January 31, 6:49 pm

Management Excellence workshop in Qatar

Attention all companies with employees in the Middle East —

In the middle of February I will be conducting a 3-day workshop in Doha, Qatar, entitled Achieving Management Excellence.

The workshop is being hosted by Campbell Knowledge Corporation, and will be held the Grand Hyatt, Doha, Feb. 9 - 11.

View the workshop brochure

Specifically designed for middle managers, this 3-day workshop covers a lot of ground. Think of it as “everything you need to know to be an excellent manager.” The workshop will also elaborate on material from my latest book, Creating Passion-Driven Teams.

For more info, or to register, contact Odessa Angeles, Director of Training for Campbell Knowledge Corporation, at Odessa@CampbellKC.com.

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January 22, 11:26 am

Stress Reduction is a Laughing Matter

Take your job seriously, but take yourself lightly. This according to Jeff Justice, a motivational humorist, who says humor goes a long way in the battle against stress.

Justice also says that “humor can be used in stress reduction, problem solving, team building, and improving communications.” And he’s quick to point out that humor doesn’t mean having to tell jokes. In fact humor is often about finding a unique way to connect two separate events or ideas.

The really cool thing is that humor is a known stress reducer.

Scott Friedman, a popular speaker and author who holds degrees in marketing and psychology, says “Humor creates an instant bond.” He also says it removes negative, non-productive feelings and creates a fresh new approach to situations.

The idea is to laugh about a situation while it’s happening – it keeps oxygen going to the brain and keeps a person thinking more clearly.

Humor is good - but use caution

While all that is good, caution should be a guideline for humor in the workplace. Yes, laughter can help stress, but sometimes it should occur internally.

For example, you probably shouldn’t choose something funny to say if the boss announces that sales are down 25 percent. Making light of every little thing that happens might sound appealing, but too much of a good thing causes a bad thing.

Consider one place of employment I know about, where they have an employee who drops one-liners at everything. Yes, the man’s comments are funny, but it’s become so pervasive that he’s perceived as someone who doesn’t take anything seriously. In fact, some people don’t like working with him anymore because his comments are so distracting from the work at hand.

At another place of business, one employee’s continuous sense of humor was causing people to get offended. And, as in the above example, his relentless wisecracking also distracted other employees from being productive. It was clearly a case of too much of a good thing.

Because of this, think of humor as salt: A little can be good, but too much of it becomes unpalatable. As the English poet Samuel Butler once said, “it is tact that is golden, not silence.” And I’m told it was Shakespeare who said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Humor tips

Dr. Joni Johnston of the company Workplace Relationships offers a few tips for using humor at work:

1. Pay attention to clues about your co-worker’s mood
2. Trust your intuition
3. Take yourself lightly
4. Use humor as the icing, not the cake
5. Avoid playful insults

Johnston says that humor should be used at the right time, in appropriate amounts, and shouldn’t make fun of an individual. In other words, if you make light of something, choose to make light of the situation, not a person.

Here’s a good example of that, offered by Jeff Justice: A creative female employee got tired of her boss rejecting her budget. He kept telling her it needed to be smaller. When she finally got her budget down to bare bones, he still rejected it.

Knowing she couldn’t make it any smaller and still do the work required of her, she took her papers over to the copy machine and kept reducing the images until they were the size of a postage stamp. When she took it back to her boss, they both had a good laugh. And, her boss gave in and okayed her budget.

One of Justice’s approaches for using humor to combat stress is imagining the stressful situation at it’s absolute worse. When you take the situation on a mental journey to the point where it becomes absurd, it then can become funny—and it also makes the present situation not seem quite as bad!

Prove it for yourself

Try some of these techniques and see if they work for you. I’ve used several of these techniques with much success, including helping me get through boot camp “way back when.” In a military boot camp environment, company commanders and drill sergeants manufacture stressful situations to “make a soldier/sailor out of you”. Ask any veteran, and they’ll probably agree that learning to laugh about the events while they were happening made it easier to cope.

It’s kind of like what Bill Cosby says: “If you can laugh at it, you can survive it.”

Bottom line: If you’re stressed, don’t stress about it more, but rather look for a way to connect your current situation to something ironic and perhaps even silly. If it helps, think of yourself as starring in your own comedy movie. By looking for and finding the humor, you’ll send more oxygen to your brain so you can think clearer, and you’ll probably enjoy life a bit more along the way.

And also remember what Jeff Justice tells us: “He who laughs - lasts!”

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January 15, 7:30 am

Taking control of your own situation

I popped open my newsreader this morning and saw the following headlines:

“New jobless claims rise more than expected”
“Sales for all of 2009 plunge by record amount”
“Record year for foreclosures”

It’s enough to be discouraging, but only if you’re looking solely at the news and not at the opportunities.

The truth is that each of us make choices about what we do each day, and opportunities present themselves all the time. The choice to act (or not act) is ours.

