To ring in the new year, we celebrate with family and close friends. We enjoy a fine meal, champagne and entertain ourselves by staging ‘No Talent’ shows that are as fun for the people ‘performing’ as those watching.
Now you know you’re partying with a coach when, close to midnight, everyone is handed a blank slip of paper and a pen with the following instructions…On one side of our individual papers, we record our greatest joys, accomplishments and triumphs of the passing year. On the flip side, we observe our disappointments, heartbreaks and achievements that stayed beyond our grasp.
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The other week we traveled to San Diego to attend the memorial for a dear friend of ours. I met John while in college, and he and his wife were the host family for the cute exchange student who was later to becomemy husband.
I have to admit that I both loved and dreaded going for pizza and beer at John and Marge’s house. They were professors, medical researchers and leaders in their fields. As a twenty-two year old I found it very intimidating. John demanded rigorous thinking, and while he was humorous and insightful, articulating my ideas sloppily would land me quickly on the hot seat.
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There are six steps to successfully delegating tasks. Most managers and leaders only do one of these steps, while some conduct two of the steps. When the task isn’t completed to the manager’s satisfaction, all too often the manager comes to his coach or boss complaining that his employees just don’t get it, or he can’t find employees who are good enough to “get the job done.”
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I’m spending Thanksgiving in Germany this year. This means that I transported stuffing, gravy mix and pumpkin pie fixings eight thousand miles in order to cook all day for my husband’s bewildered family.
Thanksgiving is more than a harvest festival. Our founders crossed the ocean in cramped quarters and found home just in time for a bitter winter that the majority did not survive. In the Spring, Native Americans offered to help the pilgrims learn how to farm. When they celebrated the harvest together that Fall, the pilgrims knew they had survived the beginning of their journey and would be able to live in their land of promise.
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Just like any parent of a young child, these days I’m training my daughter to appreciate others and their acts of kindness by saying “Thank you”. We’re all trained to be sincerely grateful for good luck, blessings and gifts from people and the universe. Yet, oddly enough, we rarely get into the habit of thanking ourselves.
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Dear Michelle,
What are some things I need to think about in order to start the process of potentially needing a “new” career? I’m not in a position to take a salary cut and I can’t relocate. Help.
A Senior Recruiter via LinkedIn.com
I really applaud the clear eyed optimism in your message, recognizing the shifting sands in your career and approaching it as an opportunity – as much as possible.
What I also hear loud and clear is what you don’t want, instead of what you do. In a lot of ways it’s more natural to look at the future through the perspective of our current, and past – and when we do, we set limits on our possibilities going forward. And the beauty of a “new” career is that if you’re deliberate about it you can reshuffle the deck significantly in your favor this time.
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Simple rules for career development that improve everything…
- Work serves life when it is a natural part of your existence that is a professional expression of your values, passions and interests.
- Life comes first. Who you are, what you care about, your most important relationships and the values, passions and interests that make you uniquely you.
- Create clarity about what you want your life to look like now. Capture your vision and hold it gentle ferocity. Firm flexibility is key since there are plenty of surprises and you want to enjoy them!
Analysts said government data on Friday showing the economy shed a mere 11,000 jobs last month, the fewest since the start of the recession, was the strongest indication yet that the battered job market was starting to turn around. (Reuters, December 7, 2009)
Everyday there are a lot of people on Twitter talking about how much they hate their jobs and that they’re only staying in them for the safety of having anything in this job market. If the job market is beginning to recover, its high time to start asking yourself, “Am I going to just complain about my job or am I going to take advantage of the uptrend when the new waves of hiring occur?”
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Becoming a thought leader will radically improve the trajectory of your career and business. By definition, thought leaders are the ones people seek out for their insight and approaches. They are cited by others to prove their points, and their expertise inspires ideas and sparks fresh potential in others in your organization. My current favorites are Malcom Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point and Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, who wrote Freakonomics.
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The gut reaction in an interview is a feeling like you’ve got to placate your interviewed to stand a chance to getting the job. But here’s what I got to say about interviewing.
