Filters that cloud our ability to drive results with others have to do with how we interpret the: truth of the content we receive, quality of our relationship with the feedback giver, and impact of the feedback to our identities.
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Book Shelf: Focus
Overview
Applying three categories of focus – “inner, other and outer” – is essential for a highly functioning life.
“Selective attention” is the ability to focus on one task in spite of “sensory and emotional” distractions.
Staying on target suppresses any emotional interference and helps you to remain cool under pressure.
Emotions intrude on focus; completing a task is more difficult when you’re upset.
Attention grows stronger and sharper with use, exercise and practice.
In a “wandering” state of mind, you pause for self-reflection, contemplate future scenarios, hatch ideas or question assumptions.
Self-awareness comes from recognizing internal cues and interpreting them accurately.
Focused empathy takes three forms: “cognitive, emotional and empathic concern.”
Today’s youth, members of the first digital generation, are growing up more attuned to devices than to people.
Every leader must focus a firm’s attention where it’s most needed and most productive.
Recommendation
Daniel Goleman, author of the mid-‘90s classic Emotional Intelligence, turns his attention to the subject of attention – and explains why focus is essential for navigating life, performing at your best, leading others and, ultimately, improving the world for future generations. His explanations of brain functions are useful to business people and educators. Ironically, Goleman meanders a bit throughout the book, almost like a stream of consciousness, and his efforts to incorporate issues that seem to matter to him – such as climate change and economic inequality – which feels a little tangled. Still, he’s at his best when thoughtfully explaining how people think and feel. His simple explanations of the workings of the human brain, and his depiction of focus as a triad of attention paid to “inner, other and outer” targets make reading his work more than worthwhile. Goleman compares attention to a muscle you can flex and strengthen. For a buff psyche and enhanced mental tone, try this attention workout.
Key Points
How your brain exerts attention;
How to use three kinds of focus; and
How to build your focus to enhance your learning, performance and leadership.
Summary
Paying Attention
How well you pay attention affects every aspect of your life. Effective focusing skills enhance mental processes, including understanding, learning, listening, being creative and reading other people’s signals. Most people underestimate focus or overlook its importance.You need to exercise all three categories of focus – “inner, other and outer” – to function well in life. Inner focus refers to heeding your gut feelings, values and decision-making abilities. Other focus pertains to how you relate to and connect with other people. Outer focus allows you to get by in the larger world.
“Focus is not just selecting the right thing, but also saying no to the wrong ones.”
“Selective Attention”
Someone writing poetry on a laptop in a busy coffeehouse is demonstrating selective attention – focusing on one task and ignoring external stimuli. Such distractions are either “sensory” or “emotional.” Sensory distractions like shapes, colors and sounds stimulate your senses. Emotional lures cut through the clutter to draw your attention, like hearing your name called in a crowded restaurant. Emotions intrude on focus; completing a task is more difficult when you’re upset.
“Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention in all its varieties represents a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.”
The brain’s prefrontal region is responsible for selective attention. The more you focus on one thing, the better your performance. Staying on target suppresses emotional interference and helps you remain cool under pressure. Controlling your attention by focusing on one thing, then moving on to the next, indicates sound mental health. Jumping from one thing to the next multiplies any feelings of helplessness and anxiety.You focus more easily when you’re doing something you enjoy. Feeling in the zone or the “flow” results from immersion in an activity you find rewarding, inspiring, stimulating or intellectually challenging. In contrast, repetitive, unfulfilling tasks cause disengagement, boredom and apathy.
“While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry.”
Two semi-independent systems make up the human brain. The lower brain’s massive computing power operates just below consciousness, coming into the forefront only when jarred by something unexpected. At such moments, the bottom brain, active in the subcortical circuitry, communicates with the top brain, or neocortex.
“People who are tuned out not only stumble socially, but are surprised when someone tells them they have acted inappropriately.”
Bottom brain activity is involuntary, reflexive and fast. It functions constantly, handling rote behaviors and filtering information and stimuli. As it continually learns, it adjusts your perceptions. Emotion sways the bottom brain. The top brain, which is under your conscious control, is the locus of voluntary focus, active when you choose to watch a sunset, plan your day or learn a new task. Sometimes the bottom and top systems share mental activities to optimize your results with a minimum of exertion. For example, as you master a task like driving, the top brain learns and then the bottom brain takes over. Performing the task becomes almost instinctive.
