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In the ideal meeting, all attendees participate, contributing diverse points of view and thinking together to reach new insights. But few meetings live up to this ideal, in large part because not everyone is able to effectively contribute. We recently asked employees at a large global bank a question: “When you have a contribution to make in a meeting, how often are you able to do so?” Only 35% said they felt able to make a contribution all the time. There are three segments of the workforce who are routinely overlooked: introverts, remote workers, and women. As a leader, chances are you’re not actively silencing these voices — it’s more likely that hidden biases at play. Let’s look at these biases and what you can do to mitigate their influence. Segment 1: The quiet onesThe unconscious bias: Smart people think on their feet. What happens: A program manager calls a meeting to think through a resourcing issue. She summarizes the situation, shares results of a recent staffing analysis, and then tees up the discussion. This works great for extroverted thinkers (those that talk to think). But from the get-go, the introverted thinkers (those who think to talk) are at a disadvantage....
Via The Learning Factor
Start by dividing work responsibilities into four quadrants: - People development (managing my teams, coaching, mentoring)
- Business operations (data analysis, running sales meetings)
- Transactional tasks (one-off things like responding to an email or reviewing a budget)
- Representative tasks (serving as a "face" for the business, like having drinks with customers or speaking at conferences)
Via The Learning Factor
Texting has overtaken calling as the most popular mobile function across all generations, with Millennial women using SMS three times more often than calling, according to the mobile research agency RealityMine.
Phone calls have been second fiddle to texting since 2007, when Americans sent and received more text messages than phone calls, thanks largely to the launch of the iPhone and to Millennials. The iPhone was texting nirvana for Millennials, because of its virtual keyboard, multitouch interface, predictive text technology, and--the saving grace of the entire Millennial generation--automatic spell-check.
With texting being the universal go-to mobile function, why are so many managers still frustrated with Millennials not answering their phones? Let me help put one final nail in the Millennial phone call coffin.
The real reason Millennials won't answer your phone call is because it's unproductive. More specifically, a phone call is ...
Via The Learning Factor
Podcasting is a great way to learn and be inspired. It's a new use of technology that hearkens back to the original social medium, storytelling.
If you have an interest in entrepreneurship, tech, leadership, business, creativity, or just learning and expanding your mind, here are 100 podcasts that can help you bring your best to all you do. Pick out a few to start with, then get ready to listen and learn while you're in the car, on the treadmill, or during your morning commute.
1. Entrepreneur on Fire
Be inspired and learn from stories of entrepreneurship. Hosted by John Lee Dumas.
Via The Learning Factor
It sounds like common sense to say thank you to those who work for you and work with you, but it in reality this common sense wisdom is not practiced as much as it should be.
Some people say they don't have time or can't afford to show appreciation; others may have good intentions but just never think of it in the moment.
But if you think of it in terms of payoff--giving you and your organization more stability and less turnover (and, as a result, greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness)--it's about investing in an important relationship.
Via The Learning Factor
The Stanford Graduate School of Business asked the members of its Advisory Council which skills were most important for their MBA students to learn. The most frequent answer was self-awareness — possessing an accurate view of your skills, abilities, and shortcomings, as well as understanding how other people perceive your behavior.
Frugal innovation is associated with resource-constrained and low-income emerging economies such as those of Africa, India, and China, but we have recently seen the rise of frugal innovation efforts in developed nations including the U.S. and in Europe. These are not primarily cost-cutting measures, a response to financial constraint or a tepid economy. Rather, across the developed world, companies are beginning to use frugal innovation as a growth strategy. They are introducing a larger lineup of new products and services, often with greater economic and social value, at a much lower cost and using fewer natural and financial resources. Their goal is not to create cheap offerings. They want to create more effective offerings that draw people in with their simplicity, while also cutting down on the use of various resources.
It turns out that the four key attributes of frugal innovation — affordability, simplicity, quality, and sustainability — are exactly the qualities that customers in mature markets want most. This makes frugal innovation a viable growth strategy for companies expanding in those markets, not just in emerging economies.
Via The Learning Factor, TeamHousingSolutions
What makes a good life? Usually this question is in the domain of priests, philosophers and metaphysicians, but the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a think tank consisting of 34 mostly rich countries, sought to find the answers with data.The organization’s Better Life Index looks at 23 indicators of current well-being across 11 domains, from how much people earn and the cost of housing, to life expectancy, and even to how much time off people get from work. Most of the indicators are culled from OECD’s own research based on country-level government data, but they also include public opinion surveys – all of which could be combined to form scores on a “well-being” scale. Overall, a Pew Research Center analysis of the data finds that life is good in most of these countries.
In a new working paper, Shu asks the fundamental question that cases like Airbnb and other once unlikely, now successful startups (LinkedIn similarly got more than 20 rejections back in 2003) seem to beg: How do you tell a good idea from a bad one? “With startups, especially high-growth startups, it’s extremely hard to predict the probability of success,” says Shu, who studies innovation and entrepreneurship. When dealing with something truly innovative, it’s difficult to compare it to anything that came before. That uncertainty makes the line between a tremendous success and a phenomenal flop a thin one. Predicting startup success or failure also turns out to be incredibly difficult to study.
How do you get your office team to relax and connect?
Do you know any great team building strategies?
Team Housing Solutions had a great time...
