Over the past two years, innovation and digitisation have been happening at a record-breaking pace. As a result, companies accelerated the digitisation of customers, supply chain, and internal operations by an average of three years. Most people collaborate remotely, leveraging technology in different ways.

Accelerating innovation

It’s likely that flexible work and workplaces are here to stay. More than half of corporate and government employees say they would like to work from home at least three days per week, and the number is higher for innovation talent. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, organizations seeking to innovate are doubling down on the benefits that new approaches to innovation present.

Widening the pool of innovation

Innovators recognise that increased diversity and greater inclusion results in better innovation. A McKinsey study found that more ethnically and racially diverse companies outperform their less-diverse peers by 36 percent. As a result, innovators are using virtual work to attract more specialised and diverse talent and are building more inclusive workforces.

Diversity and inclusion

Virtual teams, especially when managed effectively, can avoid unnecessary distractions, experience more effective and uninterrupted workflow, and achieve productivity gains. A 2021 study showed that:<ul><li>83 percent of employees working remotely agreed that working from home enabled them to work more productively.</li><li>The average office was shown at 64 percent.</li><li>Outstanding workplaces were at 78 percent.</li></ul>

Productivity

<ul><li>Many organizations can get physically closer to their customers as hiring is no longer connected to geographic location.</li><li>Proximity to the customer, instead of a physical office, can help organizations’ innovation talent avoid the corporate echo chamber and identify and test new ideas faster.</li><li>Workers can get closer to target communities.</li><li>A lack of physical proximity can fuel innovation. Although it may surprise some, boldly innovating through remote collaboration has been a fixture in the scientific community for decades.</li></ul>

Customer-centricity

Stashed ideas

How virtual work is accelerating innovation

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), making your résumé stand out has become a technical art form. The technology uses keyword searches in résumés to help filter candidates.  Companies use this technology, called an applicant tracking system (ATS), to save time and weed out candidates that aren’t a good fit for their job description. Knowing how to use keywords can help make your résumé stand out.

Applicant tracking system (ATS)

Recruiters and hiring managers have to sort through hundreds of résumés. Instead of reading through each résumé, they insert keywords into the ATS so it can filter out those who won't be a good fit. Keywords can be skills, credentials, or prerequisites that the job requires.  Once the résumés are filtered, a recruiter or hiring manager then pays attention to the candidate’s qualifications, skills, work experience, and career progression.

What AI and a recruiter are looking for

Write your résumé first. Then, for each job application, update the words on your résumé to incorporate the keywords that match the job description. Candidates can find keywords in three places:<ol><li>Within the job listing, especially in the “qualifications” and “responsibilities” sections.</li><li>On employees’ LinkedIn profiles: Notice how employees in a similar position at that company talk about their skills and responsibilities.</li><li>On the company’s website: see how they talk on their about page to see how you can speak to them in their words.</li></ol>

How to find keywords to use in your résumé

<ul><li>Job-related skills: hard skills, soft skills, core qualifications</li><li>Action verbs: accomplishments and leadership expectations</li><li>Education requirements: college degrees, high school diplomas, industry certifications</li><li>Relevant experience: job titles that the employer is seeking</li></ul> Most ATS do not understand synonyms, abbreviations, plurals, or similar skills. Ensure to pay attention to how the company use the tense and format of the skills, nouns, verbs, and job titles listed. For example, your résumé may say “managed projects” but the ATS is looking for a “project manager.”