Midbrain circuitry notices things on a neural level, such as a baby’s cry or a spider on the floor, and signals to the top brain. The brain’s amygdala checks your surroundings for threats and sends alarms when it spots danger. When your amygdala senses a threat, it commandeers your emotions until the top brain analyzes the danger; then it defends you or sends calming signals.
“While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.”
Never Mind
Your “wandering mind” – where your thoughts travel when not engaged in a mental task – is the brain’s default setting. In this state, people pause for self-reflection, contemplate future scenarios, hatch ideas, dwell on memories or question their assumptions. Brain scans show that the area for focus – the “executive system in the prefrontal cortex” – activates during downtime.
“Setting aside some regular reflective time in the daily or weekly schedule might help us get beyond the firefight-of-the-day mentality, to take stock and look ahead.”
While your mind wanders, your sensory systems dim. Doing activities that do not require a laser focus frees your mind to ramble. Focusing sharply on one activity quells outside stimuli, such as buzzing phones. Sustaining deep attention can be draining. To replenish, take breaks, meditate, exercise or do something fun.
Self-Awareness and Self-Control
Self-awareness comes from recognizing internal cues and interpreting them accurately. “Gut feelings” are messages from the insula, the area in the brain’s frontal lobes that acts as a nerve center for your internal organs. People in sync with their emotions have high-functioning insulae and a strong inner voice. The insula’s signals help you intuitively form a value system, which becomes more concrete as you articulate it to yourself and practice it.
“Video games focus attention and get us to repeat moves over and over, and so are powerful tutorials.”
Self-awareness is a focus that works as an internal compass. It governs your actions and aligns them with your values. Willpower and self-regulation are functions of “executive attention.” Focusing on achieving a goal requires exercising self-control to subdue your impulses and ignore intrusive emotions. An iconic study by the psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1970s measured the willpower of young children. In the “marshmallow test,” researchers told four-year-olds they could eat a marshmallow right away or they could wait a few minutes and get two marshmallows. Left alone with one marshmallow, the children who successfully waited for the extra treat succeeded by distracting their focus from the marshmallow by using fantasy play or singing songs. The continuing study eventually showed that the children who could delay gratification at age four performed better in all aspects of their adult lives.
“Kids who can ignore impulse, filter out what’s irrelevant, and stay focused on a goal fare better in life.”
I Feel for You“Cognitive empathy” is a top-down brain function that enables you to look at things from another person’s point of view, understand what that person is thinking and feeling, and manage your emotional response. When your emotions align with someone else’s, you experience the bottom-up response of “emotional empathy.” A top-down/bottom-up response, called “empathic concern,” leads to taking helpful action.You have to focus to tune in to other people’s nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and to perceive their emotions. You feel another person’s suffering – a hardwired physiological response – in your amygdala. Attention centers inside the brain connect with its areas for social sensitivity, giving humans the ability to feel compassion and manage their emotional reactions. Compassion and concern grow naturally from empathy, the feeling people want and expect from doctors, bosses and family members. For example, patients are more likely to sue for malpractice when their physicians share fewer signs of empathy and consideration, even if their rate of error matches that of more outwardly empathetic doctors.
“Self-awareness...represents an essential focus, one that attunes us to the subtle murmurs within that can help guide our way through life.”
Everyone’s social acuity falls on a continuum from socially oblivious to highly intuitive. People who fail to notice social cues often act inappropriately, missing nonverbal messages or misreading context. They’re often unaware when they make social gaffes, such as being rude or speaking too long or too loudly. Where you fall on the social hierarchy affects your ability and desire to read others. Columbia University research reveals a direct correlation between power and attention: The higher your rank, the less heed you pay to other people’s thoughts and feelings.
“While we are equipped with razor-sharp focus on smiles and frowns, growls and babies, as we’ve seen, we have zero neural radar for the threats to the global systems that support human life.”