If you think the current situation is a roadblock on the path to success, consider this: Each of the following businesses was started during a recession:

Burger King
Microsoft
Hewlett Packard
CNN
IHOP

I remember people all around me mocking the CNN concept when it was announced, saying it was going to be boring and nobody would watch. Hmmm. The world is well-populated with nay-sayers.

Each of the successful companies listed above (and thousands more) was started and staffed by people who believed they could succeed, even when times were tough.

According to a 2009 survey, 55 percent of US workers are unhappy with their jobs. It’s even worse if you’re young; with 64 percent of the 25-and-under crowd saying they’re unhappy.

My question is “what are you going to do about it?” You can focus on the negative headlines, or you can focus on that cool idea you’ve been bandying about. The choice is up to you.

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January 12, 10:10 am

Don’t force diversity in your entrance exam

By Dan Bobinski
Director, The Center for Workplace Excellence

Not much good comes from trying to look good. You must actually be good, too.

Unfortunately, someone needs to remind the Chicago Police Department of this truism. A recent article by Steve Bryant on nbcchicago.com (Police May Scrap Entrance Exam) states that the Chicago PD is thinking about doing away with their entrance exam because they don’t employ enough minorities.

If you have half a brain, you’re saying “What?”

But it’s true. Apparently the department is overly concerned about achieving racial parity. Only 25 percent of their rank-and-file officers and 8 percent of their lieutenants are African-American, but the 2000 census shows that blacks make up about 37 percent of Chicago’s population. It would seem that someone doesn’t think those numbers look fair.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather make sure the people hired to serve and protect are the best available at serving and protecting—regardless of their skin color. If the best cops are 4 feet tall with green skin from Antarctica, “hire em!”

It so happens that I grew up in a Chicago suburb near O’Hare airport and my father was a policeman in that town for 28 years. I can tell you from close observation and interacting with these men and women on a regular basis that they don’t have an easy job. The stresses on policemen and women are enormous.

Put yourself in their shoes

For a moment, put yourself in a police officer’s shoes. It would be pretty unnerving as a highly qualified officer to be surrounded by people hired because of their skin color and not because they were the best possible people to be backing you up.

Quality hiring makes a huge difference. When I was contracted to do management coaching at Qualcomm, Inc. in San Diego, California, I noticed they had an intense application process to identify the best possible applicants. As a result, the company created much of the cutting-edge technology we use today in our mobile phones, along with other nifty inventions that most of us never hear about.

But Qualcomm wouldn’t be the successful company they are if they merely hired people to balance their employees’ skin-tone palette.

If this kind of logic doesn’t sit right with you, think about your current place of employment. Regardless of your specific career choice, if the professional hurdles you had to clear were suddenly discarded and unqualified people were hired (for whatever reason), I imagine you might feel a bit ripped off and cheated.

‘Opportunity’ and ‘Outcome’ are different

I’m all about equal opportunity, but equal opportunity doesn’t mean equality of outcome. In other words, everyone who wants to apply themselves should be given the chance to do so. But true fairness says that people are to be evaluated based on their merits, not on their race, color, religion, gender, national origin, veteran’s status, political affiliation, or the existence or non-existence of any disability.

Hiring (or not hiring) people based on any aspect of the above-mentioned list is not only unethical and immoral, it’s illegal.

Sadly, the Chicago Police Department is giving us an example of how to substitute perceived fairness for true fairness.

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December 21, 9:21 am

Is Target Off-Target?

Today’s business section in the Buffalo News (NY) has a story that seven Target employees were fired for buying Zhu Zhus, one of the hottest selling toys this Christmas season. According to the story, these employees were following policies they knew about, but were terminated for a new policy they were not aware of.

I encourage you to read the article, and then think about how you notify your employees about new company policies. Yes, the story has its emotional factors: You may not agree with Target’s policy (I didn’t) and you may also think Target’s management has their heads firmly planted in a place where Christmas lights can’t be seen (which I believe they do).

But for workplace implications, we can learn from Target’s mistake. Again, one question for employers and managers could be “how do you let people know about new company policies?”

The next question could be “Do you enforce your policies by using the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?”

In the comments following this article, some readers are so disgusted they say they won’t do any more shopping at Target. When one considers that loss of business and the costs involved in replacing and training new employees, Target’s actions here were just plain DUMB. But in the bigger picture, Target is a large company and will survive the financial hit.

Still, what can we learn? Granted, your company might survive a similar mistake, but is it worth it to take financial hits for being unwise or undisciplined when issuing or enforcing policy?

With that last question in mind, one of my Christmas wishes just became “I hope that managers strive to be intellectually honest when creating and notifying people about policies, and that they use fairness and flexibility when enforcing them.”

Especially this time of year, when Grace is a large component of the Reason for the Season.

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December 7, 5:47 pm

Train the Trainer / Manager as Trainer workshop slated for January

Back by popular demand!

On January 13 and 14, the Center for Workplace Excellence will host a two-day Train the Trainer / Manager as Trainer workshop in Boise.

Good training is vital.  The problem?  Too many managers are never taught how to train. Yet training is a core management responsibility.