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Not having broadcast TV, my husband and I just discovered The Tudors. Beyond the fun of religion, sex, and beheadings; at its heart, the series is a fascinating depiction of how a young Henry VIII transforms into an infamous tyrant, to whom no one who dares speak the truth or else find themselves on the chopping block–quite literally.
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Political discussions reveal how we share a nationality but live in parallel political cultures. In the U.S. we have 536 elected officials running the largest economy ever to exist, and they cannot communicate with one another. Here’s a simple way to create change.
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Mentor relationships begin with plenty of promise. Often however they don’t deliver because the mentor and mentee don’t know how to make the most of the relationship. As a professional business mentor, and mentor to UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Global Social Venture Competition for the past few years I’ve been asked to share my thoughts on what makes a mentoring relationship successful and my tips for this year’s teams and mentors as they start out.
Hosni Mubarak showed up nearly an hour late to his own funeral. The announcement of his address today created extraordinary expectations. Millions of Egyptians streamed into the late night cold to watch in collective celebration. Mubarak instead effectively delivered nothing. After a stunned hush in Liberty Square, the demonstrators’ angry shouts drowned out the balance of his speech.
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Do you ever feel you have so much potential that you can’t sit still? All high performers feel this potential boiling up within them. It’s what they look for in turn when making key hires. But even with the most promising new employee, something can happen and, next thing you know, they’re stuck playing catch up with their inbox or putting out fires. Enthusiasm turns into frustration and if this continues over the long-term, even the best burn out or give up.
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The New York Times has finally introduced digital subscriptions. It’s well known that an orgy of free news available via the Internet has been killing newspapers. Now the Times is finally catching up with a major cultural shift.
Many readers who became accustomed to having the national ‘Newspaper of Record’ at their fingertips are outraged. While it was free, the Times‘ reporting became a public good that is now being taken away. Before the Internet we wouldn’t expect to receive a newspaper for free, but our culture changed. Through the Internet our consumer culture evolved to expect a vast selection of stuff that is fast and free.
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Pre-traumatic stress disorder is a term I invented once on a coaching call. I was working with a client who was in absolute anguish over something she had convinced herself was going to happen. Even though my term is about as pop-psychology as it gets, in the years since that call, I’ve seen many clients consumed with pre-living disastrous scenarios that they misperceive as being real.
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After a meeting at a large corporation I work with, one of the division presidents, I’ll call him Bill, pulled me aside. “Last year I felt invincible. But these past few months, I’ve been completely off my game,” he told me in a hushed voice. “My boss even said that I used to be a winner and asked what had happened.”
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Ever wonder what it takes to truly become the best of the best? For 100 years? If you’re going to be the best, commit to it–not once a year during strategy formulation or an annual event, but everyday in your culture, hiring and financial decisions. read more
I was walking across my university campus 20 years ago when it hit me. My bulky Walkman was piping my favorite tunes through muff-like headphones when I noticed just how many other students were also plugged into their own music. We were ensconced in our own customized micro-environments with no need to interact with any sounds we hadn’t selected for ourselves, or even with each other.
At that moment, I was filled with dread for a likely future when we would become alienated from each other by our personalized, parallel realities. Fast-forward tro today’s era of mass customization. More far-reaching than entertainment, the Internet delivers news to us that is automatically filtered for our individual preferences. As a result, we never need bump into a viewpoint that opposes our own.
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When I saw a poster for Groupon in a Shanghai subway this summer, my first reaction was, “What a perfect match!” I love buying Groupons on my iPhone and I thought that the cost-conscious, cellphone-toting Chinese public would too.
And they do. But Groupon has proven that it’s not ready for them.
The company recently announced that it will be “fine tuning” its strategy in China. By that, they mean shuttering many of their 80 Chinese offices, slashing 400 jobs, and dealing with a pending lawsuit from former employees. They may be tuning, but it isn’t fine.
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Every year we head into the holidays with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Who can forget Bridget Jones’ holiday party singing that was tone deaf in oh-so-many ways.
