Helping Others Makes Employees Happy

 

Each company—large or small—has its vision, mission, and goals. Employees, from upper management to part-time interns, are a part of a team because of their goal-oriented mindsets, valuable skillsets, and appreciation for the philosophies and objectives of the organization. It’s this collection of individual talents that leads to goals being set, met, and exceeded. 

But even company achievements, continually accomplished by a stellar team, may not be enough to keep a unit engaged and enthused all the time. Acknowledging, celebrating, and crediting successes to a team goes beyond the professional perspective; the human element of raising intrinsic feelings of pride, joy, and worth among team members is where the bigger picture of giving back becomes vital. 

Studies show that feelings of positivity and worth increase when people are being of service in the communities where they work and live. As Ghandi wrote, “The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in service of others.” 

Make it personal 

It is one thing for a CFO or president to cut a check to a charitable cause, but the value of organizing participation by each team member to be of service has much longer lasting, positive psychological effects for everyone involved. It is that connection to the community that can help make tight-knit teams even stronger. 

To elevate the personal psyche of a team, there are a few avenues of giving back that a company can incorporate into its business rhythm. From a simple marketing perspective, it is logical to choose a cause that is linked to the organization’s mission and core values. Sure, helping many charities would be ideal, but organizing charitable involvement is time-consuming, so choosing the best fit makes the most sense logistically. 

Take the initiative and have your work group sponsor a unique event for a selected charitable cause. By taking ownership and creating a specific event, such as a 5K walk/run, car wash, or “Eat the Street” event, you’re showing employees and the community that organizational goals and involvement go beyond profit margins and revenue gains. The website Better Fundraising Ideas has an extensive a list of ideas.  Many can occur at times when they aren’t competing with other major events in your community. 

Another way to assist employees in giving back is to designate “giving days” when employees can individually or as small groups take a paid workday to give their time to a charitable organization of their choice. You might also want to pitch this idea to your executive staff as an enterprise-wide initiative. 

Get started 

You have the tools and talent right in front of you, so let employees set up a task force and have drive the project, choosing how they would like to be involved. Some may enjoy an organizational role, coordinating with city officials, chamber of commerce, charity directors and relevant vendors. Others may simply want to participate at the event itself. Throughout the process, besides seeing happy employees, you may find new talents from your staff you never knew existed. 

During initial discussions with staff members get them excited; let them know how important an event like this is for all those involved. Perhaps bring a member of the charity to a staff meeting so they can explain the charity and how their cause specifically benefits those in need. 

Some team members will get excited immediately, while others may see an event like this only as extra work. Through leadership and delivery, provide those employees who need that extra push a jumpstart. When all is said and done, their sense of happiness will exist long after being of service for a charitable cause. 

Bottom line 

The reasoning behind supporting a charity event should be for the charity and their cause—that comes first and foremost. A possible bonus throughout the process is the networking that will take place that probably would not have occurred otherwise. Working with other businesses, vendors, and the charities themselves may open business opportunities down the road. 

Company parties, rewards, and bonuses have their place—there’s no question. But the feelings received from giving back, that’s a truly human experience, creating in employees a happy intrinsic feeling that could carry them further and be more rewarding than a company pat on the back. Giving back has the capacity to heighten morale and daily outlook for each of your valuable team members. 

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How to Use Curated Content for Content Marketing

rosemary published this at 6:34 am

Content is at the center of everything digital. It is what people look for when searching for something on the web and it is what makes them share, like, subscribe, comment, follow, buy or donate.

But creating valuable content can often be quite challenging, and when you are not quite ready for this challenge, curated content comes to your rescue.

Content curation basically involves sifting through relevant information on the internet and sharing the best of what you can find on your social profiles. However, curating content manually takes a lot of time and effort. To make things easier, you can use tools like DrumUp, Scoop.it and List.ly and overcome this hurdle. Using high quality, curated content projects you as an expert and an authority in your field. It gives you the reputation of being a reliable source of information, which will act as your social capital.