It’s a fabled story about a janitor’s exchange with President Kennedy during the early days of NASA: “What do you do?” the president supposedly asked the man with a broom during a visit to Cape Canaveral.“Well, Mr. President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon.” This meeting may not have actually taken place. But there’s a good reason it’s one of the most commonly-repeated management anecdotes: it illustrates the idea that a workforce motivated by a strong sense of higher purpose is essential to engagement. A survey by Calling Brands found that working for an organization with a clearly defined purpose is second only to pay and benefits in importance for employees, and ranks ahead of promotion opportunities, job responsibilities, and work culture. Two-thirds said a higher purpose would motivate them to go the extra mile in their jobs. A similar study by Net Impact showed that almost half of today’s workforce would take a 15% pay cut to work for an organization with an inspiring purpose.
Becoming a manager for the first time is no easy task. One day you’re happily doing your own work and achieving your own goals, and then, suddenly, your work life does a 180: Instead of focusing on yourself, you have to focus your attention on others. You have to motivate others, build relationships with your team, and give effective feedback. You need to have empathy and understanding, but command respect. You need to be direct and assertive, but not so much that you crowd out others’ contributions. You need to take responsibility, while at the same time giving others the autonomy to grow. The changes can be dizzying and often require an entirely new set of skills. Imagine now that you have to do all of this in a foreign country, not only outside your personal comfort zone, but outside your cultural comfort zone as well. It’s doubly difficult to command authority and lead a team for the first time in a new culture where the nuts and bolts of how to manage are completely different.
Anyone who has worked inside a large organization can rattle off a lengthy list of the things that regularly kill promising ideas: conflict with existing businesses, naysayers, management turmoil, insufficient resources. And yet when companies suddenly decide to “get more innovative,” starting hackathons, idea competitions, and accelerator programs, they typically forget to address all those things that kill perfectly good ideas after they hatch.
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The next time you're packing for a trip, you might want to reach for your brightest-colored luggage. It could help keep bedbugs away.
Have you just discovered the all time worst kept secrets of the hospitality industry? Not only is staying in a serviced apartment less expensive, it provides you...
When it comes to success, it’s easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust. But new research from Stanford University will change your mind (and your attitude).
Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and her latest study shows that your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ.
Dweck found that people’s core attitudes fall into one of two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.
Via The Learning Factor
From leadership and sales to robots and beer.
Research by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Larissa Tiedens suggests that women can exert control by engaging in more subtle or “implicit” methods of dominance. A shift in facial expression, an expansive posture, or a different negotiating strategy can be just as effective as a direct command, a wagging finger, or other aggressive behavior, she says. When women use these methods, the backlash is weakened or even disappears, according to the research by Tiedens and Melissa Williams of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Based on a review of hundreds of earlier studies, their work suggests a winning strategy for women in business: “While the obstacles to women’s achievement in leadership roles are real, there also is reason to hope that women may be able to work around them by relying more heavily on implicit methods of interpersonal influence,” write the researchers.
Via The Learning Factor
Do you care about your job? No, you know, really care. Do you care so much that you will defend your company's product at dinner parties when someone mentions that it snapped in two on first use? Or do you mumble: "Yeah, we cut back on manufacturing costs for a little more profit. You can't blame us, can you?"? I muse on this because there's a certain trend for companies to take themselves a little more seriously. By "more seriously" I mean focusing on something other than pristine clean lucre and the CEO's large cut of it. Something akin to a larger purpose, for example. This means that in hiring staff, they're increasingly looking for people who are able to have -- or even have naturally -- higher goals than mere money-making.
Via The Learning Factor
Frugal innovation is associated with resource-constrained and low-income emerging economies such as those of Africa, India, and China, but we have recently seen the rise of frugal innovation efforts in developed nations including the U.S. and in Europe. These are not primarily cost-cutting measures, a response to financial constraint or a tepid economy. Rather, across the developed world, companies are beginning to use frugal innovation as a growth strategy. They are introducing a larger lineup of new products and services, often with greater economic and social value, at a much lower cost and using fewer natural and financial resources. Their goal is not to create cheap offerings. They want to create more effective offerings that draw people in with their simplicity, while also cutting down on the use of various resources.
It turns out that the four key attributes of frugal innovation — affordability, simplicity, quality, and sustainability — are exactly the qualities that customers in mature markets want most. This makes frugal innovation a viable growth strategy for companies expanding in those markets, not just in emerging economies.
Via The Learning Factor
About a decade ago, some early scientific research suggested that playing memory games could increase "fluid intelligence," which is the capacity to solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. A spate of apps, books and classes resulted, all claiming to make people smarter. Unfortunately, later studies proved that "braintraining" (as it's sometimes called) has no effect on your general intelligence. The most recent research in psychology and neuroscience, however, has found five effective strategies for improving your intelligence. Some of them may surprise you:
Via The Learning Factor
Hiring the right people for a company taking root in an entirely new economic sector might be the ultimate recruiting challenge.
16 Quick Tips on How To Use Twitter For Business if You're A Local Entrepreneur (Part 1)
Via Daniel Watson
Staying focused on the right things can make all the difference.
Tech startup founders share tips and tricks for making the most out of business travel time.
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It's not easy for companies to find desirable staff. Here's one character aspect they're desperate for.
This put me in mind of the Monsters Inc motto...."We Scare Because We Care." If we need people in organisations who care then it calls for a different kind of leadership too, where we value that characteristic and find ways to recognize it and amplify it.