Types of keywords

ATS can’t read through shading, doesn’t understand images, and most recognize certain fonts better than others. Many also read your résumé hierarchically. Use or create a template for your résumé that the ATS can read: <ul><li>Fonts that ATS can read: Arial, Tahoma, Impact, Georgia, Courier, Lucinda and Trebuchet.</li><li>Put your contact information at the top, not the bottom.</li><li>Include contact, professional summary (2-3 sentences), skills, work experience, and education.</li></ul>

How to create an ATS-friendly résumé template

In some industries, include additional sections to show your skills or certifications. <ul><li>Split your technical skills and soft skills into two sections</li><li>Training and certifications</li><li>Honours and awards</li><li>Languages you speak</li><li>Proficiency levels for skills or languages</li><li>Organizations</li><li>Interests</li><li>Social media or portfolio links</li></ul> Ensure to spell your keywords correctly.<ul><li>Add job-related skills keywords in the "skills" section</li><li>Relevant experience keywords in the "work experience".</li><li>Action verbs belong in the "work experience."</li><li>Educational requirements should be included in the "education" section. </li></ul>

Additional sections for an ATS-friendly résumé

Once the ATS has scanned your résumé, the recruiter needs to be able to read it easily. <ul><li>The recruiter will be looking for ATS keywords as well.</li><li>Your keywords should fit in an easily readable way.</li><li>Keep your résumé to one page.</li><li>Hiring managers also want to see that you’ve developed throughout your career and willing to advance your skills and knowledge.</li></ul>

How to incorporate keywords for recruiters

Use this guide to learn how to use résumé keywords effectively so hiring managers and AI technology take notice of your application.

A Guide to Using Résumé Keywords in Your Job Search

Successfully leading a company into the future is no longer relying on command-and-control leadership. Instead, the emphasis is on distributed leadership - giving people autonomy to innovate and working in flexible teams so that companies can respond to technology and external risks. Top leaders are flipping their hierarchy. Their job is not to have all the answers but to help people contribute the best of their expertise, knowledge, skills, and ideas.

The future of work requires nimble leadership

Research judged the success and challenges of two firms based on four key capabilities. <ul><li>Relating: Seeing the environment through others’ perspectives</li><li>Sensemaking: Creating and updating maps of a complex environment to engage more effectively in it.</li><li>Visioning: Aligning the leader's vision with the organisation's goal.</li><li>Inventing: Creating new structures or processes.</li></ul> The company that enacted distributed leadership fared better than the one with a command-and-control leadership model.

Distributed leadership fare better

<ul><li>Let those at lower levels who have vetted and tested ideas participate in leading the change process.</li><li>Give people a say in matching themselves with roles.</li><li>Have an honest conversation with potential team members about their capacity to implement and commit.</li><li>Senior leaders still facilitate and enable entrepreneurial activity.</li><li>The change will require some combination of command-and-control and cultivate-and-coordinate styles.</li></ul>

Moving to a distributed leadership model

Managing the future of work requires a nimble mindset focusing on small, short-term wins, and a ‘cultivate and coordinate’ approach to leadership.

There's been a stigma around career breaks for too long, despite the reasons to pursue one, such as starting a family, focusing on health and wellbeing, and pursuing passions. However, career breaks are really important parts of your career journey and what makes you unique. Still, it can be intimidating to publicly share your career break story while trying to return to the workforce.

Stigma around career breaks

Tackle the job search with transparency and honesty. You can now add a career beak to the Experience section of your LinkedIn Profile, with the option to show the type of break you took like caregiving, career transition, health and well-being, and more. Share your new experiences and skills gained. Ensure to look for ways to connect them to roles you're interested in so that you stand out to recruiters.

Highlight your career break on your LinkedIn profile

Proactively bring up your career break during the interview.  Focus on how your time away has developed you, the valuable skills you've learned, or how you discovered a new passion.  Connect the dots between what you did during your career break and what you can bring to a particular role as a result. For example, you helped your child with homeschooling and realised you had a passion for teaching or community volunteering.

Share your experience and learning in job interviews

62% of people have taken a career break at some point. So, don't be afraid to reach out to your professional community for help and advice. In your LinkedIn Profile, turn on the Open-to Work feature. It will increase your likelihood of getting a recruiter message. Ask for advice with a post on LinkedIn. Sharing your story can also inspire others to do the same and bring attention to this topic.

Network and connect with others who can help

LinkedIn’s Camilla Han-He says jumping back from time away from work is more than possible. It’s a reality for many who are ready to move forward.


