Personal Performance Improvement – Introduction
Today’s highly competitive marketplace demands continued personal performance improvement in order for professionals to remain viable and accelerated improvement to move ahead. Add in the exponential growth in available data and the vast number of global newcomers and it becomes easy to understand why all professionals feel overwhelmed.
StrategyDriven’s Personal Performance Improvement articles help relieve some of this stress by providing field tested methods and hard won insights that are immediately actionable to help improve individual performance effectiveness. These behavioral and mechanical performance improvement tools are divided into two categories:
Practices for Professionals: tried and true actions that enhance personal performance effectiveness and efficiency
Tools for Professionals: products and services that help professionals become more organized, connected, and efficient
Sign up for our Email NewsletterHow to Get Fired! Or keep your job, whichever you’d prefer
So, your formal education is coming to a close. You’ve had a wonderful time in school, and you’re in no hurry to trade that for a life filled with stress and responsibility. In fact, this whole ‘getting a job’ thing isn’t even your idea; it’s your parent’s or school counselor’s idea, it’s the entire seething mass of society trying to crush your freedom.
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Well then, fight back! If you would rather play video games all day than suffer through a lifetime of stable employment, here’s exactly what you need to do:
- Dress every day as though you’ve just woken up. Nothing says ‘disinterested in advancement’ like a man or woman too lazy to bother with basic grooming.
- Treat your job like college! In other words, do what you like when you like and ignore the rest. Show up when it suits you, skip meetings you expect will be boring or inconvenient, and save all your productive energy for the night before any project is due. You’ve had several years to perfect these skills, and if you continue putting them to good use you should ensure that the IRS never bothers to audit you. After all, why hassle a person without assets?
- Gossip! Remember how you’ve used your Facebook account to complain about the various problems of others? Well, no need to stop now! And since nothing on the Internet stays private, it’ll only be a matter of time before word trickles back to your boss about what you’ve been saying about him/her. And when it does, congratulations! You’ll never miss another mid-morning cartoon marathon in your life!
In all seriousness, those techniques are very effective at helping people lose their jobs. And if that’s your goal, you can stop reading now. However, if you actually want to keep a job – any job – for any length of time, here are a few things to consider:
- Under no circumstances should your parents accompany you on any interview. Nobody will hire anyone whose mommy and daddy need to do all the talking. Seriously, if they’re coming with you, why not just sit in the car and wait to see how it turned out. Then maybe they’ll take you out for ice cream afterwards!
- Do not use your social networking email as the contact email on your resume. It’s awfully hard to take anybody seriously when they ask you to contact them at vampiregirl23@facebook.com.
- Show up every day, on time. Not terribly profound advice, but it’s a habit school – especially college – doesn’t require you to develop. Your job will, though.
- Understand that you’re not going to start at the top unless you’re related to the person who hired you, of course. Otherwise, yours will be a slow and steady progression like everyone else’s, and if you want that progression to happen faster, you’ll concentrate on proving yourself first. If you expect to advance before you’ve demonstrated an ability to handle more and more difficult assignments, then you’ll be waiting for a long, long time.
There’s more to know and plenty of other behaviors to avoid, but this should get you started. So get out there and enjoy yourself because the ability to determine the path of your life, which your education has just given you, is a more incredible experience than you might expect. Don’t blow it.
About the Author
Jeff Havens is a former comedian turned college and corporate speaker. His latest comedy lecture, How to Get Fired!, helps prepare college students for their professional lives by ‘encouraging’ them to do each of the top ten things that most commonly cost people their jobs. The accompanying book, How to Get Fired!: The New Employee’s Guide to Perpetual Unemployment
What Would a Business Robot Do?
There is an old joke about a man who goes to his neighbor’s house to borrow a lawnmower. On the way, he thinks about all the reasons his neighbor might say no to his request, and gets angrier and angrier as he listens to the imaginary argument in his head. When he finally gets to his neighbor’s house, he rings the doorbell, waits for the neighbor to answer, and shouts, “Keep your d@#n lawnmower you ungrateful @#$%^&*!”
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Most of us become aware, at some point in our lives, of the price we pay for cutting ourselves off from our feelings. Like a river flowing against a dam, the more we resist feeling what we feel, the stronger those feelings can get. But what many people also fail to notice is how these repressed feelings and emotions get in the way of making sound business decisions.
Emma was struggling to keep her home-based business alive after about a year of very hard work and very limited profits. When she hired me to help her turn things around (or help her make peace with letting the business go), the first thing I did was introduce her to a thinking tool I use with many of my clients:
Imagine a robot who has been programmed with all the best business skills and business wisdom, but has no emotional circuitry whatsoever. No matter what is going on in your business, “Business Robot” will always make the decisions and take the actions that are most likely to lead to success both short and long-term.
Now imagine that Business Robot has been hired to run your company or take over your job for awhile – what would Business Robot do?
When I asked Emma, her first response was “he’d quit!” (Not sure why most people seem to make Business Robot a “boy-bot”, but they do!) After further questioning, she realized that in fact, the business was mostly on track – what had been troubling her was the pressure she’d been putting on herself to “make” it succeed more quickly.
A series of insights followed, including:
- Business Robot would institute a strict ABC priority policy and stick with it, not letting itself get caught up in other people’s sense of urgency
- Business Robot would work less hours, recognizing the value of focusing on work when at work and renewing energy and resources outside of working hours
- Business Robot would go through and do an 80/20 evaluation of which clients were bringing in the most money for the least effort and vice-versa – and then would use that information as a basis for prioritizing certain clients and “firing” others
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough Emma got from the exploration was when she realized that far from working harder or longer, Business Robot would hire an assistant to take care of the majority of the tasks she herself found so tiresome, leaving her free and energized to do the work that she loved and excelled at.