To save time and money
Original content can be expensive and takes a lot of effort and time to create. Content curation is a way in which you can make sure that you have quality content when you’re strapped for money or time.To become the trusted source of information
Prudent use of quality curated content will turn you into an authoritative source on the web. Sharing high quality content can make you the preferred source that others refer to for advice, tips and suggestions.To create round-ups for better engagement
Your audience could easily miss some content you share because information moves quickly on the web. Doing a round up of the best stories of the week on a specific topic can help them stay up to date. They will be grateful to find all the noteworthy advice and news that interests them in one post. To reach out to a wider audience
Using different content formats such as audio,video, presentations, and infographics on different social media platforms will add variety to the content you share and will help keep it interesting.Social media
In a survey of 400 marketing professionals, 76% of the respondents said that they share curated content on social media. When using curated content on Twitter, try expressing an opinion or asking a question. But you’ll have to keep it short since you only get 140 characters. Facebook and LinkedIn on the other hand give you a little more scope for long-form content. You could write a summary, add a commentary or ask a question to begin a conversation. Newsletters
Use newsletters when you need multiple pieces of fresh curated content all put together in one place. Remember that newsletters should include the latest in industry trends and data from the previous week, fortnight or month. Along with curated content, a good newsletter will include a note from the editor, original articles, calls-to-action and information on how to contact you.E-mails
Though email has often been prematurely declared dead and irrelevant, there are marketing tactics that live on. Curated content can be used in email marketing. You can charm your subscribers with interesting and quality curated content sent straight to their inboxes. Share links to your blogs and social network profiles in the mail. You will only earn more loyal subscribers.

There are three main challenges you face while creating original content – paucity of time, inability to create sufficient amount of content and inability to create engaging content. Curated content can help you overcome all these challenges effectively.

Are you curating yet?

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Get The Best Out Of People Through Leadership Development

Studies show that in organization, a strong sense of leadership is a must for its operations to run smoothly. It is for this reason that many companies now offer leadership development to potential leaders in various business organizations and also for people who would want to discover the inner leaders in them.

Leadership development pertains to activities that help a person enhance his or her leadership skills. This can either be through formal seminars or in other means such as a team building activity or a retreat. No matter what type of leadership development is preferred—the formal or the laidback setting—experts say that there is one surefire way to get the best our of people. This is by helping them discover the power of self motivation.

A different leadership development approach

Leadership is effective when an organization runs orderly and its people are working in a harmonious setting. This type of leadership, say experts, can be achieved only if the leader is motivated towards one common goal to success.

Studies show that leadership development that incorporates the concept of self-motivation is far more effective because it helps the person look forward to better things in life. These days, there are less effective leaders because many of them have lost their innate means of motivating themselves. When motivation to accomplish a certain goal has diminished, it would be easier for a leader or a potential leader to just give up and live a remorseful life filled with negative things.

Today, more and more people who conduct leadership development try to incorporate motivating the participants because this is one of the keys in helping people get rid of negative emotions. When people are cleared from negative vibes, they will be able to think more clearly and would be able to see things in a positive way.

Helping individuals discover the inner leaders in them

One of the factors that hinder people to lead better is their personal issues and problems. If you are conducting leadership development, it would be best to address the problems of potential leaders and help them motivate themselves.

You can tell them to slow down and set their own pace. Although it is sometimes healthy to be competitive in terms of achieving goals, there would always be times when people will get tired of running after so many things because they don’t want other people to finish before they do. More often than not, people who compare themselves with others are the ones who are left behind without anything because they spend too much time thinking how they could outlast the other person, thus, neglecting his or her own priorities.

To help that person motivate him or herself to be a better leader during leadership development, it would be best that they understand the importance of self-motivation so they won’t feel too much pressure. Tell them that this is beneficial for them because they can rest whenever they want to since nobody is breathing down their necks to finish something.

Why Management Training Is a Waste of Money

You have a problem. You know that your management team isn’t as effective as it could be, and you know that this problem comes down to a lack of skills or ineffective mindsets. So the solution is, of course, to find a management training professional to come in for a one- or two-day overhaul that will transform your managers into leadership rock stars. 

Right? Not exactly. 

Some $60-$80 Billion in the United States alone is spent annually toward leadership training. Yet only 20 percent to 30 percent of skills learned during this training actually results in on-the-job changes. 

So if 4 out of 5 dollars spent on management training are wasted, why do we keep spending the money? Because our need for making our managers better leaders far outweighs the ineffectiveness of the training. 