3 ways to highlight a ‘career break’ to land your next job

When companies overuse the word “family,” the results are rarely positive. Indeed, Pushing for family levels of commitment can actually do damage to company culture and morale.Calling your company a family may be a well-meaning metaphor, but it’s not useful. Most employees don’t want to be part of another family. Instead, they want to be part of a team that is bonded by a common purpose and built on trust and respect. They want to know their contributions are valuable even after they leave. They don’t want leaders who overcommit and take advantage of their loyalty.

A company is not a family

Many of the organizations that emphasize being a family end up taking actions that blur the lines between work and life for their employees. This was seen much more often before the pandemic when companies touted free food, dry cleaning, happy hours, and all sorts of amenities designed to make life as easy as possible — as long as people never left work.

Work-life boundaries get blurred

When companies or team leaders overemphasize the family metaphor, the next step is asking for a family-level commitment from employees. And this creates a lot of opportunities for leaders to take advantage of employees. One project after another gets taken on, without considering existing workloads and making it difficult for employees to say no.

Committed employees can be taken advantage of 

If employees decide they don’t like blurry boundaries around work and life or around ethics and choose to move on — that can create a whole new issue. In organizations that overemphasize family, it becomes easy for leaders to label to departures as a form of betrayal.

Departing employees get labeled as betrayers 

The intention behind labeling a company as a family might have been positive — organizations and leaders desire a strong culture made up of employees who are bonded to each other and who push each other to new levels of performance.But what’s wrong with just calling that a team? Strong teams deliver exactly that. And whether you’re in a company that’s abusing the family metaphor or not, here are a few actions you can take to build a stronger team.

What’s wrong with being a team instead of a family?

One of the reasons for companies choosing the family metaphor was a poor attempt to bond together people, teams and organizations. But just saying you’re a family doesn’t build bonds.Instead, research suggests that one of the most potent ways to bond a team is by pointing to their so-called “superordinate” goals — goals that are so big they require collaboration.

Redefine your purpose

In a modern economy, work is never done. The only way to ensure that people stay productive in a way that’s sustainable is to make sure every employee enjoys downtime as well. More and more companies are experimenting with ways to reinforce boundaries such as forbidding email after-hours, moving to four-day workweeks or even paying people to take their vacation time.

Encourage boundaries

No matter how committed a company’s employees are, most of them will eventually move on. New opportunities present themselves, life changes happen, and so do plenty of other reasons for employees to look elsewhere. In the face of this inevitability, treating departures like betrayals doesn’t make sense.Instead, departures ought to be celebrated. Employees who leave on good terms ought to be seen as alumni who represent the organization even in their new endeavors. Departing employees are also a powerful new source of referrals for new hires.

Celebrate departures

When companies overuse the word "family," the results are rarely positive. Here's how it can lead to dysfunction -- and how leaders transform their dysfunctional work families back into thriving work teams, from organizational psychologist David Burkus PhD.

Why a company is not a family — and how companies can bond with their employees instead

The abrupt change in our personal lives or at work can leave us feeling anxious. To smooth the transition, people need the right preparation and guidance.  Change management gives employees the tools and resources to adapt to change better and feel comfortable in the process.

Change management

Change management involves guiding an organisation from a current state to a different future state. However, the current state is often not well understood, whether app usage, workflows, or employee behaviour. Some managers may be tempted to assume employees behave in a certain way based on the documented process teams should follow. Then a change roadmap is built on the faulty assumptions and is bound to cause problems. Effective change managers plan how employees do their work. They know what's actually happening.

