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Traditional goal setting focuses on the beginning and the end—start strong and keep your eye on the prize. Unfortunately, that process doesn’t work for every kind of goal, says Scott Young, author of How to Change a Habit. “A lot has been taught around the classic self-help style of Zig Ziglar or Tony Robbins where you have a clear goal, you visualize it, write it down, and focus on the starting point,” says Young, cofounder of the career development course Top Performer. “Some goals, though, aren’t clearly sequential.” The middle can and should be your starting point when you’re setting a goal where you’re unclear of the level you can achieve within a particular timeframe. This is especially the case with daunting, unfamiliar goals where you don’t yet have a strong sense of the big picture.
Via The Learning Factor
Every year for the past ten years, Glassdoor announces the top places to work all across North America and parts of Europe. The most unique part of this award? You can only win the award if your employees say so. Glassdoor's methodology for the award includes a collection of anonymous company reviews where employees share their honest opinion on pros and cons of working for the company, overall satisfaction, the CEO, and workplace attributes. They're also asked if they would recommend their employer to a friend. It's a juicy turn of the tables. Within the top 100 best places to work for, the industries that came out on top were tech, retail, healthcare, consulting, finance, and travel and tourism. The top cities included the Bay Area, Boston, and Los Angeles (just to name a few). So, what does it take to be the top of the top?
Via The Learning Factor
Being more productive is about working smarter, not harder, and making the most of each day. While this is no easy feat, getting more done in less time is a much more attainable goal if you’re not sabotaging yourself with bad habits. Following are 16 things you should stop doing right now to become more productive.
Via The Learning Factor
All the data suggesting that coding is rapidly becoming an essential skill for any job–not just one in tech–only tells one side of the story. The other side indicates that soft skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, attention to detail, and writing proficiency top the list of what hiring managers find missing from job seekers’ personal tool kits. But according to theWorld Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, one the job skills that will make a candidate competitive in the job market of the future is emotional intelligence. The WEF predicts it will be among the top ten in 2020. How emotionally intelligent are you now? There are several ways to test it (including one that’s so accurate it’s creepy). The good news is that even if you’re a bit deficient on some traits, emotional intelligence can be improved. Here are some suggestions on boosting your EQ right away.
Via The Learning Factor
Communication is an essential life skill for anyone and everyone. It's one of the earliest survival skills we learn as growing children. (How else would we have asked our parents for another cookie?) As we grow and become fully functioning human beings, communication only increases in complexity and importance--especially when you're leading a company. No matter what industry you're in or what size company you're leading, you're working constantly with different kinds of people. You've got internal team members and employees, clients, prospective clients, recruits, and other industry professionals, each with their own personalities and communication styles. You even communicate in a lot of different ways: during meetings; via email, phone calls, and group messaging; through thought leadership content published online and on social media; and at industry events.
Via The Learning Factor
Although there are hundreds of books about how to negotiate more effectively, the advice they offer is often difficult to apply, for three reasons. First, there are just too many contextual specificities underpinning each negotiation, such that one size does not fit all. Second, the effectiveness of each strategy is partly dependent on the personal background of the negotiators — who they are, what they want, and how they connect. Third, many of the factors determining the outcome of negotiations are more emotional than rational, which requires a deep psychological understanding of the people involved. Luckily, personality research provides valuable lessons in predicting an individual’s ability to negotiate effectively. Some traits are clearly indicative of good negotiation potential, while others are more of a handicap. That isn’t to say people can’t get better at it, but their success will depend on their ability to understand their own and the other party’s personality.