Is management training destined to fail, or are there adjustments that can be made to beat the averages and create a management program that is more effective? To answer this question, let’s look at why management training is failing in the first place. 

No Focus on What Happens Before Training

When training occurs, participants are typically shuffled into a classroom with less than a basic idea of what to expect. Maybe they know that they’re going in to learn “how to delegate more effectively,” or “how to better influence others,” but research says that’s not enough.

According to a study by University of Phoenix, 26 percent of learning effectiveness is actually dependent on what happens before training even takes place. This period of time is also known as the “pre-event.” The purpose of focusing on what happens before training is to provide participants with an effective mindset before entering the actual training curriculum. 

Little to No Follow-Up 

We’re seeing more and more evidence that what happens after training is most influential on whether or not training sticks. For instance, according to a recent ATD study, 70 percent of training failures occur because the real-world application environment is not conducive to fostering retention and follow-through. 

Without having accountability and regular refreshers on goals and priorities, the training curriculum will be quickly forgotten. 

Management training is a waste of money. The exceptions have less to do with content (actually, most content in management training courses is generally quite similar), and more to do with what happens before and after training. 

At Leadership Choice, we’ve dedicated our programs to overcoming the “how” and “why” of ineffective management training courses. In doing so, we have perfected a training platform that is 3x more effective than traditional leadership learning programs. Through some mindful changes to a traditional training system, we’ve been able to accomplish an average 85 percent retention and application rate.

We payi attention before training even starts. Our pre-event typically begins with a collaboration between a participant, their senior manager, and one of our leadership coaches. During this conversation, we are able to focus on a participants’ specific goals and needs. This gives the participant a preliminary mindset of what to focus on during training (instead of simply trying to be a “catch-all” for every bit of information) in order to more specifically fill their personal skill-gaps.

We prepare each participant to learn more effectively. Every participant in our program takes part in a communication workshop that helps them better understand their personal communication and learning patterns, as well as the communication patterns of those around them. Because management is such a people-oriented position, understanding how oneself and others communicate amplifies the success of the changes a manager will learn to make during their training program.

No participant flies alone. Our training models usually consist of four to five learning modules, each of which is directly followed by a one-on-one conversation with a personal leadership coach. This conversation personalizes the curriculum for each participant, allowing the participant along with their personal leadership coach to develop application plans and goals in order to make retention and application easier.

 No goal is forgotten. While many participants in traditional management training programs may leave their training session with a list of goals and priorities, this list is typically forgotten within a matter of days. To mitigate forgotten applications, our personal leadership coaches meet with each participant’s supervisor post-training. 

More importantly, Leadership Choice empowers the supervisors with the tools, knowledge, and follow-up to foster an environment in which the participant can successfully apply new behaviors.

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What’s the Primary Driver of Innovation?

Innovation is the creation and implementation of something new and different. Innovation is a fresh approach to solving a problem and application of the solution. Innovation is both thinking and doing. Innovation is follow-through, the commercialization of a good idea. 

Innovation is vital because it’s the only way you can reliably achieve profitable growth. And profitable growth is the chief objective of every CEO. You’ve got to have profit—that goes without saying. But profit is not enough. You also need growth. In a dynamic competitive landscape, the company that’s not growing is on its way to irrelevance. 

There are really only two ways to grow. 

You can grab a bigger slice of the pie by stealing business from the competition. It’s fun, if you can do it. But it’s not easy. You can grow the pie. Innovation in products and services may do both. Innovative products and services can grow the market. They can grow the pie. And innovative products and services can also snare your competitor’s customers and enlarge your piece of the pie. 

In addition, process innovation can grow your profitability, because it means you’re running your business more effectively. 

Less time. Less scrap. Less friction. Less cash consumed. More cash remaining. More to the bottom line. That’s wealth. 

It’s the job of the CEO to create wealth. It’s the job of the CEO to drive innovation. Your CEO cares deeply about innovation, and so should you. 

What Really Drives Innovation? 

There are lots of books and articles written about innovation, and I’ve read many of them. Few seem to capture the primary lesson that that’s revealed by innovation research: expertise, more than any other factor, determines your ability to innovate. 

