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Tag Archives: Work Place culture

Do You Push Your Team Members Too Hard?


Each minute of our life is a lesson but most of us fail to read it. I thought I would just add my daily lessons & the lessons that I learned by seeing the people around here. So it may be useful for you and as memories for me.

Many of us have experienced the frustration of working for a manager who intimidates their team members while apparently charming their superiors at the same time.  But it’s hard to know if you are that type of manager.  You might think you are doing a good job.  You get results by challenging and pushing people past their comfort zones. But what if they perceive your style as overly intimidating and as a consequence they are actually afraid of you?

Some managers believe that being direct and pushy is the only way to get results.  While this can be appropriate in some situations,  it does not build a culture of trust and commitment in the long term. 

There was a company that was struggling to meet its goals and objectives.

The management team was constantly pushing their employees to work harder and faster, but nothing seemed to be working.
One day, a wise consultant was brought in to help the company improve its management practices. The consultant observed the company’s operations for a few weeks and then called a meeting with the management team.

The consultant started by telling the management team a story:

“There was a farmer who had a field of wheat that wasn’t growing well. He tried everything he could think of, but nothing seemed to help the wheat grow. One day, he decided to try something new. Instead of pushing the wheat to grow, he decided to focus on the soil. He enriched the soil, gave it the nutrients it needed, and then let nature take its course. To his amazement, the wheat grew tall and strong.”

The consultant then turned to the management team and said, “Just like the farmer, you need to focus on the ‘soil’ of your company. Your employees are the soil that your company grows in. If you invest in them, give them the support they need, and create a positive work environment, they will grow and thrive. Your company will flourish as a result.”

The moral of the story is that good management is not just about pushing people harder, but also about investing in them and creating a positive work environment that supports growth and development.

If you wanna share your experiences, you can find me online in all your favorite places  LinkedIn and Facebook. Shoot me a DM, a tweet, a comment, or whatever works best for you. I’ll be the one trying to figure out how to read books and get better at playing ping pong at the same time.

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Posted by on January 13, 2023 in Life & It's Importance, Work Place

 

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Leadership Starts with Simply Being a GOOD Person


Each minute of our life is a lesson but most of us fail to read it. I thought I would just add my daily lessons & the lessons that I learned by seeing the people around here. So it may be useful for you and as memories for me.

It doesn’t matter if you are running a business, managing a team, or teaching a class–leadership skills are important. Some people seem to be born knowing what to do to inspire and lead people, but for most of us it doesn’t come that naturally.

Being good is all about our core VALUES as a person.  Every one of us has a set of core values.  Our values have been built from a young age into adulthood.  From day one, the people that have raised us, our parents, relatives, guardians, and friends, have been IMPRINTING values upon us.  When you were young and impressionable, you were just young and impressionable. 

Not everyone will become a great leader, but everyone can become a better leader.

What makes some people excel as leaders often feels shrouded in mystery. You can read about leadership, research it, and talk about it, yet the interest in leadership alone will not necessarily teach you how to be a good leader.

You will have more information than the average person, but learning effective leadership is lifelong work. It requires experience – and lots of it. Most importantly, it requires observation and a commitment to action.

Remember words like these: “Show respect for your sister; that type of behavior may be okay for your friends, but not you; do your chores, everybody does their role in this family.” Those words instilled the values of respect, strength, and hard work. Take a minute and reflect on words you may remember from your childhood. Now let’s fast forward from your childhood to, if appropriate, parenthood. As a parent, have you ever heard your parents voice come out of you as you talk to your kids?  Most parents have, and it’s cute and scary all at the same time. 

In living and leading a fearless life, values are an integral part of navigating and overcoming fear.  In life, when things are good our values are beneficial and positive. However, when a crisis strikes, tragedy sets in, a roadblock is thrown up, and the value of your values skyrockets. I’ve always felt that you learn more about a person when the chips are down. During challenging times our values can be our bedrock, our lightpost and something that carries us through the challenge. 