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Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reports that 58% HR professionals give their own performance management systems a grade of C or below. Some go as far as saying performance reviews are hurting companies and should stop. read more
If patience is a virtue and we’re living and working at breakneck speed, do we have to give up our virtue in the name of profitability? The surprising answer is probably not. If you and your employees have a healthy impatience, you will refuse to remain stuck because when people put their ego aside and don’t have to be the one with the answers, they can reach out for help and get unstuck quickly. And it creates results – in fact, American Express is just one company rating its managers on healthy impatience.
And the focus isn’t solely on impatience. It’s also on healthfulness.
Companies spend a huge amount of time and resources crafting business strategies. Even so, most of these strategies end in failure.
I saw one company spend half a million dollars and hundreds of employee hours implementing a new strategy, only to admit that it wasn’t working. They had to spend even more money and lay off employees trying to put things back to the way they were before. The next time the company tried to introduce a new strategy, it was met with considerable employee resistance.
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On a recent Mastermind call, the discussion was about self-management and putting on a game face in difficult situations.
There’s a problem with the game face when it’s used to neutralize our emotions. As a result, we can begin to be complacent by tolerating behavior that we would not accept if we were honest in our reaction.
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The annual meeting of the International Coach Federation is a great time to connect with my colleagues from around the world and spend time with friends who I respect so much that I’m always pleasantly amazed and grateful that I can contribute to them!
One of these colleagues is a coach I admire tremendously who has pioneered the field of shadow coaching. She dropped a sentence that really caught my imagination: “If you make decisions based on your assumptions, they will come true.” As we head off to the holidays to spend time with family and friends – the people in our lives we may be carrying powerful assumptions about – I wonder how our decisions and interactions could be different if we engaged the key people in our lives with fresh eyes and no assumptions. And of course what it would require of us to relinquish our safe and well-developed assumptions in the first place.
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What if Congress had to get rid of an old one every time they wrote a new one? Think about it.
Now let’s take this to the business arena. What if the CEO could only introduce a new objective and all the new work that goes into implementing it, after eliminating an old objective and all the work that went along with that one? Just writing this I hear the cheers of millions of hyper-productive employees who have been multi-tasked into exhaustion.
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This is an excerpt from an essay Michelle contributed to the book, Winning Without Compromising Yourself.
Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, George Bush, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey – people who have power are subject to both reverence and distain. They engender great loyalty and animosity based partially on the natural alliance we feel with what they choose to do with their power, but more so as a result of their personal choices based on the impact that power has on them. There’s been plenty written and discussed about how to gather and wield power, and there are plenty of people ready to tell you what to do with your power. But why is there so little discussion of the impact that power has on an individual other than the adage, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?
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Each year brings with it a whole new brand of crazy-making busyness. Listening to my clients, now seems to be even more intense than usual. So it’s time to take a breath and revisit your vision for the year.
Your vision is that picture of your whole life, as you want to manifest it – your biggest dreams for every area of your self, spoken in the present tense. Whether your vision is a written document or resides in your head, it can start to lose its inspiring effect and even feel a bit heavy. And if your head’s barely above water because you’re so crazy busy, who’s looking up at the heavens?
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I am a lousy mentee. It’s a funny admission to make as someone who makes her living as professional mentor. Sure, I train my clients on how best to leverage my expertise. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I follow my own advice very well.
It’s not that I don’t know the results that mentoring can create. How else can you access the smarts of someone who has led companies, made mistakes, picked themselves back up, and learned how to be really successful? The best part is that mentors are outside of your business, so they can see the forest for the trees, and question both the assumptions, and taboos, that stealthily drive decision making.
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When reading this title, I imagine the first question that comes to mind is, “Is this really the recovery?”
Economists may say it is, but business leaders can only answer with a resounding, “Kinda.”
Even in a “kinda” recovery, or especially in one, it’s critical to outmaneuver your competitors. The situation is very dynamic:
• Customers are looking for any advantage in the shifting marketplace, making them more open to doing business with new organizations;
• Even with an oversupply of workers looking for jobs, the competition for great talent is white-hot;
• The spigot for credit remains tight, dampening the ability to take advantage of opportunities for growth.
