Many managers regard inefficient, unproductive or boring meetings as an unavoidable business flaw.Acknowledge that meetings can cause a lot of frustration, and assess your meetings to seek improvements.Rather than getting rid of meetings, solve your problems with them by applying science.Critically evaluate your meeting facilitation skills: Are they as good as you think they are?Carefully craft meeting agendas. Make participants “directly responsible” owners of their agenda items.

Meetings Are Inevitable Even If We Don't Like Them

<ul><li>Holding a meeting for 48 minutes will catch your colleagues’ attention.</li><li>Invite fewer participants to reduce “social loafing”; encourage input before and after from “secondary stakeholders.”</li><li>Walking and standing meetings add variety to your meeting culture and ensure that people “don’t get too comfortable in that chair.”</li><li>“Deflate negative energy from the start” and create technology-free meeting zones.</li><li>Encourage silence to bring out every team member’s input.</li><li>Pay special attention to audio-only telephone conferences.</li></ul>

Scientific Meetings: Key Takeaways

Everyone needs to meet for team discussions, inter-department alignment and group decision-making. But everyone needs to meet effectively. Meetings can cause frustration, especially when they waste time and energy due to a bad meeting culture.Bad meetings should never be accepted as an organizational norm.

Seek To Improve Meetings

While you’re stuck with your colleagues in a meeting, you all could be spending time doing real work. When your company manages meetings effectively, meetings add to productivity and organizational cohesion. And when it doesn’t, they add to the cost. In 2014, meetings cost the United States economy about $1.4 trillion – roughly 8% of the nation’s GDP that year.

The Opportunity Costs Of A Meeting

Employees have no lack of cynicism when it comes to meetings. Yet getting rid of all meetings is not feasible. Without meetings, you would lose contact with your colleagues, disconnect from other departments and become single-minded about difficult problems. Rather than eliminating meetings, improve them.

Don't Reject Meetings, Just Be Smart

Rather than overestimating your skills, accept that you might have room for improvement, and strategically seek out opportunities to improve. You can, for example, gain input by asking meeting participants for feedback. If you feel that approaching them in person would bias the results, consider sending around a short, anonymous survey. Collecting data and being open to that information will increase your awareness of issues, which is the first step to improvement.

Evaluate Your Meeting Facilitating Skills

Look for the following signals when assessing your meeting effectiveness:<ul><li>Are participants on their phones or other devices, attempting to multitask?</li><li>Are a few participants talking all the time, while others aren’t speaking at all?</li><li>Are you, as the leader, dominating the meeting?</li></ul>

Meeting Effectiveness: The Signals

What differentiates successful meeting leaders from unsuccessful ones is the willingness to pick the right tool for the job at hand.

Adopt a “servant leadership” mindset and buy into an idea by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton, that you should be a “giver” who actively assists others and disseminates knowledge without expecting anything in return. Companies with strong servant leadership and giving cultures perform better across all business indicators.

Servant Leadership

Collect meeting feedback through different instruments, including your annual employee engagement survey. You could also make meetings part of any 360-degree feedback instrument that applies to leaders in your company.

Get Meeting Feedback

A meeting will fill in the time you allot it. When you schedule a meeting for 60 minutes, it will most likely take 60 minutes. Your tasks as a meeting leader include making a conscious choice about the meeting length. Consider your objectives, agenda items and the number of participants to determine the best length for a meeting. Once you have an accurate estimate, reduce that estimate by 5% to 10% to add the extra time pressure that makes meetings more effective. Going forward, hold meetings that last 25 minutes instead of 30 minutes, or 50 minutes instead of 60.

Make The Meeting An Odd Number OF Minutes

Research shows that merely having an agenda doesn’t yield more effective meetings. Instead, be intentional in the process of creating a meeting agenda, including customizing it to meet team needs and approaching team members to ask them to add their agenda items in advance. The rule of thumb is to prepare for an internal meeting as carefully as you would prepare for an external client meeting.

Craft The Meeting Agendas

Place important discussion items near the top of your agenda. The same holds true for items that participants have generated. Even if you convene the meeting, you don’t have to own every item. Increase accountability by assigning agenda items to participant-owners up front. Present the most salient and demanding items early.  These topics usually will require a more intensive exchange and alignment time. It’s most functional if you kick them off no later than 10% to 15% into the meeting time.

Prioritizing The Discussion Points

Research shows that seven participants per meeting hits the sweet spot. With more participants, decision-making effectiveness decreases by roughly 10% per additional participant above seven. Reasons for this decrease include logistics, coordination and social issues.How do you keep the number of participants low, while not offending colleagues by not inviting them? To strike this balance, revisit your meeting goals and determine who among your potential participants is absolutely indispensable to achieving those goals.

Invite Fewer Participants 

Change the seating arrangement – Actively ask participants to sit in a different seat, change the table set-up or switch to another venue.Conduct a “walking meeting” – Take the meeting agenda and your participants outdoors or on a circular walk through your building.Hold your meeting standing – Participants in “standing meetings” gain health benefits and appreciate the efficiency of this shorter meeting format (15 to 20 minutes maximum).