System Navigation
No single area of the brain deals exclusively with system recognition and comprehension, but the mind uses the brain’s parietal cortex to recognize patterns. The ability to read and navigate systems is a learned process, separate from self-mastery and empathy. System navigation is an essential life skill. People understand systems indirectly, by developing mental models during firsthand experiences and by absorbing distributed knowledge.Pandemics and climate change are systemic problems that people learn about by gathering data, identifying patterns, and noticing peaks and disturbances. For example, “big data” collected by Google and analyzed with sophisticated software identified areas of flu outbreaks within 24 hours. The brain readily perceives immediate threats, but your perceptual system is blind to long-term dangers, such as the thinning of the ozone layer.
“Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.”
Practice Makes Perfect, Sometimes
Psychologist Anders Ericsson’s research about expertise laid the foundation for the “10,000-hour rule,” which holds that achieving the highest possible level of performance takes at least 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, the rule is only partly true. Practice makes close-to-perfect only if it’s conducted in a “smart” way – that is, if the person who is practicing uses that time to make adjustments and improvements. How much attention you pay during practice is crucial. Productive practice includes feedback, which is why dancers practice in front of a mirror.
“The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.”
Professional athletes, experts and other high performers counteract the brain’s natural inclination to make routines automatic and to transfer them to the bottom mind. They use focus, skill development, refinement and positivity to strengthen their brain circuitry. Feeling upbeat is a crucial requirement for productive practice. Positive emotions ignite the brain’s left prefrontal area, making people feel motivated, aware and energized.Mindfulness refers to the practice of paying “attention to attention.” Meditation focuses on your inner state and develops your capacity to observe yourself in the moment without judgment. It strengthens focus by improving your ability to sustain attention. The meditation cycle rotates through the following four steps: “The mind wanders, you notice it’s wandering, you shift your attention to your breath and you keep it there,” until your mind wanders again.
“Attention works much like a muscle – use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.”
Games and Cognitive Skills
Playing video games generally diminishes brainpower. Certain games do improve some cognitive abilities, including “visual acuity and spatial perception, attention switching, decision making and the ability to track objects.” “Smart games” that improve focus and boost cognitive function may become educational tools. Such games provide:
Specific goals for different levels of play.
Feedback and pacing geared toward each user.
Challenges that progress in accordance with players’ skills.
Different contexts for applying a particular set of skills.
In the Classroom
Some schools are adding “social and emotional learning” (SEL) practices to their curriculum in order to help children self-regulate. For example, the “stoplight” exercise instructs kids to think of a traffic signal when they become upset or overstimulated. The red light means: Take deep breaths and try to calm down. A yellow light cautions kids to pause first, then reflect and come up with alternative behavior. A green light encourages them to try a solution.The constant lure of technology waylays young people’s attention and compromises their interactions with other people. Today’s youth, the first digital generation, grow up more attuned to devices than to people. They may develop cognitive skills for navigating the virtual world at the cost of the kind of person-to-person attentive skills needed to build rapport, empathy and social dexterity. Adults are not immune. They may find it hard to read more than a couple of pages, listen to a speech longer than five minutes or stop constantly checking their smartphones. However, the ability to pay attention grows stronger with use, exercise and practice.
Attention in Organizations
Every effective leader must focus a firm’s attention where it’s most needed and productive. Triple focus provides direction. First comes inner focus: Heed your behaviors and the effects of your actions. Leadership requires knowing your values and communicating your vision to inspire and motivate others. Other focus means developing an organizational strategy to provide a road map of issues and goals that require attention. Great managers develop interpersonal skills and can effectively listen, respond and collaborate. Using outer focus, leaders absorb the big picture, visualize complicated systems and foresee how their decisions will play out in the future.
About the Author
Science journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee Daniel Goleman wrote The New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence.
Driving Dedication During Change: Prove You're Dedicated to People
People won’t bust their tails for just anybody. They have their reasons—good ones--when they dedicate themselves to their work. Usually the relationship has a lot to do with it.
Dedication rarely comes without reciprocity--or some mutual benefit. You have to be invested in people if you want them to invest in their work.
That’s not always as easy as it sounds. For example, in today’s world of rapid change, you can’t promise job security. You can’t protect everyone from anxiety and job stress. You can’t keep from having to make hard moves that may derail or even harm their careers. Sometimes you have to do things at the expense of the individual for the good of the organization.
