successful people had to fight tooth and nail for opportunities to learn new skills and advance up the corporate ladder. That’s often because what they wanted to learn and achieve wasn’t in sync with what their bosses wanted for them. You’re not a data scientist. You’re not cut out for engineering. Sales isn’t what you do. Lines like this are still used all too frequently when employees tell their managers that they want to move in a new direction. But this is only half the story. Managers are under tremendous pressure to generate results. You have annual quotas, quarterly goals, and increasing competition. Who has time to let employees go learn skills that may not be relevant for years, or may not serve your unit at all? I hear these challenges all the time as I work with managers at all levels, particularly in large corporations. I’ve also faced them myself with the companies I founded and scaled. It’s a tough balancing act. But I’ve learned key lessons to help managers turn lofty goals — such as making learning and development a central pillar of the workday — into real actions that mitigate damage to, and even help strengthen, the bottom line. Here’s how.
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You see people succeed all around you and it seems effortless for them. You feel you've stalled, or worse -- you feel like you've wasted your time doing what you're doing, and time is running out. I get it. I've been there, and I can help. So now what? Now it's time to unleash positive change in your life once and for all. Start with a question: What do you love to do? For those of you who struggled with the answer. I'm going to help you get there. Here are four steps to unleash positive change in your life immediately.
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HR leaders are sizing up a handful of challenges that they weren't yet facing in the early days of 2016. Over the next 12 months the solutions to those obstacles will have to evolve and adapt as the overall business world does the same. Still, it's worth taking a look back at what's changed in the past year in order to see what's in store for human resources professionals in 2017. These are five of the biggest trends impacting the field right now.
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I’m sure you’ve seen the articles on things you can do — independently — to bolster your career prospects. You can take steps to get more face time with your boss, you can volunteer to take ownership over projects and you can develop other talents on the side. But the thing is: Advancements aren’t all you, you, you. In other words, I’m sure several of the job descriptions you've seen call for a “team player,” and in job interviews, you you may have been asked to describe how you work with others. So even if you nail your solo tasks, you still have to be able to work with a group.
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LinkedIn can make or break your chances of getting an interview — you probably already know this. But just like with your resume, what you leave off your profile is just as important as what you keep on it. When it comes to the latter, we've given you plenty of tips regarding what should be there — from brilliant summaries to killer headlines that attract recruiters. But today we're talking about the former — all the items you need to leave off. Or, in most cases, remove before you make one more more hiring manager cringe and X out. I know, that sounds bleak. However, there is a silver lining, and it's that removing these items won't take you more than five minutes.
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There have been several books written about the subject of happiness including several from Tal Ben-Shahar ("Happier", "Even Happier" and "Being Happy") and Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh who wrote Delivering Happiness. All great books if you're looking for a deep dive into the subject of happiness. But I came across a quote from the Dalai Lama XIV that really nailed it for me: Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.
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Recently I helped a client get ready for an intense conversation with his team. There'd been some big stuff happening in their division, not all of it great. He had a "state of the union" to deliver as well as some requests. His concern was that if he didn't handle it well, he'd create a mess, not have any clean next steps, waste time, and ultimately demoralize the team. He was nervous. My good friend was having a challenge with her son. There'd been tension for a while and she sensed he'd been dishonest with her. They needed a heart to heart. Her concern was that if she didn't handle it well, she'd create a mess, alienate him, and create even more resistance between them moving forward. In another land, my colleague's team was rockin' it and he wanted to do something awesome for them. His concern was he wouldn't honor them well enough. I today am wrapping up a move, throwing my daughter a birthday party, working with clients, and writing to you. I want to make sure that I'm productive AND that everyone feels honored and seen. Four scenarios -- I'll bet you can plug yourself into at least 3 of them, if not all. So what to do? It's so simple. Happy Monday.
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How many goals have you set in your life? A hundred? Ten thousand? Even more? How many of these goals have you actually achieved? If you're like most people, this second number is going to be a fraction of the first. A big reason is that as soon as you set a goal, three things emerge to stop you. But most of us don't even realize what they are, and as a result, we are just left with our unaccomplished goal and an unshakable feeling of failure. What if you could not only identify these obstacles but also learn to welcome them? Well, the good new is that you can....
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It’s no surprise that Google, now part of Alphabet, loves data, and the company’s execs frequently share the revelations they find, such as their insights on mobile web use. But some of us would be…
Google's Five Dynamics of team effectiveness are applicable to creating effective safety cultures as well. Dynamic 1 - psychological safety is of particular importance because so often employees fear speaking up about safety concerns.