It’s also a problem when employees are placed in training positions with little or no training for their new jobs. Telling ain’t training, and the ability to stand up and talk does not a trainer make.

One of the biggest complaints in employee surveys is “poor training.”  Think how much more productive your employees will be when you can give them highly-effective training!

Learn how the best managers, executives, and trainers create and deliver training for maximum results.

In just two days you will learn skills that will be useful for years – and you’ll be putting them to use the very next day! Set aside January 13 & 14 and register today.

Your facilitator for this workshop is Dan Bobinski, M.Ed. Tap into his 20-plus years of Train-The-Trainer experience in this 2-day workshop.  Dan is a past chapter president for the American Society for Training and Development, a member of the Society for Human Resource Management and also the International Association of Workplace Professionals.

Additionally, Dan holds a degree in Workforce Education and Development and a Master’s Degree in Human Resource Training and Development. (He’s also currently completing his Ph.D. in Adult and Organizational Learning).

Questions?  Contact the Center for Workplace Excellence at 208-375-7606.

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November 23, 5:00 pm

My List of Recommended Reads for 2009

It’s time once again for my “end-of-year list of recommended reads.”  These are books that have stood out to me as practical and useful. As always, use this list for your own personal development, or as a suggested gift list for co-workers and relatives. Also as usual, I guarantee that valuable “golden nuggets” can be found in each of the following titles.

At the top of my list this year is Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long by David Rock.  I first became acquainted with Rock’s work a number of years ago when he and research psychologist Jeffrey Schwartz wrote The Neuroscience of Leadership. In that work, they explained how most change efforts fail because they are implemented in contrast to how the brain works, along with excellent tips for how to make change happen more easily.

In his latest work, Rock takes the concept of brain function (with respect to our productivity) and makes it extremely easy to understand. For anyone who feels overwhelmed, overextended, and nearing burnout, this book will explain why. Best of all it will give you practical suggestions for what you can do differently so you regain control and confidence.

Rock’s book is easy to read and the material is organized quite well. Whether it’s to help you become more effective or help those on your team, this book earns my highest recommendation.

Second on my list (and yes, a little self-serving) is my own book, Creating Passion-Driven Teams: How to Stop Micromanaging and Motivate People to Top Performance. I was encouraged to write this book by several respected leaders who believe that too often people are promoted to management positions without receiving a blueprint for how to make their teams flourish.

Having two decades of management and leadership training experience, I looked back and identified key attributes of teams I’d worked with that had passion.  Then I took a practical approach, combining a balance of “why” and “what to do” so readers would have proven processes at their fingertips.  Included are chapters on how to prevent micromanagement, how to motivate without manipulating, and how to turn mistakes into a fervent drive for quality.

Gratefully, the book has a five-star rating on Amazon.com, and one of those reviewers says the book “goes into the aspects that work, [with] experience that has a weight to it, along with common sense.” Another reviewer says “I highly recommend it for any business owner who wants to get out of micromanaging and someday have peace.”  It’s these types of comments I was hoping for when I wrote the book.

Next on my list is a book by Jeretta Horn Nord, entitled A Cup of Cappuccino for the Entrepreneur’s Spirit. Similar to the “Chicken Soup” series in format, this book is a collection of short stories outlining the life paths of more than 50 entrepreneurs. Each story outlines what drove these people into starting their own business, along with some of the struggles and triumphs along the way.

Nord’s purpose is to inspire and energize entrepreneurialism, and in my opinion, she accomplishes her goal.  It’s an energizing read for existing entrepreneurs as well as those thinking about becoming one.

In Harvey Deutshendorf’s The Other Kind of Smart: Simple Ways to Boost Your Emotional Intelligence for Greater Personal Effectiveness and Success, readers will get a well-written (and well-formatted) “how-to” book to help them boost their emotional intelligence. In my opinion, this is must for anyone in management or leadership, as it’s been shown over the past 15 years that higher EQ is the prominent differentiator between top performers and average performers.

In other words, if you want to be more successful, boost your EQ. Fortunately, EQ is learnable, and this user-friendly book shows you how to apply EQ principles with real-life examples and scenarios. Even with the increasing number of books on EQ arriving on the market, I don’t think you’ll find a better book on the subject.

If you care to jump outside the workplace and look at the economy at large, I recommend A World of Wealth: How Capitalism Turns Profits into Progress by Thomas G. Donlan. With the world in economic turmoil, questions abound on the best path to take. Donlan does a great job of spelling out the problems with trade protectionism, government regulations, and bailing out irresponsible lenders.

The topic of economics is often clear as mud to many, but Donlan carefully explains (with good examples) how capitalism and free markets work just fine when regulations and government restrictions are removed.

As a small businessman, I’m not a fan of “little guys” getting squashed by corporate giants. This book presents 11 well-written chapters that confirm what I’ve believed for many years: Get government out of the way, and businesses of all shapes and sizes will thrive as they meet the needs of the market.

There you have it.  Five of my top recommended reads for 2009. Enjoy!!

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