Hailing from a broad base of inspirational female entrepreneurs, plastic persona, Barbie, shares her newest business venture, the “Dream Incubator.” After 55 years in business, she has moved into professional networking online. Her motto of “If You Can Dream It, You Can Be it!” is targeted not only at girls, but everyone who could use some positive pop-culture inspiration to move forward in his or her career.
Please join us for the live event, “TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments.”
The information age has morphed into the “interruption” age. People are swamped with work and emails. And just when they hunker down to get something done, a colleague knocks on the door. Or the phone rings. People tend to push these interruptions aside to focus on the “real work.” But in his counterintuitive webcast, Doug Conant (the former CEO of the Campbell Soup Company) shows us how these brief interactions are the “real work” today and they will be even more so tomorrow. The secret lies in one simple, but powerful notion: The action is in the interaction.
The session will be facilitated by Louis Biggie from JHU’s Talent Management and Organization Development office. Before and after the webcast, Louis will lead a discussion that will help you apply Conant’s concepts to your own situation.
Location: East Baltimore Auditorium. 2024 E. Monument Street. Suite 2-1002
Date: September 25, 2014
Time: 11:30am – 2:00pm
Please bring a brown bag lunch to enjoy during the event. Registration is limited to 60 participants. Click this link to reserve your seat today.
It’s so important to treat others with respect – to behave in a way that demonstrates our regard for others – and to listen, knowing that they might be right and we might be wrong. We need to treat people with dignity, just as we would like to be treated.
To show respect for another person, you need to recognize that the person has value. You need to acknowledge that the person’s thoughts and ideas are valid and important. You can demonstrate your respect by doing the following:
Remember, being respectful involves treating people with dignity, recognizing the validity and worth of other people’s ideas, and keeping an open mind. When people treat each other with respect, it encourages open communication and cooperation. It creates a warm, supportive environment in which everyone can succeed and reach their fullest potential.
Giving feedback (especially corrective feedback) can be very difficult. It’s important for you to get your message across, but at the same time, you want to avoid angering and alienating the person who is receiving the feedback.
“Giving Appropriate Feedback” is a 15-minute SkillSoft e-course that can help to test and enhance your ability to provide corrective feedback. In this e-course, you’ll be presented with a realistic scenario about a difficult team member whose behavior must be addressed. Then you’ll be challenged to choose the most effective course of action. Good luck!
http://lms4.learnshare.com/l.aspx?CID=89&A=2&T=373094
So many of us are so busy that we sometimes fail to acknowledge our colleagues in the way they deserve. Quite often we don’t seem to have the time, but even more frequently we fail to make positive recognition a habit in our professional and personal lives.
In this three-minute video, Marshall Goldsmith gives some clear tips to help you get into the habit of providing positive feedback in a way that doesn’t take time, produces results, and becomes part of your daily routine.
http://lms4.learnshare.com/l.aspx?CID=89&A=1&T=455020
Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we are able to make this video available only to employees of Johns Hopkins University, who need to provide their user name and password to see it. Other readers, however, can find a lot of wonderful material that Marshall Goldsmith provides for free on his website.
http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com
Marshall Goldsmith has developed a reputation as a practical, insightful, and inspirational thought leader and executive coach. He has authored numerous best-selling books. Every two years, there is a global survey to determine the world’s top 50 business thinkers. In the 2009 survey (sponsored by Forbes and The Times), Goldsmith was ranked as one of the top 15 most influential business thinkers in the world.
Pretty much every leadership book you ever read encourages leaders to maintain a positive outlook. A combination of optimism, joy, and enthusiasm, we’re told, is infectious, and your team will benefit from a leader who has a bright and cheerful disposition.
If you’re like me, you may have occasionally felt like snarling at the author, “Easier said than done!” But there is a good trick that I use to keep myself positive, and it is really simple.
In your life, always have three things on the calendar that are in the near and intermediate future, that need a little planning, and that you really enjoy.
These things don’t have to be expensive. They could be as simple and straightforward as a family visit, a trip to a museum, or just a day at the beach. But your sense of anticipation rises if they require a little time to plan.
My list right now includes:
1. An opera that will be screened at my local cinema in just over a month followed by dinner at home with friends.
2. A trip with friends to the beach in June.
3. Our summer vacation in August.
Just the anticipation of these fairly simple events and the planning they require puts me in a pretty good mood.
As soon as one of my events is done, I make sure there’s something new to put on the list, and I’m able to recite my list of three at all times.
Who doesn’t need to elevate their mood after this dreadful winter?