Still, you can be fiercely dedicated to helping people succeed in the jobs they face. You can commit yourself to support them and provide the resources they need. You can invest in their training, education, and overall employability. You can encourage them, believe in them, and back them up in their work.
Beyond that, you can dedicate yourself to honesty, to always being trustworthy and above board in your dealings with them. Unless they have experienced you as a colleague or manager in the past, their dedication will come cautiously if at all. Make it clear that they can count on you to do what’s possible on their behalf.
It always comes down to this: You’ve got to be caring and dedicated toward people for them to be caring and dedicated to their work. We play how we are coached.
The trust level typically drops during change. People grow wary. More self-protective. They interrupt unpopular events as solid evidence that the organization lacks commitment to employees.
And right or wrong, perceptions run the show.
This means you must provide generous proof to the contrary. Leave no doubt about your dedication to your people.
Commitment usually travels on a two-way street.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.
Driving Dedication During Change: Match People With Work They Love
IMAGE CREDIT: Ian Schneider
Dedication comes naturally when our work is compelling. If people like what they are doing, they are more in tune with their tools and good at finding problems before they arise. They get absorbed by the day's challenges and time flies. When people like their work, they find focus. You don't need to turn up the heat; their internal fire is self-igniting.
Being compelled by our work means there's a good match between skills and interest. Therefore, the casting of employees is significant to a mission's success. Who goes where and who does what can make a world of difference in how your people apply themselves.
If you can position people so they get to spend their days doing what they love, you ensure dedication. They'll voluntarily put in extra time, and throw their hearts into the job as well.
Dedication feeds on work that's engaging. When we are compelled by our work, it captures the imagination toward creative solutions. Engaging work also provides energy rather than takes it away. This energy reserve is what perpetuates when the hours are long and significant challenges. There's another important benefit: people who consumed with their work invest more fully in the organization. The organization's mission becomes their mission. They give time. They give themselves--both heart and soul.
With more of themselves involved in their work, people will be more likely to protect that investment of time, knowledge, and expertise as it pertains to furthering the mission. They also need to share t it, widely. Logic dictates that we look out for our own best interests. When we care about our work we have a personal stake in the organization, and are more committed to the success of its mission.
People lose a degree of control over their work lives during change. Organizations get reshaped, resulting in some forced assignments and arbitrary placements of employees
Careers get compromised. Some folks settle for the jobs that are available, forsaking the sort of work they really want.
The payoff is that they get to stay employed. The problem is they feel no passion whatsoever.
More careful casting of people protects commitment. Give them assignments that stir their hearts, and they’ll work harder because they want to.
The workload always weighs less when you’ve got a job you love.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.
Driving Dedication During Change: Outlaw Apathy
IMAGE CREDIT: Aneta Pawlik
People live into our bias of them. Meaning, people have a peculiar way of confirming our beliefs about what they can and cannot do. Somehow our expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can use this unique psychology to your group's advantage and create high commitment--by giving people reputations to live up to instead of reputations to run from.
Begin by making it clear that dedication is a top priority trait expected from everyone. Using this lens immediately starts to shape the reality you live and the talent you seek.
Make sure you communicate a clear mission for the group, and everyone a clear goal in helping to achieve that mission. Be specific in explaining what dedication means in this group, what standards you want them to adhere to, and the expectations you have of them. Operational definitions for common understanding are essential to effective, constructive communication. There should be no confusion regarding what dedication looks like in the context of a particular group or organization toward its mission. People need to know precisely what you mean to perform.
Once you've achieved clarity with the mission and goals, show that your expectations are firm. Be intolerant of apathy. Weed out the uncommitted by creating consequences mediocre performance. Save the rewards for those who try the hardest, contribute the most, and continually go the extra mile. Everyone in the group should benefit in direct proportion to their efforts and to the results they produce.
Follow through on the clarity of the mission, relevancy of goals to the mission, and clear expectations make dedication count for something. All of a sudden, behavior starts to matter. Attitude starts to change. Individual performance begins to make a real dent in progress toward tangible results and momentum with the mission.