Be wary of "going with your gut"

Many companies may introduce new tools too quickly or add too many into the mix at once. This could lead to duplicative apps and licenses and cause tech costs to become out of control. IT shouldn't be afraid to audit the company's existing app usage and retire apps that do not create value. <ul><li>What was the problem the app was designed to solve? </li><li>Is it still an issue for the company? </li><li>Are there more comprehensive apps the company currently pays for that can serve the purpose?</li></ul>

Don't be afraid to retire apps

Change management is essential during mergers and acquisitions. If employees feel overwhelmed by the pace of change or puzzled by the integration of systems, they may leave. Change managers should be deliberate about planning integrations and base their strategy on the same fundamentals:<ul><li>Looking into the data</li><li>Not assuming work happens in a particular way</li><li>Design change around how employees actually behave.</li></ul>

Retain your best talent during M&A

Here are three ways change managers can empower companies and their employees to thrive in today's work environment.

How to optimize change management in the digital workplace - Pendo Blog

First Break All the Rules asserts that the status quo is counter productive, and encourages management to adopt innovative approaches to employee engagement. 
 There are four keys for unlocking potential in your employees: select for talents, suggest outcomes rather than direct control of process, focus on employees strengths and work around weaknesses, and finally find the right fit for your employees.

Breaking The Status Quo

<ul>
<li>Do I know what is expected of me at work?</li>
<li>Do I have the equipment I need to do my work right?</li>
<li>Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?</li>
<li>Have I received recognition for good work?</li>
<li>Does anyone care about me as a person?</li>
<li>Does anyone encourage my development?</li>
<li>Do my opinions matter?</li>
<li>Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my work is important?</li>
<li>Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?</li>
<li>Do I have a best friend at work?</li>
<li>Have I talked to someone about my progress recently?</li>
<li>Have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?</li>
</ul>

Workplace Strength: The 12 Questions

As a manager, it is your responsibility that your employees reply with an emphatic “yes” to the 12 questions. Positive responses to these questions were strongly correlated to profitability, productivity, employee retention, and customer satisfaction. 
If you can generate positive responses to these questions then you have the ability to attract and retain quality employees. The importance of influential perks, pay, or a charismatic CEO was not established in the author’s research.

A Yes To All 12 Questions

Normally we associate talent with celebrated excellence. Great managers disagree with this definition of talent. It is too narrow and too specialized. 
Instead they define talent as a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior than can be productively applied. The emphasis here is on the word recurring. Your talents, they say, are the behaviors you find yourself doing often

Identifying and Understanding Talent

Great managers know that every role in a workplace requires talent because there are recurring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Managers that are able to select for these patters will have more harmonious results on their team. 
One of the biggest mistakes managers make is selecting for other factors like experience or intelligence, and ignore required talents (for example, empathy is a required trait for nurses).

Empathy And EQ Over Experience

<ul><li>Striving talents explain the ‘why’ of a person: what motivates them, do they want to stand out, and is ‘good enough,’ good enough for them?</li><li>Thinking talents explain the ‘how’ of a person: how they think, their decision making processes, are they focused, disciplined, strategic or non-linear in thinking?</li><li>Relating talents the ‘who’ of a person: who do they trust, who they build relationships with, do they avoid confrontation or have a desire to win people over? Do they love or hate surprises?</li></ul>

The Three Types Of Talent

We all possess talents within the contexts of these categories. It is important to recognize that talents can’t be taught, they can only be cultivated and encouraged within the work roles assigned to that person. Skills, on the other hand, can be taught (i.e. typing speed, surgical techniques, software etc.). This does not mean entirely that people can’t change over time, but as managers, we need to be aware of underlying talents and work with them rather than against them.

The Intangible Talents That Cannot Be Taught

High performing managers understand that trying to achieve direct control of employees is futile and that trying to change people’s natural talents will not work. The solution is both simple and elegant: define a required outcome and then let the employee find their own way forward, through a path of least resistance.The most efficient way to turn someone’s talents into performance is to help him find his own path of least resistance towards the desired outcome.