This doesn’t seem like much of an insight, but it must not be that obvious because so many books on innovation gloss over or completely ignore the role of expertise. Instead, they focus on getting the right culture, recruiting diverse teams, implementing gate reviews and process metrics, taking risk, and celebrating failure. A lot of what’s written about innovation, in my estimation, misses the mark. 

Look, there’s no such thing as the perfect culture to drive innovation. Even if there was a perfect innovation culture, it wouldn’t guarantee innovation. The power of team diversity is over-rated. In fact, diversity may work against you. And go ahead, use gate reviews, take risks, celebrate failure, and do a great job measuring everything. Good luck. It doesn’t mean you’ll innovate. 

But if you do nothing other than assemble a handful of engaged experts—I’m talking about true experts—you’ve at least got a shot at innovation. 

Above All, Innovation Requires Expertise 

We can all cite accidental discoveries that have launched groundbreaking innovations. But if we’re serious about innovation, we can’t wait for accidents. We have to be intentional about it, and that means we need experts. 

Experts have the ability to see anomalies that others don’t. They see similarities others miss. They see connections that are invisible to non-experts. They see patterns. Those patterns and connections are the basis of innovation. Innovation comes from the connections experts see between patterns. 

The first step to becoming intentional about innovation is to understand experts and the nature of expertise. 

Experts are passionate about their discipline. They are more than highly interested. They are more than hobbyists. Experts are focused, obsessive, and single-minded in a way that’s nearly incomprehensible to the non-expert. They are driven to study, think, experiment, and to develop their own unique point of view that is the result of their own work. Ownership is important to them. They cultivate their passion and fiercely guard their expertise because they’ve invested so much in it. They own it. In fact, that largely explains why they are so passionate. Their passion builds as their expertise builds. 
  Experts have a vast amount of experience. The passion of experts leads them to spend more quality time working in their discipline. The 10,000-hour rule was identified in research years ago and popularized more recently by Malcolm Gladwell. The point is that, although there are ways to accelerate and enhance the value of experience, there is really no way to get around the sizable investment in time required to develop expertise. A true expert in any recognized discipline—chess player, diesel mechanic, or physician—has paid their dues.
  The nature of an expert’s experience is different. It’s not just that experts have more experience, there’s a qualitative difference in their experience. They practice differently. It’s more focused, more intentional, more mindful. It leads the expert musician player to play the same four bars of difficult music over and over and over again until it’s more than perfect, until it’s natural. As martial artist Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
  An expert’s motives are different. They are achievement-oriented, but the way they define achievement is different from others. More than anything else, they are motivated by being an expert. They love to have answers that others don’t. They love to be in demand for what they know. That’s not to say that experts don’t have other motivators. They may value autonomy, money, power, security, or affiliation, for instance. But above all, they long to breathe the rare air that only true experts breathe when they reach the pinnacle of their profession.

Of course, expertise is not the only driver of innovation. Innovation requires teamwork, and creating the right team environment for experts is essential. Innovators need resources, and are best served by an organizational culture that is informal, promotes a high degree of approachability between all players, and fosters constructive dissent.

We’ll explore these topics in future posts. In the next article, we’ll delve deeper into the careers of experts and explore how they are best developed and engaged by the organization.

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Authentic Loyalty Requires Commitment, Not Just Compliance

Leaders often mistake compliance for commitment. Team members’ engagement in workplace could be misconstrued as commitment. Status quo performance and adhering to policies and procedures, set forth by regulations within industry, are symptoms of compliance.  In order to know the difference between a committed and a compliant team member, leaders and managers should heed simple principles in order to keep the team on track and ensure a “buy-in” attitude.

Micro-managing is a common mistake of leaders in a compliant-polluted environment. This damaging fault of leadership is one that cannot be changed easily or quickly. Acting as the grand overseer causes a state of paranoia for leadership and the team; the incessant need to watch your back and the emotionless overexcitement in an attempt to gain trust can result in an overall hostile work environment breeding compliance over commitment. Work is accomplished, but your team members are never really performing for the greater good and overall goal.