This approach might seem a little hardnosed. Looking at how change (reassignments, reorganizations, new leadership, etc.) has affected people, and you might start to feel apologetic. Maybe you put these decisions into action; maybe you didn't. Maybe you think the situation is unfair. Maybe you think you aren't justified in asking for high dedication among those you work with.
Just remember—anyone who passively tolerates mediocre work is as much involved in it as they who help to perpetuate it. Those who accept mediocre work without protest or speaking up against it is really cooperating with it. Benign neglect is not an act of kindness.
It could be that under these conditions you consider commitment to be a hopeless case.
Act otherwise.
Too much respect for problems can kill our faith in possibilities. There has to be balance between analysis and action.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.
Driving Dedication During Change: Give People A Stake In The Outcome
IMAGE CREDIT: gustavo Campos
People invest more into their work for a lot of reasons. First, their work has to be satisfying in some way (to them). Second, the incentives to do their job and do it well need to be fair--they need to get something out of the deal. Let people share in the outcomes, and see how their enthusiasm, interest, and dedication change.
We are most passionate about results when something is as stake. When we are personally invested in a our own or someone else's success, it's because we have something to lose or gain in the process. We will try harder to influence the results. Things at stake might be our pride, ability to learn, or our rank. So how do you make the results matter to everyone? Why should people's work matter to them? Why should we not allow ourselves to get by with doing just the minimum?
Help others make a meaningful connection between effort and rewards. They'll see little logic in trying harder unless they believe more energy is likely to bring them better returns. If you want more dedication from those around you, you should make sure they have a genuine vested interest in the results.
Maybe there's money that should be shared. Bonuses, profit-sharing, or communal tips. Compensation time or paid days off or some other kind of financial incentive. For sure, there are intangibles—psychological paychecks—deserved across the group. Give people their fair share of the recognition they earned. Determine the incentives most relevant to your team or organization. You can't expect to run a marathon on crumbs.
Figure out how to share the action across the group. Sharing implies ownership. Ownership is a core aspect of dedication.
Let’s deal with employees’ hot question: “What’s in it for me?
They can see that change carries quite a price tag. What’s harder for them to find are good reasons for giving it their best shot.
Their question is legitimate. You can’t afford to ignore it, and the logic in your answer must be solid.
People don’t put out extra effort unless there is some kind of special payback.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.
Driving Dedication During Change: Invest in Rapport
IMAGE CREDIT: Priscilla Du Preez
Cohesiveness—the “we” spirit within the group—can wield heavy influence on commitment. The stronger the ties between the people, the more those personal bonds serve as a motor powering individual effort.
Sometimes this sense of family, community, or “teamness” comes about naturally over time as people work together during the regular workday. But sharing experiences outside of the daily routine often accelerates the process. Getting together after hours—for fun, maybe even for work—allows a unique and most valuable connective tissue to develop across the group.
Some people aren’t drawn to this sort of thing, of course, particularly if they’re already putting in long hours. So don’t force it. You can’t make camaraderie a job requirement. What you can do is encourage it and create a conducive environment that helps it to happen spontaneously.
Bonding that occurs beyond the boundaries of the job creates richer relationships. The relaxed atmosphere makes it easier for people to get to know one another on a personal basis. The feelings of unity take on more depth.
The payoff? Tightly knit groups make members want to try harder. We’re more committed to those we care for. We’ll pitch in to help them out. We’ll go further out of our way to make sure we measure up in their eyes. Call it peer pressure, group pride, or inspiration that comes from knowing your associates are cheering for you. Label it however you want, the force if formidable enough to drive personal commitment through the roof. You’ll see people push themselves to their absolute limits rather than let down their colleagues.
That cohesiveness is worth something. You can’t buy that kind of behavior. It’s born of feelings deep inside the human being, stirrings that develop out of purely personal ties. It’s commitment with a capital C.
Devotion to the job drops when working relationships get disturbed.
Personnel shakeups cause people to pull back psychologically. The social ties that connect employees carry a weaker emotional current, particularly if people end up working with others they hard know.
You should take time—make time—to rebuild relationships.
Commitment runs at a far higher voltage when people know and care for their coworkers.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.
