Are You the Boss You Need To Be?

How are you doing as a boss?

As a leader and manager, someone responsible for the results obtained by others, are you the boss you need to be? Are you getting the best from your people, and from those you need but don't control? Are you fully satisfying the ever-rising expectations of your firm and its customers?
Equally important, are you meeting your own expectations? How would you like to work to develop yourself? Are you good enough to achieve your own aspirations? Are you ready for increased responsibility?
These are critical questions all bosses must ask if they want to be fully effective. Why? The two of us have spent nearly 60 years in total studying and practicing management, and again and again we've made a troubling observation: Most managers grow and develop to a certain point, and then they stop. They reach the "Plateau of Good Enough." Perhaps they struggled at first as new managers, but they quickly learned how it's done in their organizations, how to cope with the challenges they typically face every day, and they've come to feel comfortable.

FORTHE FULL ARTICLE GO HERE http://blogs.hbr.org/hill-lineback/2011/01/are-you-the-boss-you-need-to-b.html

Management Tips for New Supervisors

Some very good tips for the new supervisor at Work Awesome - Management Tips for New Supervisors . The one thing that I would add is to get to know other supervisors across the organisation - your job is to help bind the organisation not just look after your team.

A Field Guide to the Workaholic

"Workaholics are out of balance," says Bryan E. Robinson, a therapist in Asheville, North Carolina, and author of Chained to the Desk: A Guidebook for Workaholics, Their Partners and Children, and the Clinicians Who Treat Them. "They don't have many friends. They don't take care of themselves. They don't have any hobbies outside of the office. A hard worker will be at his desk, thinking about the ski slopes. A workaholic will be on the ski slopes thinking about his desk."


For the full article with tips on how to "turn down the addition" go to A Field Guide to the Workaholic | Psychology Today

The Psychology of Persuasion

All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we should buy, believe in or vote for.

In our personal lives the same struggle is played out for the supremacy of viewpoints, ideals and actions. Whether it's friends and family, work colleagues, potential employers or strangers, each of us has to work out how to bring others around to our own point of view. We all play the influence game, to greater or lesser degrees.

Psychologists have been studying how we try to influence each other for many years. I've been covering some highlights of this research, which are collected below.

For the full article go to PsychBlog - Psychology of Persuasion — PsyBlog

Use The One-A-Month Technique To Adopt Habits That Stick

Keeping resolutions is hard. It’s easy to get to the end of a year and proclaim loudly all the things you didn’t like about the last year and all the things you’re going to do differently with the new one. Making sweeping changes with resolution shopping lists, however, is a recipe for failure. Willpower is a finite resource, and a very limited one at that; it’s critical to structure your habit changes for success.

Below, we’ll offer some tips for pruning your resolutions and making them more realistic, then walk you through creating a more realistic resolution schedule during which you’ll adopt one new resolution each month. Read on for the details.

For the full article go to Lifehacker at this link Use The One-A-Month Technique To Adopt Habits That Stick | Lifehacker Australia

How a Good Leader Reacts to a Crisis

Here are some tips for the next big storm that hits your office:

Take a moment to figure out what's going on. An executive I know experienced a major disruption in service to his company. He was the person in charge and he told me that at the first response meeting everyone started talking at once. The chatter was nervous response — not constructive — so he delegated responsibilities and then called for a subsequent meeting in an hour's time. This also helped to impose order on a chaotic situation.

Act promptly, not hurriedly. A leader must provide direction and respond to the situation in a timely fashion. But acting hurriedly only makes people nervous. You can act with deliberateness as well as speed. Or as legendary coach John Wooden advised, "Be quick but don't hurry."

For the full article go to HBR via this link How a Good Leader Reacts to a Crisis - John Baldoni - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Think You Need a New Job? You’re Probably Wrong

Bet you are thinking, “Well, some jobs are definitely bad: coal mining would be too much for me.”  That might be true, but the same is true with being a lawyer: Both jobs totally suck. The reason is that you need only three things to make any job good:

• Control over your work environment
• Control over your workload
• Challenging goals you can meet

If you have these three things then your job will not prevent you from being happy. Coal mining does not give you control over your environment, so you constantly fear for your safety. Lawyering does not give you control over your workload, so you have to cater at your client’s whim if you want to keep your income stream.

So why do people continue to talk about the perfect job, the best job, the most successful, and on and on? I think it’s because it’s so hard to turn inward, and to admit our limitations. Isn’t it easier just to chase a new job?

Read full article here at Bnet - Think You Need a New Job? You’re Probably Wrong | BNET