With so much in flux, here are six keys to outperforming your competition in this market.
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“My Power Lies in My Vulnerability” may not be something we would think up as a campaign slogan for a political candidate. However, as increasing value is placed on collaborative leadership, it is a key factor differentiating outstanding leaders as they take on the challenge of actively practicing vulnerability.
Thinking about being vulnerable can be by its very nature uncomfortable and frightening. When we’re faced with new circumstances, feel threatened or feel the need to prove ourselves, we often cling to the power of position or knowledge. But it is this type of power that moves us away from our own learning and stifles both our own potential and the potential of our organizations.
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Imagine opening a book and discovering that a postcard had been slipped between the pages with a stamp, an address, and an invitation to send in your secret. What would you write? Would you trust your secret to the post office, even anonymously?
And what do your answers to those questions tell you about yourself?
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Michelle Randall went from backpacking in Southeast Asia to teaching Fortune 500 executives how to boost their businesses on an international scale.Her company, Enriching Leadership International, has a client list that includes IBM (IBM), Kaiser Permanente and Deutsche Telekom.
One of her goal-achieving secrets: her business-benchmarking group. At least twice a year, Randall gets together with others in her industry to talk success, down to the decimal point.
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“An international virtual community of small consulting firms has formed a network to share their expertise and win business.” read more
“When things do turn around, the leaders who do this have created a more trusted team than ever before…” read more
“It takes culturally agile leadership in order to meet people where they’re at in all their humanity – whether squeaky clean hero or starry-eyed addict”…. read more
While getting employees to dress better at work, or mandating fashion rules, may seem like good solutions to some, Michelle Randall, the principal of Enriching Leadership International, a global consulting and executive coaching firm, sees these actions as signs of lazy management… Read more
Like unclear resolutions, plans that are too strict will also be too hard to accomplish. Executive coach Michelle Randall warns against making inflexible resolutions. Read more
Michelle Randall, who runs Enriching Leadership International, a Silicon Valley Management Consultancy, “size is a male obsession, and a less-relevant measure for women’s success. Fulfillment may be harder to measure, but it’s far more appropriate…” Read more
“Many companies espouse their strong cultures, but, interestingly, they’re unable to point to why they believe this, to any evidence that the culture is indeed “strong” or that the culture has any measurable impact on the company’s overall mission, vision, values or objectives.”
“Michelle Randall, principal of Enriching Leadership International, a global executive coaching and consulting firm says: “The most important element in obtaining an accurate cultural assessment is to ensure that the responses obtained are honest and unfiltered.” Read more
It can be a hectic and sometimes alienating time in the workaday world, which is ironic considering how personally important this time of year is to so many people across cultures.
So, for goodness’ sake, says Michelle Randall, principal of Enriching Leadership International, a global executive coaching and consulting firm, stop with the insincere holiday wishes.
“Make heartfelt New Year wishes in the place of generically waving ‘Happy Holidays’ at co-workers. To me, it’s like the Barbie and Ken of holidays. There’s nothing there,” Randall says. “Especially when we’re talking about, for a lot of us, our most treasured family traditions. This is a deeply felt time
it’s also a time to be able to share something about yourself in a heartfelt way.” Read more
In most parts of the country, it’s difficult to find a lumberyard that doesn’t sneer when you ask for green products. Yards that do stock one or two token green products have a poor selection, and there’s rarely a knowledgeable person at the counter available to answer your questions. Until now, the only other option has been “green boutiques” specializing in products that are good for the earth but cost an arm and a leg. Read more
With reverence and awe, we admire the forest primeval, with its towering boughs of green and massive columns reaching skyward. Beacons of sunlight filter through the dark and mysterious labyrinth of ancient life, giving us more and more reason to clamor to preserve its ageless beauty at almost any cost.
We are jolted back to reality when we learn that only 5% of North America’s old growth forests are still standing. Over the past decade or so, builders have come to recognize that the future of homebuilding may not necessarily continue along the same paths followed by our parents’ generation, with the systematic rape of old growth mountain tops for our immediate gain. Read more