It is really interesting to reflect back on the first global crisis I had to lead a company through.  It was September 11th and I was in the middle of a capital raise to keep our company alive.  It was also on the heels of the Internet Bubble bursting.  I was leading a struggling tech company in Silicon Valley that was running out of money and America just got hit by terrorists.  In fact, on September 11th we had investors from New York and Chicago in our offices in California and we became their hosts for over a week as all planes were grounded. 

In the face of adversity, the values that immediately struck were STRENGTH, COURAGE and FAITH.  Just a day earlier the company relied on its own strength, but today the company needed mine.  Everyone was shaken, and I don’t mean professionally.  We were all shaken personally and as Americans we were literally numb. As a company we pulled together for our employees, served our clients, but more importantly served our community, all while we were struggling and running out of cash.  We were courageous in the face of fear and had faith that if we did the right things, good things would happen to us. We made it through September 11thstronger as a company and closer as a family.  And our Fearless Leadership was rewarded with a successful capital raise and the company stayed in business and grew. 

The lessons I learned during that crisis I have been able to apply at other times in my career – during the financial meltdown of 2008-2009 and most recently during the global pandemic we are all experiencing. In all of these instances, I have lived and learned that simply waking up and being a good person is perhaps the biggest part of being a steady and consistent leader during troubled times.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to be a good leader, first and foremost, is an inside job. You must focus on growing as a person, regardless of the leadership title that you hold. You cannot take others where you yourself have not been. So focusing on yourself, regardless of your time or where you are in your career, will have long term benefits for you and the people around you.

Being a Fearless Leader is built on being a good person and living your core values. Values are great in good times, and they are literally the super-glue during the tough times. 

Author: Brendan P. Keegan

Please feel free to share your story and any lessons you learned, you experienced, you came across in your life in the comments below. If you enjoyed this, or any other other posts, I’d be honoured  if you’d share it with your family, friends and followers!

If you wish to follow my journey outside of my writing, you can find me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MunnaPrawin) Instagram(MunnaPrawin) and Twitter(@munnaprawin1).

 
 

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Workplace Happiness Matters


Each minute of our life is a lesson but most of us fail to read it. I thought I would just add my daily lessons & the lessons that I learned by seeing the people around here. So it may be useful for you and as memories for me.

Happiness at work is heavily surveyed and it is proved that an average human spends over 90,000 hours at work over his/her lifetime. People still figure out how to work on feeling happy or coming in terms with your work. Just like everyone, you may be also thinking that happiness should be the primary goal of having a good work-life.

Most people chase success at work, thinking that will make them happy. The truth is that happiness at work will make you successful. How often do you consider quitting your job and feel that you are not getting paid enough for the dedication and service you offer your organization?

Happiness and satisfaction are subjective concepts – while for some of us monetary benefits can be equated with job satisfaction, some might strive for recognition of their hard-work and lose motivation on failing to achieve so. For some people, having a friendly environment at work is an essential requisite for deriving pleasure. No matter what the standards are, being content with our careers is crucial for maintaining the ‘work-life’ balance.

Being happy is the first step to anything that we want to do successfully. Going to the office, mechanically performing all the duties assigned, and coming home to spend the rest of the day with a drink in hand and the TV in front is an ideal picture of an unhappy life.

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” ~Dalai Lama

How to work toward happiness at work

So now that we know the essence and benefits of happiness at work, how can we foster, support, and build it?

There’s no single, simple answer to this question. However, in developing our course, we have identified four key pillars of happiness at work: Purpose, Engagement, Resilience, and Kindness—or PERK, as in to PERK up your happiness at work, or make happiness your company’s best PERK.

Studies report multiple ways to strengthen each pillar of PERK on personal, social, and structural levels at work—through individual exercises and activities, the development of key social skills, shifts in leadership style, organization-wide initiatives, or changes to company policy. While this field is young and ideas overlap, we offer PERK as a flexible, integrated framework to help guide thinking about how to increase happiness at work.