Helping And Empowering

<ul><li>Create “perfect people”  by imposing a “best way” attitude and that you have the right answers. This is disempowering, demeaning and prevents self-exploration and learning.</li><li>Believe that employees don’t have enough talent, which can be true, but not if your hiring criteria is critically based on talents rather than selecting for other strengths.</li><li>Believe that “trust is precious it must be earned.” Great managers must reject the concept of earning trust.</li><li>Believe that “some outcomes defy definition” such as abstracts like employee satisfaction and customer feedback.</li></ul>

The Four Temptations That Hinder Growth

<ul><li>Select people. Differentiate between talent, skills and knowledge</li><li>Set accurate performance expectations</li><li>Motivate (recognition and care)</li><li>Develop the employee </li></ul>Managers look inward, leaders look outward.

What Great Managers Do

<ul><li>Select for talent (not simply for the experience, intelligence, determination)</li><li>Define the right outcomes (not the right steps)</li><li>Focus on strengths (not on weaknesses)</li><li>Find the right fit </li></ul>

The Four Keys

Employees must follow certain required steps for all aspects of their role that deal with accuracy and safetyEmployees must follow steps when they are part of a company or industry standardRequired steps are useful only if they do not obscure the desired outcome.

Defining The Right Outcome: The Rules

<ul><li>Talent interview should stand alone</li><li>Ask open-ended questions and keep quiet</li><li>Listen for specifics and top of minds</li></ul>Clues to talent:<ol><li>Rapid learning: which roles have you been able to learn quickly? What comes easy now?</li><li>What do you find fulfilling?</li></ol>Know what to listen for. Know what the top answer is (e.g. top salespeople hate to be doubted, top teachers love it)

Interview For Finding Talent

Develop a performance management routine to keep focused on the progress of each person's performance.Routines are:Simple.<ul><li>Frequent (not all criticism at once; recent examples; results and problems fresh in memory).</li><li>Focused on the future.</li></ul>Ask the employee to keep track of his own performance and learnings in a private document.

Managing Performance

<ul><li>What did you enjoy most about your previous work experience? </li><li>What brought you here? what keeps you here?</li><li>What do you think your strengths are? Your weaknesses?</li><li>What about your goals for your current role?</li><li>Do you have any personal goals or commitments you would like to tell me about?</li><li>What is the best praise you have ever received? what made it so good?</li><li>Have you had any really productive partnerships or mentors? why do you think these relationships worked so well for you?</li></ul>

Basic Routine Questions

<ul><li>How would you describe success in your current role? can you measure it?</li><li>What do you actually do that makes you as good as you are? what does this tell you about your skills, knowledge and talents?</li><li>Which part of your current role do you enjoy the most?</li><li>Which part of your current role are you struggling with? what does this tell...? what can we do to manage around this? (training? positioning? support system? partnering?)</li></ul>

Career Check Discovery Questions

This book is a result of an exhaustive study undertaken by the Gallup organization involving 80,000 managers across a large number of industries exploring the concepts of employee satisfaction, selecting and maintaining good employees, and means of measuring employee satisfaction. The approach was revolutionary when published (1999) and has become a business classic because it challenged the status quo.

Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently. With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level. The greatest managers in the world seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, and race. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. They consistently disregard the golden rule. And, yes, they even play favorites. This amazing book explains why. Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers across a wide variety of situations. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small entrepreneurial companies. Whatever their situations, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were invariably those who excelled at turning each employee’s talent into performance. In today’s tight labor markets, companies compete to find and keep the best employees, using pay, benefits, promotions, and training. But these well-intentioned efforts often miss the mark. The front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. No matter how generous its pay or how renowned its training, the company that lacks great front-line managers will suffer. The authors explain how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience; how they set expectations for him or her — they define the right outcomes rather than the right steps; how they motivate people — they build on each person’s unique strengths rather than trying to fix his weaknesses; and, finally, how great managers develop people — they find the right fit for each person, not the next rung on the ladder. And perhaps most important, this research — which initially generated thousands of different survey questions on the subject of employee opinion — finally produced the twelve simple questions that work to distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. This book is the first to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, and the rate of turnover. There are vital performance and career lessons here for managers at every level, and, best of all, the book shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