Via The Learning Factor
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Advice on how to improve one’s self is everywhere. It accounts for about 2.5% of all book sales in the United States. Add in speeches, training programs, TV programs, online-products, coaches, yoga, and the like, self-help is a $10 billion industry per year, and that’s just in the U.S. However, research shows that much of the advice extolled may be misleading or even wrong. Several myths about performance persist, despite research and practices that show they are half-truths at best. That might explain why the most likely purchasers of self-improvement books have bought another within the previous 18 months. The first myth-riddled book didn’t work, so they bought another, and maybe another soon after. A recent report in the Journal of Management noted that of nearly 25,000 academic articles on performance, only a fraction include what psychologists call within person variance, which describes ranges, such as that between individuals’ top, average and worst performances. Advice too often mistakenly assumes performance can be compared across people, using the same gauge. That’s absurd. Our observation of hundreds of performance seekers largely confirms the report and has led to delineating a series of myths that hold people back when trying to improve. These assertions are based on a diverse set of fields, including psychology, sports, arts, and leadership. We hope that by dispelling these myths, explaining the reality and offering some sound advice instead, we can help move people toward more effective personal development.
Via The Learning Factor
Leadership challenges are more complex today than ever before, and one leadership challenge that I see as an executive coach is the tendency to anticipate what might happen tomorrow while forgetting about what is happening today. In other words, leaders try to outthink and overanalyze the future. They anticipate all the possibilities that could happen, select the outcome most likely to occur and then mold their leadership style to accommodate it, only to find that Murphy has a full-time job and is apparently dedicated solely to them — and Murphy wins.The point is, tomorrow, next week or next year are all uncertain, so if you try to mold your leadership style to the “most likely” option to occur, then you’re not leading, you’re contingency planning. Leaders don’t just think about the future, they think in it. Once they have a clear picture of what they want to see, where they want to be—as an individual or as a team — and why, they begin to mold the world around them to achieve it.
Via The Learning Factor
Find it hard to advocate for yourself? You’re not alone. The personality trait that psychologists call “agreeableness” describes how motivated you are to get along with other people. If you’re highly agreeable, that motivation can sometimes prevent you from sticking up for your own interests. Anytime you ask for something at work, you run the risk that you’ll be told “no”–and possibly aggravate the person you’re asking. As a result, agreeable people may be put off from asking in the first place. This can be a problem, because research suggests that agreeable people tend to make less money than disagreeable people (even accounting for the fact that disagreeable people lose their jobs more often). And in leadership roles, agreeable people may not be as good at getting their teams all the resources they need. So what can you do to be more assertive even when it just isn’t in your personality to do so? Here are a few tips.
Via The Learning Factor
First-time managers often ask themselves how to develop a leadership style that suits them: “Who should I model myself after? What kind of leader should I be?” It’s great to think critically about your approach to managing others, particularly when you’re new to it, but these questions won’t exactly help you. That’s because they assume that leadership is something you try on and show off, a “style” that’s curated and intentional. But especially in the beginning, your style will be based far less on mirroring others’ habits and behaviors and far more on instinct and intuition. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Via The Learning Factor, Kevin Watson
We all know that the work landscape is changing. The jobs that will be in demand are shifting as more are automated by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robots. Teams are becoming more disparate and globalization has added new collaboration challenges. At the same time, more millennials are taking on management roles, and even our work spaces will undergo changes between now and 2025. “Change will be happening so quickly that 50% of the occupations that exist today will not exist 10 years from now. So we’re going to be living in an environment that is extremely adaptable and changing all the time,” says Liz Bentley, the founder of Liz Bentley Associates, a leadership development consulting firm.
Via The Learning Factor
Have you ever heard about someone “cutting the line” to land their dream job? They’re the people getting the perfect position without ever submitting a resume, or negotiating a sweet signing bonus plus five weeks’ vacation, or getting hired for a role the company created just for them. How do they do it? Are they just naturally golden? Or do they know something you don’t? While you might use the word lucky, these folks aren’t necessarily more talented; they’ve simply perfected a way of approaching the job search in a manner others haven’t been trained in (or are fearful of adopting). This out-of-the-box approach gives them a notable advantage when it comes to standing out. So what do they know, and how can you follow their lead to make your next transition not only more quickly, but more successfully as well? Do what they do:
Via The Learning Factor
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Some goals aren’t clearly sequential. Here’s the case for rethinking your approach.