Don't Let People Get Too Comfortable

Meetings enlivened with humour and laughter lead to more supportive team members, more constructive group dynamics and higher team performance. Negative comments lead to “mood contagion” that lowers performance. Paying attention to the emotions in your meetings is part of successful meeting leadership.Greet participants, offer refreshments or snacks, and play an upbeat song as they enter the room. Discourage multitasking. Some companies also create “technology-free zones,” banning personal laptops, phones and smart devices from meetings.

Avoid The Negative: Mood Travel Quickly

“Brainwriting” – Ask meeting participants to be silent and jot down their ideas before sharing them with others. Your objective is to generate unique ideas and avoid “groupthink.”“Silent reading” – Assign 10 to 30 minutes of silent reading for a new proposal and conceptual piece rather than having a person present the idea. This ensures participants evaluate a proposal on its merits and not on the eloquence of the presenter.

Idea Generating Technique

Because audio-only meetings are tricky to lead, pay special attention to your format. The absence of social controls tempts participants to perform other tasks or embrace distractions while on the call – reducing meeting efficiency immensely. To counteract those shortcomings, ban the mute button at audio-only meetings and increase engagement by actively addressing participants by their names.

Audio Conference Calls

A how-to guide those that lead or participate in meetings

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

productivity

Productivity

communication

Communication

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How to Run an Effective Meeting

Many managers regard inefficient, unproductive or boring meetings as an unavoidable business flaw. The author challenges this assumption with ideas on how to stop wasting time and energy by facilitating better meetings.

Preface -- Setting the meeting stage -- So many meetings and so much frustration -- Get rid of meetings? no, solve meetings through science -- Evidence-based strategies for leaders -- The image in the mirror is likely wrong -- Meet for 48 minutes -- Agendas are a hollow crutch -- The bigger, the badder -- Don't get too comfortable in that chair -- Deflate negative energy from the start -- No more talking! -- The folly of the remote call-in meeting -- Putting it all together -- Epilogue: trying to get ahead of the science' using science -- Tool: meeting quality self-assessment -- Tool: sample engagement survey and 360 feedback questions on meetings -- Tool: good meeting facilitation checklist -- Tool: huddle implementation checklist -- Tool: agenda template -- Tool: guide to taking good meeting minutes/notes -- Tool: expectations assessment -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Index

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

business

Business

A recent estimate suggests that employees endure a staggering 55 million meetings a day in the United States. This tremendous time investment yields only modest returns. No organization made up of human beings is immune from the all-too-common meeting gripes: those that fail to engage, those that inadvertently encourage participants to tune out, and those that blatantly disregard participants' time. Most companies and leaders view poor meetings as an inevitable cost of doing business. But managers can take heart: researchers now have a clear understanding of the key drivers that make meetings successful. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, researcher and consultant to some of the world's most successful companies, draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews with over 5,000 employees across a range of industries to share the proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings. For those who lead and participate in meetings, Rogelberg provides immediate direction, guidance, and relief, offering a how-to guide to change your working life starting today.

Steven G. Rogelberg

The Surprising Science of Meetings

Thought leadership is the delivery of authentic and genuine content that leverages the expertise, insight, and experience of the author, with the goal of sharing that wisdom with others.Thought leadership - when done right - can be an excellent way to reinforce your brand and enhance your content marketing strategy, allowing you to leverage your expertise and build trust with your audience.

Defining Thought Leadership

<ul><li>Define your goals and audience</li><li>Review existing thought leadership in your niche</li><li>Explore the various communication channels in your industry</li></ul>Incorporating thought leadership into your wider content strategy can help you to:<ul><li>Establish the credibility and authority of your brand.</li><li>Generate backlinks, shares, and mentions.</li><li>Attract clients directly.</li></ul>

Core Steps to Developing a Thought Leadership Strategy

Thought leadership is about taking expertise, experience, and tools, and sharing actionable insights.

Identify what exactly you want to achieve.To do this, consult your existing marketing goals, and consider how thought leadership can help you achieve each one — if indeed it can. For example, if your goal is to raise awareness of your brand (and the solutions it’s offering), then a thought leadership piece about, say, accessibility issues facing consumers in your industry can help you get people’s attention.

How to Build a Thought Leadership Strategy: Define Your Goals

Clearly define who your <a href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/complete-guide-to-customer-analysis/">audience</a> is. These people would be aligned with <a href="https://www.semrush.com/persona/?utm_source=ThoughtLeadershipBlog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=q4_blog_orgcampaigns">your buyer persona(s)</a>, although you should also consider who might benefit the most from hearing what you have to say.Your audience doesn’t necessarily equal your buyers. Your thought leadership strategy might go beyond reaching folks who can purchase from you.

Defining Your Audience

Do the research and see what thought leadership already exists in your niche.Explore the various communication channels in your industry, such as:<ul><li>Online forums and communities</li><li>News resources (online and offline)</li><li>Trade publications and journals (online and offline)</li><li>Personal brand platforms, such as LinkedIn and Medium</li><li>Company blogs</li><li>Social media</li><li>Webinars and seminars</li><li>Conferences</li></ul>Then, start building up your knowledge of what the key existing thought leadership trends and ideas are.