First, Break All the Rules

Employees who feel connected and have a sense of belonging are more productive and committed to their companies. Leaders should use everything at their disposal, including new technologies, to foster their company culture.
Encourage your managers to do the same. Taking the necessary precautions, host monthly in-person, all-company gatherings for employees to reconnect, as well as special events like team luncheons, wellness discussions, happy hours, or even a yoga health retreat

Fostering Connectedness

The pandemic put corporate communications functions to the test and leaders learned firsthand how being authentic and vulnerable builds trust. Leaders who continue to be transparent with their feelings, both positive and negative, will build stronger connections and loyalty. When people see you being authentic, asking for feedback, or acknowledging difficulties, it shows them it’s ok to do the same, and creates a place where people feel they can voice their opinions and be their true selves.

Authenticity

Employees who<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave"> find purpose</a> in their work are more engaged and productive. As many workers reevaluate their priorities during the pandemic, they’re bound to consider how a company’s purpose and values align with their own. Help employees see the connection between the work they do and the organization’s greater purpose. Reinforce the important role they play. If they crave a new challenge, work with them to identify new career development opportunities. Explore pro-bono or low-bono projects with nonprofit partners.

Promote A Sense Of Purpose

It’s common sense to show employees your appreciation, but it might not be felt as deeply in the hybrid workplace. A lack of positive feedback or appreciation can cause workers to feel ineffective or stuck in their jobs. Besides giving feedback and praise during regular interactions, ramp up more formal recognition opportunities. Consider highlighting great work and how employees have lived your corporate values during weekly, monthly or quarterly communication and meetings. Show appreciation in unique ways that also foster connection.

Show Appreciation

Every New Year’s resolution list should include a focus on mental health. We’ve all been through a lot and workers now rely on employers to help them cope. If you’re not already, offer mental health support in your benefits package. This could include access to online resources, providing a wellness-related allowance that supports employees’ external endeavors, or expert guided gatherings or safe spaces where employees can talk, process issues, and learn from each other.

Prioritize Mental Health

In times of uncertainty, it’s easy to stay the course and play it safe. However, people have been wading through the global pandemic for almost two years and are ready to move beyond uncertainty. Experienced leaders know that transparency, a clear vision, ambitious goals, and employee appreciation energize workers. It’s time to be bold and make moves that inspire transformational ideas that help us emerge out of the pandemic.

Think Bold

Employees want to move beyond the uncertainty of the past two years of the pandemic—but keep the flexibility that remote and in-person work allows.


A 6-point plan to hypermotivate your hybrid teams in 2022

People all over the world struggle with feedback. In any feedback exchange between giver and receiver, it's the receiver who decides what they're going to let in and whether and how they will choose to change. However, if we could get better at this, it would make a huge difference. Research shows that people who go out and solicit negative feedback, have higher work satisfaction, adapt quicker in new roles and get higher performance reviews.

It's hard to receive feedback

Getting a better handle on feedback changes you and how other people perceive you.
Think about a suggestion or advice you've received in your life that you've rejected. There could be hundreds of reasons why you didn't take it. Maybe it was wrong or bad advice, or perhaps you were not aware that you cared about their opinion. The problem is that you will always find something wrong with your feedback. 90% of it might be wrong, but 10% may be just what you need.

Receiving feedback is a skill

<ul>
<li>Truth triggers. Is the feedback correct? However, we all have blind spots. It's tricky to figure out what the givers are trying to tell you.</li>
<li>Relationship triggers. All feedback lives in the relationship between giver and receiver. We often have a bigger reaction to who's giving us advice than to what they're saying. We can conquer this trigger by separating the who from the what.</li>
<li>Identity triggers have to do with your emotional reaction and what it says about who you are.</li>
</ul>