Driving Dedication During Change: Membership Matters
IMAGE CREDIT: June O
We are members in a lot of different ways--families, companies, gyms, softball teams, circles of friends, hobby clubs, unions, charitable organizations, and local religious congregations. Membership in social groups can boost our sense of identity because people take pride in and derive meaning from group memberships that are important to them.
There are some groups with a high barrier to entry. Where the harder we have to fight for something, the more precious it becomes. Somehow, in sacrificing, we prove to ourselves that what we're after is valuable. For example, golf clubs create a high barrier to entry by requiring high annual dues. Navy seal training creates a high barrier to entry by requiring mental and physical toughness.
Sacrifice is linked to membership. Making it through rigorous selection standards and working to prove their worthiness, people convince themselves that being a part of the group matters.
Some organizations abuse these ideas, dangling carrots off a long stick with no intention of making good on promises. They create a set of initiation rites building commitment to the group by making acceptance hard to come by--continually frustrating the process through underhanded practices.
When joining a group, the criterion should be clear. Joining any group can be something special--an achievement and a privilege--if the people entering and the people managing it don't lose themselves in the process.
Belonging (in any group) is when you feel safe and valued for embracing what makes you unique. It's natural to experience self-doubt at work. Converting that energy into further worry leaves people feeling more alienated and alone. Turning that worry into constructive work brings us back into feeling included. With effective membership, it’s incredibly important for people to be inspired by one another, to look one another in the eye and see goodness rather than merely an obstacle to our own agenda.
Initiating people into groups comes down to welcoming, mentoring, and sustaining progress toward challenging goals—always. It takes effort, energy and mental discipline. Moving from "me-ness" to "we-ness" comes from having shared everyday struggles, requiring us to be vulnerable with one another. This identification with the group feeds dedication.
Having a sense of belonging doesn't mean work will be easy—it means the normal ups and downs of your job won't cause you quite so much stress. Encourage people to share their experiences (good and bad) to help everyone realize that emotional ups and downs are part of the job and that you can go through painful periods but still belong.
People get shuffled. Repositioned. Assigned to different bosses and new work groups.
Many employees end up in jobs they didn’t apply for, and don’t really know that they want. Unsure about whether they even care to be part of the new scheme of things, they keep their dedication on hold
Force the issue.
Be welcoming, mentor everyone, and sustain progress, and dedication comes naturally.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.
Driving Dedication During Change: Connect Through a Relevant Mission
Depending on the level of resilience in the organization and the individual, change can leave people shaken, with a wounded sense of self-worth. Reinforce your efforts by providing reasonable goals. Let these accomplishments restore their faith in themselves. Keep people from just going through the motions. Employees who don’t believe in themselves or in what they are doing deliver little of their potential and hold back the team.
Read MoreDriving Dedication During Change: Build Momentum
IMAGE CREDIT: June O
Establish a sense of momentum in your team or organization and watch how it brings people together. Progress is compelling because people want to be on the winning side. Dedication starts to increase when things start clicking.
People start to disengage when their organization stalls or loses ground, but they deeply commit themselves when the organization is on a roll.
Momentum means taking action. Pick up performance. Make progress on clear goals.
Bag the deer, don’t chase the squirrels. Match hard challenges with tangible performance gains. Engage in activities that provide concrete proof of the group’s effectiveness. Avoid distractions by trying to address morale, lower stress, or improve loyalty and job satisfaction directly. Remember that they are byproducts of a well-run system. They don’t do much at all to build momentum. It works quite the opposite—momentum heals most attitudinal problems.
You must mobilize people—outlaw apathy, inertia, disinterest, and inactivity. Change begins within, today. Find ways to create meaningful urgency that will help your team or organization move at a faster clip. Push for daily progress where it makes the most sense. Post results and keep them up to date. Celebrate accomplishments, then “raise the bar.”
Rinse and repeat. Discipline is what maintains momentum. Momentum toward tangible results is what tightens the bond between employees and the organization.
Organizations instinctively slow down in response to change. People can grow more committed to protecting themselves, and less committed to protecting productivity and cost management.
Pretty soon results start to suffer. Then the problem begins to feed on itself.
Your job is to reverse the trend.
Speed things up. Focus people on achieving hard results.
Momentum gives job commitment a second chance.
To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.
Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.