Harry S. Truman famously remarked that “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”
It is sad, though, that there really does seem to be a decline in how much we read. Some people lament that they simply don’t have enough time to read. The time excuse really isn’t very credible. We all have exactly the same amount of time — 24 hours a day! When we say that we don’t have enough time — whether it’s for exercise, playing with our children, or getting to know our colleagues — what we really mean is that something isn’t a priority.
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, “reading has declined among every group of adult Americans,” and for the first time in American history, “less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature.”
Perhaps the competition for our attention has simply become too intense. Social media, computer games, and television all seem to demand our time and attention when we could be reading. But there is quite a lot of compelling, hard-nosed data that suggests that the reading habit leads to very desirable social and economic outcomes. A study of 6,000 people born in the United Kingdom concludes that children’s test scores are even more strongly correlated to how often they read than to the other strong predictor, the education of their parents.
Leaders have one thing in common. They tend to read much more than the average American, who reads only one book a year. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, by contrast, read four to five books a month!
Some of the benefits of reading include:
So, as a good leader, you should always be able to provide an answer if someone asks you what you’re reading at the moment. Your books don’t all have to be about business. A good novel can often teach you far more than any business guru.
For those of you with children, remember that there is almost nothing more effective than cultivating the reading habit in kids. I read to my children pretty much every night when they were young, and I am so glad that they have developed a lifelong habit of books and reading.
Finally, thank you, dear reader, for reading this post. It shows you’re one step ahead in becoming a habitual reader.
Thoughts on influence, leadership, and identity
One of the best known “personality” tests in use today is the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI). This assessment measures a person’s preferences among four dichotomies; the extent to which a person expresses these preferences determines how they experience the world — and how others experience them. The MBTI can be a powerful tool for helping people develop self-awareness, especially in the ways their preferences interrelate with others’ preferences.
One of the dichotomies that the MBTI measures is that of extraversion vs. introversion. However, a new term, “Ambiversion,” is being used increasingly as a way to describe those who seem to fit firmly in the middle of this scale.
Author and sales expert Daniel Pink writes about the ambivert in his book, “It’s Human to Sell.” Pink asserts that influential people, including the most effective salespeople, are neither extraverts nor introverts but ambiverts — people whose preferences and behavior patterns lie somewhere in the middle.
Why does ambiversion predict success? Pink writes, “Extroverts can talk too much and listen too little, [and] overwhelm others with the force of their personalities.” On the other hand, “Introverts can be shy to initiate, too skittish to deliver unpleasant news and too timid to close the deal.” Ambiverts, however, “know when to speak up and when to shut up, when to inspect and when to respond, when to push and when to hold back.”
Social commentator/blogger Daniel Kao expands this definition in several ways:
Ambiverts sit on the spectrum of social interaction right in between the introverts and extroverts. Ambiverts enjoy spending time with people, but can get worn out by people, as well. Ambiverts are also very capable of doing things alone, but spending an entire day alone can suck them into a depressed, unproductive mood.
Ambiverts love interacting with people, but in a very purposeful way. Ambiverts can have extremely animated and interactive conversations, or mellow and meditative ones. Ambiverts will defend both their personal time as well as their social time.
Ambiverts process information best when they process internally and externally. Ambiverts need time and space to process things on their own, but they also need people whom they can trust to process things with externally. In order for ambiverts to fully process information, they usually need both.
Ambiverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, but dive deep when they are truly passionate. Ambiverts can be thought or action oriented, depending on the situation, but they are also oftentimes both.
The challenge for ambiverts is finding one thing to stick with. Because ambiverts do well socially and individually, it’s easy for an ambivert to become the jack of all trades, having knowledge in many different areas but not necessarily an expert on any of them.
Multipliers bring out the intelligence in others. They build collective, viral intelligence in organizations. Everyone around them gets smarter and more capable. Multipliers invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius — innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.
There are also Diminishers in many organizations. These leaders are absorbed in their own intelligence, stifle others, and deplete the organization of crucial intelligence and capability.
While Diminishers underutilize people and leave capability on the table, Multipliers increase intelligence in people and in organizations. Multipliers leverage their resources. By extracting people’s full capability, Multipliers get twice the capability from people than do Diminishers.
We’ve all experienced these two types of leaders. What type of leader are you right now? Are you a genius or are you a genius maker?
You Can Be a Multiplier
You can choose to think like a Multiplier and operate like one. For Multipliers, there are four active practices that, together, catalyze and sustain this cycle of attraction:
Adapted from Executive Book Summaries, January 2011