Three kinds of triggered reactions

Psychologists estimate that 50 percent of our reactions are based on genetic wiring, 40 percent on the story you tell yourself, and 10 percent on the actual circumstances.<ul><li>The story you tell yourself about the feedback you get has a huge impact on how you feel about it.</li><li>High achievers. When we let ourselves down, the judgments and feedback we have for ourselves can be the hardest to deal with. </li></ul>

Overreacting to feedback

Some people are very sensitive to feedback, while others are the opposite. Both have their own challenges with feedback.The sensitive personOne piece of feedback can suddenly become everything. It becomes super-sized. You may look at all your past mistakes, and it seems like you have never done anything right.The undersensitive person<ul><li>You often don't realise people are trying to give you feedback. They may say, "Bill is doing this," and you think "good for Bill."</li><li>You may acknowledge feedback, but then it doesn't stick.</li><li>People may say you're aloof or overbearing, and you dismiss it outright.</li></ul>

The sensitive and undersensitive person

<ul>
<li>Identity. Ask your friends or colleagues, "what is the one thing I'm doing or failing to do that you think is getting in the way?</li>
<li>What is the one thing I could change about how I run our weekly meeting that would be an improvement?</li>
<li>What is the one thing that would make a difference to you in our friendship?</li>
</ul>

How to encourage feedback

We have two core human needs. <ul><li>We want to learn and grow </li><li>We also have a need to be accepted and respected and loved the way we are now. Feedback suggests that how we are now is not ok.</li></ul> However, sometimes, the most painful things in our lives are some of the most important things we've learned in life. To get the most out of feedback, we have to learn to manage the pain to enrich our relationships and to get learning faster.

Learn to manage pain to receive feedback

This talk offers excellent insights into why nobody likes feedback, why feedback is good, and how to get the best out of feedback.

Most efforts to improve individual and organizational learning focus on teaching people how to give feedback. After years of consulting with organizations around the world on how to manage their most challenging conversations, Heen and her colleagues realized they may have been thinking about the problem the wrong way. She explains why, if you want to improve learning in your organization, the smart money is on figuring out how to receive feedback—even off-base or poorly delivered feedback—and use it to fuel growth.  With plenty of examples and a natural charm, Heen delivers a talk that will change the way you think about feedback. Most of us have a love-hate relationship with feedback, but Heen thinks we can learn to embrace it for the valuable tool it is. If we handle it right, we can use it to enhance our performance and strengthen our most important relationships. A founder of Triad Consulting Group and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, Heen has spent the last 20 years with the Harvard Negotiation Project, developing negotiation theory and practice. Her work takes her throughout the world, helping people and organizations work through their most difficult conversations.  A New York Times bestselling author of two books, she specializes in particularly difficult negotiations – where emotions run high and relationships become strained. An expert often sought out by the media, Sheila is schooled in negotiation daily by her three children. Learn more about Sheila Heen at http://bit.ly/1IQ0azH. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

How to use others' feedback to learn and grow | Sheila Heen | TEDxAmoskeagMillyardWomen

It’s a lot easier to preach accountability than to practice it. Accountability is, if not a magic solution to everything, certainly a solution to many things. Business books are full of examples of companies that hit serious difficulties because people refused to take the steps to accountability. People don’t see what they don’t want to see and miss the cues in the early stages, leading to million dollar fiascos later on.

The Oz Principle: The Premise

To discern when you or your organization are slipping below the line between achievement and a dead-end, ask yourself: <ul><li>Do you feel that you have little or no control over your circumstances?</li><li>Do you listen when people tell you that you are not doing all you could be doing?</li><li>Do you blame other people? Are you defensive?</li><li>When discussing the problem, do you talk more about why you can’t do something instead of finding solutions?</li><li>Do you avoid situations that require you to report on your responsibilities?</li></ul>

A Self-Diagnosis

<ul><li>Companies ignore or deny the problem.</li><li>They dodge responsibility.</li><li>They blame others.</li><li>They wait for some higher power to provide orders.</li><li>They focus on protecting themselves and ‘cover their tail’.</li><li>They adopt the wait and watch approach and see if the problem will go away on its own.</li></ul>

The Six-Stage Victim Cycle

At many organizations, “accountability” really means “blame.” People only hear about accountability when something sinks, blows up or crashes. When everything is great, no one asks who’s accountable for the success. It is a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results. Accountability includes success, not just failure.All too often people view unhappy circumstances as accidents of chance; yet when they find themselves in more pleasant circumstances, they automatically take credit for a job well done.