Cultivating a committed team in the workforce should have the majority. Leaders consider commitment as a weakness due to general lack of follow through and commitment on their behalf. However, engineering a committed team can be accomplished in three empowering ideals:

Strong vision. Team members have an emotional connection to the workplace as the majority of their daily lives are spent at work. One cannot assume that performance means commitment. Team members who lack belief in your vision will take the path of least resistance by ensuring work is completed but punch the clock as soon as the task is complete. Committed team members will go above and beyond, they will put their heart into their work. Involvement. Every good organization requires a variety of perspectives in the decision making process. Often the vision is similar for leaders and managers which can result in a tunnel vision and inability to mitigate variables in workflow. This is where feedback from team members is vital. Their democratic role in providing a valuable perspective to how they engage in a workflow or process can provide differing ideas and values when making decisions. Compiling their feedback and sharing to the audience at large keeps the team members engaged, ensures they feel valued by asking their view points and keeps the organization and team moving in the right direction. Recognition. Want to know the biggest secret to employee commitment? Endless thanks. Leadership and managers thank their team members for the greatest goals achieved, hurdles met, and when challenges are overcome. This can leave them feeling as if their daily contributions go largely unnoticed. Gaining commitment requires recognition on a regular basis, even if daily. A simple “thank you” at the end of the day thanking team members for their daily contribution shows your commitment to their commitment and daily dedication.

Gaining commitment from team members boils down to individual respect and helping them entrust to their own success. When team members feel empowered the quality of their work will show the difference between compliance and commitment. Additionally, committed team members will be compliant in the policies and procedures of the organization.

The two roles will begin to homogenize and meld into a cyclical nirvana of a heartfelt buy-in with the vision. Employees will begin to evolve by providing unsolicited, quality feedback to be utilized for the greater good, as opposed to the paranoid, back-biting fear that is generated by constant micromanaging and overseeing. Gratitude becomes the attitude as team members, managers and leadership nurture and develops each other personally and professionally.

An overall feeling of trust and security is experienced by the team members when they feel appreciated for their efforts, their feedback is considered in the decision making process and when they can see how they all merge into the shared vision. Maintaining this mode of operation is key for any organization and their leaders in order to operate at top potential for success.

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Leadership Development: Making Sure It Works

Most companies nowadays have a leadership development program in place. This is because it's been a proven way to get an internal pool of talent for running a company. This is a lot cheaper than going outside of the company to headhunt a professional manager. The problem is that like all types of educational programs, leadership development isn't an automatic solution.

There need to be several factors in play for it to work the way it's supposed to. It is important to note that participation in a leadership development program means you're earmarked for a promotion – this is why some people want to be able to get the most out of such programs. If you're one of those people, here's a few hints on what you should be focused on:

1) Be open-minded – One of the hallmarks of being a good student of a leadership development program is being open-minded. Leaders are flexible individuals – they are able to accept most situations and turn it into their advantage. There's an emphasis on this during training and hopefully you manage to absorb it into your work ethic. Being open-minded means more than being able to accept changes in your work environment – this also means that you should be open to the chance that you ar mistaken. Negative feedback helps you improve and make you more efficient as a leader.

2) Be a planner - Another thing that leadership training emphasizes is planning. Good planning will almost always assure you of a positive for any situation that you are in. You will not believe how difficult it is to plan sometimes. This is because most people prefer to take things as they come. This is mostly because most of the time we have a laid-back culture. Leadership training does the opposite. It will encourage you to plan – you're not an employee anymore, which means you have to worry about more than yourself. Goal and problem identification, brainstorming solutions and implementation will be focused on in this part of the program.

3) Being pro-active – Leadership isn't just about spouting orders left and right. Leadership is about being an active part of the process. This is what is called “leading from the front”. Haven't you had that energizing feeling when your boss pulled up his sleeves and got down and dirty? Inspirational leadership goes hand-in-hand with active leadership. Don't be passive and sit behind the desk all day; admittedly it's a part of your job but going into the trenches and getting active feedback from your subordinates and gauging the morale of the group is also part of that. Learn to connect with people in a way that establishes a rapport, making you easily approachable. Also, familiarizing yourself with what your people are working with is a great way to win over your team.

Leadership development isn't exactly a snap but it can be condensed into these three things. Try to work on them and you'll be well on your way to the title of the “Boss of the Year”.