To put Business Robot to work in your own company, imagine that it has been brought in to run your company, take over your job, or manage your career:
- What would Business Robot do in the first week?
- What goals or targets would it set for the next month? Next quarter? Next year?
- What longer-term vision would Business Robot create for you business or career?
- Think of the biggest problem or sticking point you are facing in your work right now – what would Business Robot do in that situation?
The key to making this thought-experiment work for you is to realize that as Aristotle said, “a virtue is the mean between two vices”. Your goal is not to become more robotic – just to bring the wisdom of a mentally disciplined approach into balance with the feelings of your very human heart.
About the Author
Michael Neill is an internationally renowned transformative coach and the author of the new book, Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone’s Life
7 Ways to Deal With a Negative Boss
If you are bursting with good ideas, but your boss always rejects suggestions out of hand, it’s very hard to stay positive and continue to think creatively. What can you do to keep your own creative spirit alive, and try to bring about positive changes in spite of the negative atmosphere?
- Brainstorm strategies for making change. You and your coworkers have probably witnessed some improvements and changes. Even the most negative boss can’t stop all forward progress. So, ask yourself how those changes came about. What process is most acceptable to your boss? Who does he feel he has to listen to? Then recreate the successful strategies when you decide to propose something new.
- Avoid too much interaction with a negative boss. Try to keep the face-time to the minimum required, and to keep it civil and polite. Spend as much time as you can interacting with people who are more positive and have a healthy can-do attitude, so your own attitude doesn’t turn negative too.
- Innovate outside of work. Find ways to engage in creative, forward-thinking activities in volunteer work or a part-time extra job, internship or hobby, so you can stay fresh and get to strengthen your innovation muscles. A bad boss is no excuse to let your creativity atrophy!
- Make suggestions on paper, not in person or by email, to give your boss time to digest them. The longer you can delay her response to a suggestion, the more likely he’ll get over her initial knee-jerk resistance to change and actually look at the idea on its merit.
- Allow your boss to revise your idea and propose it as his own. I know, it’s so irritating when your boss rejects your suggestion, then proposes it himself a month later. But look at the bright side-at least this means there’s a way to make progress, even if it does involve accommodating an over-inflated ego.
- Build your own coalition for innovation. Sometimes it’s possible to reach out to others in power in a workplace and build a strong personal network, based on your bright ideas and enthusiasm for positive change. If you can do so, do so! You may be able to work with your coalition to bring about innovation. Let them pull your boss’s strings and force him to bring your unit in line with the new direction you helped create.
- Watch the bottom line and jump ship if your boss seems determined to run you up on the rocks. The biggest problem with change-resistant bosses is they don’t lead very well. Often, their department, division or business does poorly for lack of innovation. If that’s the story at your workplace, you probably should begin to look for another job with a better boss and more momentum. It’s hard to be a rising star when you’re working on a sinking ship.
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About the Author
Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies
Improving Your Creative Coordination
The brain has a unique approach to creativity. Several areas of the right hemisphere become highly active, while the visual processing area of the brain experiences diffuse, rather than focused, activity, according to a study by John Kounios, professor of psychology at Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University, who monitored brain activity during creative problem-solving. Another recent study, by Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia and colleagues, found that the portion of your mind that wanders can sometimes cooperate with more focused regions of thought to help bring in fresh ideas and insights.
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There are a lot of exciting new findings in brain research that suggest creativity involves complex coordination of many areas of the brain in particular, unique ways. Whereas we once might have described creativity as a sort of mental muscle that simply needed to be kept strong, now it appears that creative thought is a higher-level process involving the coordinated efforts of many mental muscles. Pumping a few ions every now and then in a brainstorming session won’t get you into peak creative shape, any more than lifting leg weights will prepare you to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. So, what can we do to be in peak creative condition?
Since creativity requires complex coordination of multiple brain areas and functions, from daydreaming to connecting distant thoughts, it’s important to exercise your creative coordination through a variety of complex creative challenges. Here is a great set of exercises you can use, alone or in a team or staff meeting, to increase creative strength and coordination within the brain:
- Think of ten ways for human beings to fly, aside from the obvious ones involving airplanes or helicopters (this exercise requires the group to think imaginatively and gets them in touch with their sense of fun and fantasy)
- Come up with ten ways to open a jar of jam whose lid is stuck (this exercise brings the group’s imagination into the practical realm and demonstrates that it can come up with useful insights)
- Design three options for “drops” in which one spy could hand off secret papers to another in a public place without any possibility of being seen or caught (this exercise engages the group in process brainstorming, which can be more difficult than product brainstorming)
- Invent a completely new kind of footwear that solves some major problem (this exercise requires people to brainstorm problems as well as solutions, which orients them toward opportunity-finding)
Exercises such as these, performed in sequence, can do a great deal to increase the power of your creative mental functions and prepare you to tackle important challenges at work. It may sometimes feel like play to do creative exercises, but as recent research into brain function shows, creative play uses the same highly-complex mental activities that you need to solve important problems or come up with new designs and inventions.
About the Author
Alex Hiam (www.alexhiam.com) is the author of more than 20 popular books on business, including Business Innovation For Dummies
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