Being Accountable

People who are imbued with a spirit of accountability will: <ul><li>Ask for constructive criticism and candid feedback.</li><li>Demand the truth even when it hurts and face facts, no matter how scary or nasty.</li><li>Don’t waste time or energy on things you cannot control or influence.</li><li>Commit yourself 100% to what you are doing, and if your commitment begins to wane, strive to rekindle it.</li><li>Take full ownership of their work and its results.</li><li>Enjoy responsibility for what happens.</li><li>Always ask yourself, “What else can I do?”</li></ul>

The Spirit Of True Accountability

When people lack courage – think of the timid lion in The Wizard of Oz – they don’t fail to see problems; they deliberately refuse to see problems out of fear. What they can’t see, they can’t solve. Therefore, in their cowardly minds, they are not responsible or accountable. Now, think how laughable their evasions and excuses really are. Instead, do as the cowardly lion did: Get some courage.

The First Step: See The Problem

People in an organization who see a problem and take responsibility for fixing it are golden. People who reject accountability do nothing. If you have ever seen yourself as the victim of a terrible injustice, reflect on that experience and ask yourself: <ul><li>What did you know to be true and that you simply closed your eyes to?</li><li>If you were in the same circumstances again, what would you change?</li><li>What warnings were flashing?</li><li>What did the experience teach you that you could have used but did not?</li><li>Why were you responsible? What did you commit or omit?</li></ul>

The Second Step: Own The Problem

How do you know a problem when you see it? The most dangerous unresolved problems organizations face are: Poor communication, people development, empowerment, misalignment, entitlement, work and personal life imbalance, poor performance, senior management development, and cross-functional strife. Exercise your leadership, wisdom and prudence to distinguish what needs to be done from what does not. Wasting time on unnecessary action takes away time that you need to spend acting effectively.

The Third Step: Solve The Problem

<ul><li>“Stay engaged” – Be awake and focus on the possible.</li><li>“Persist” – Hang in there stubbornly until you have it right.</li><li>“Think differently” – Look for strange and shockingly different points of view.</li><li>“Create new linkages” – Build new and unfamiliar relationships.</li><li>“Take initiative” – Go first; don’t wait for someone else.</li><li>“Stay conscious” – Get involved and stay involved.</li></ul>

Our Solve-It Skillsets

Leaders must apply these principles to themselves and to their organizations. Intervention, itself, is risky. Leaving the team to figure things out for itself is important, but it can also be a way of shirking leadership responsibility. Try to fulfill this checklist of leadership characteristics:<ul><li>Act accountably, the way you want your staff members to act.</li><li>Tolerate occasional “below the line” statements. Recognize that your team members sometimes have to deal with frustration. </li><li>Know a dodge when you see it and an evasion when you hear it.</li><li>Make people accountable in order to empower them.</li></ul>

The Final Step: Do It

Getting Results Through Individual And Organizational Accountability

The definitive book on workplace accountability by the New York Times bestselling authors of How Did That Happen? Since it was originally published in 1994, The Oz Principle has sold nearly 600,000 copies and become the worldwide bible on accountability. Through its practical and invaluable advice, thousands of companies have learned just how vital personal and organizational accountability is for a company to achieve and maintain its best results. At the core of the authors' message is the idea that when people take personal ownership of their organization's goals and accept responsibility for their own performance, they become more invested and work at a higher level to ensure not only their own success, but everyone's. Now more than ever, The Oz Principle is vital to anyone charged with obtaining results. It is a must have, must read, and must apply classic business book.

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