A happy worker will reach office on time because he respects his punctuality and will perform all the daily tasks because he enjoys doing it. He will work out of love, not out of compulsion.

1. Happiness Multiplies Success

Happiness at work can spread like fire. Employees who feel pleasure in doing their work form a great example to others who are less motivated.

For example, when a team leader is happy with his position and work, he can influence his team with more positivity and maintain great functionality in the group. Happiness in the workplace is directly correlational to increased productivity and better group performance at work.

2. Happiness Builds Positivity

A troubled mind can be the storehouse of negative contemplations. When we work out of compulsion and don’t feel passionate about the contribution we make to the organization’s success, our mind starts wearing.

We become stressed, lose focus, and indulge self-deprecating thoughts like “I have to quit”, “I cannot take it anymore”, “I am not worth it”, etc. On the contrary, a professional who has strong positive feelings about his job will undoubtedly be more enthusiastic and focus on building himself. Rather than focusing on the problems, he would look into ways of solving it.

3. Happiness Reduces Stress

Annie Mckee, an International Leadership advisor, and writer, in one of her publications in the Harvard Business Review, mentioned that when employees are unhappy, their brain starts to disconnect from the positive emotions, and damages their power of creative thinking and reasoning.

She further said in her article on the link between our thoughts, feelings, and actions. If any of these breaks down, it is sure to hamper the others. If we feel happy in the 8 hours that we spend at work, if somehow we can hit the strings of positivity that will keep us uplifted, it can remarkably improve our responses to stress and redirect our focus to the positive aspects of the work-life.

4. Happiness at Work means a Healthy Life

If we allow the work stress and disappointments to enter into our personal space, there is no way that we can get rid of them.

Successful professionals who can optimize their work are less likely to suffer from hypertension, cardiac arrests, substance abuse, and other stress-related disorders.

When we are happy from inside, we get that power to fight diseases and the will to recover and get back on track.

Remaining physically or mentally sick can bring unprecedented hurdles even at work. We lose the energy to give it our best shot, become less focused on work and more focused on the woes, and consequently, kill our productive soul.

Not just that, happiness at work also makes us less prone to work-related stress and burdens.

5. Happiness at Work Increases Likeability

We all like to stay around people who have a positive attitude and look content with themselves. In a happy state of mind, people are more innovative and inspired. They are willing to improve their existing skills and contributes toward creating a fun and creative performance culture at work.

Finding happiness in work helps in building strong interpersonal relationships at work and encourage people to work together for the common welfare of the organization they are serving. It is the backbone for innovation, loyalty, responsibility, and success.

Happy workers can create a pleasant environment at work that is easy for others to cope in, and the more people get into it, the better the team grows.

Dyfed Loesche, an eminent statistical and data journalist, in one of his publications about countries having the best and the worst work-life balance, mentioned that the Netherlands is one of the happiest countries concerning the work-life balance.

His interactive chart (given below) represents the countries that have great work-life balance, starting with the one that has the happiest working population.

Happiness Workshop Ideas for Employees

  1. Workshop Activities To Build Team Success – Access here
  2. The Work Happiness Workshop – Access here
  3. The Employee Stress Management Online Workshop – Access
  4. Happiness In The Workplace Everyday – Access here
  5. Team Building And Effective Communications Workshop – Access here
  6. Happiness At Work In-depth Workshop by Alexander Kjerulf – Access here
  7. Arrive At Happy Workshop – Access here

Finding happiness is as much about the decisions and actions you take as it is about having good things happen to you. And remember, if you don’t enjoy your life, change it! Doing the same thing today will create the same results tomorrow. Try some of these strategies and put yourself in a position for happiness.

Please feel free to share your story and any lessons you learned, you experienced, you came across in your life in the comments below. If you enjoyed this, or any other other posts, I’d be honoured  if you’d share it with your family, friends and followers!

If you wish to follow my journey outside of my writing, you can find me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MunnaPrawin) Instagram(MunnaPrawin) and Twitter(@munnaprawin1).

 

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