Review Existing Thought Leadership

It’s a good idea to build out a roster of thought leaders. Think about the key experts working in your company. Here are some aspects to look at:Alignment with your brand and its values. If your thought leaders are not firm believers in what your brand is all about, and are not aligned with your story and your position, then it’s unlikely to work.Knowledge and expertise in the field. Another thing that can truly move the needle is passion. Strong opinions, innovative ideas, and concepts. Note that there will always be a risk of making someone unhappy about your beliefs.

Identify Your Organization’s Focus and Its Thought Leaders

Sources of Ideas for Thought Leadership Content:<ul><li>Your/your thought leaders’ unique experience. </li><li>A strong opinion embraced in your company that goes against the industry norm.</li><li>Unique data and statistics you can access due to the nature of your business.</li><li>Industry research and insights.</li><li>Collaboration with your customers and partners. </li><li>Collaboration with existing opinion leaders and influencers in the industry.</li><li>Your personal story and background. People love stories, especially those that are personal.</li></ul>

Create Your Thought Leadership Content: Researching Your Topics 

Our study shows that articles remain the most popular thought leadership content format (91,4%), followed by video (44,1%), webinars/events (36,2%), white papers and research (33,2%), ebooks (29,9%), podcasts (21,7%) and data visuzalitions (20,7%).There are a few things to bear in mind:<ul><li>Consider how the content will be produced.</li><li>Ensure that you’re being open and genuine.</li><li>Stay flexible.</li></ul>

Producing Thought Leadership Content

Giant, well-known organizations with extensive resources tend to organically become thought leaders in their sectors. And yet, thought leadership is all about you creating value, building knowledge, and taking a stand. Small businesses and startups with strong ideas and experienced leaders have the same chances of being heard and followed.

A Small Company or a Startup Creating Successful Thought Leadership Content

Since thought leadership is all about sharing knowledge and unique opinions, there’s no reason why it can’t (and shouldn’t) work in B2C. The rules are the same: make sure you understand your customers, do some research, be genuine and deliver valuable information

Thought Leadership: From B2B To B2C

Strategies and tactics around the <a href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-distribution-guide/?utm_source=ThoughtLeadershipBlog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=q4_blog_orgcampaigns">distribution and promotion</a> of your thought leadership content — and any valuable content, for that matter — are a vital component of a thought leadership campaign. A few tactics to consider:<ul><li>Collaborate with non-competing brands in your sector to produce joint thought leadership content. </li><li>Reach out to relevant opinion leaders and influencers to get contributions (and extra promotional support) for your thought leadership content. </li><li>Try services like Help a Reporter to pitch your content to journalists.</li><li>Analyze content creators in your industry.</li></ul>

Distribute and Promote your Content

Thought leadership is about creating a conversation, so ensure that you follow through and engage directly with the communities, leaders, players, and influencers that are discussing your piece. In a larger organization, you may have brand or reputation management personnel that can handle this, but in a smaller organization, your thought leader may need to be more involved.Keep an eye on whether your thought leadership content is being discussed elsewhere too.

The Importance of Engagement

As with any tactic, it’s important to measure the performance of your thought leadership marketing. Organic traffic is the key benefit of producing thought leadership content (81,4%). Besides, a big proportion of companies also manage to boost social media following/engagement (64,9%), and almost one half generates the actual leads and sales (47,6%). Other benefits include backlinks (44,3%), email subscribers (38,9%), media and PR mentions (34,1%), and invitations to speak at events, interviews, etc. (28,4%).

Measure the Results

Thought leadership requires authenticity, deep expertise, and ideas that strive to challenge the conventional way that things are done. To communicate all of this effectively, it needs to take the form of high-quality content on topics that are relevant, and that your audience really cares about.Therefore, it’s crucial that you conduct in-depth topic research, and put out content that is engaging and unique.

The Bottom Line

You are a brand and a business by yourself.

What is thought leadership? How can you leverage it for your business? And how do you become a thought leader? Explore this ultimate 2022 guide to find out.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

What Is Thought Leadership: The 2022 Guide for Your Business

Transformational leaders are those who engage with followers to raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.
How do they achieve this? By embodying an inspiring vision in order to motivate followers to work on shared goals that transcend their self-interest.

Transformational Leadership

<ul><li>Extraversion</li><li>Low neuroticism and high levels of self-efficacy</li><li>Openness to new experience</li><li> Conscientiousness</li><li>Agreeableness and supportiveness</li></ul>

Characteristics and Traits of a transformational leader

Transformational leaders set a high standard of moral and ethical conduct to engender loyalty and respect in their followers. One might say they ‘walk the talk’ or lead by example.

Components of transformational leadership: Idealized influence

Transformational leaders stimulate the inner emotional worlds of their followers by appealing to higher ideals and values.They achieve this by tenaciously upholding an inspiring vision linked to clear goals. Rather than obfuscating the vision with jargon, they repeatedly and enthusiastically repeat it to keep it front of mind.Idealized influence and inspirational motivation are highly correlated, sometimes combined in the research to form the dimension ‘charisma.

Inspirational motivation

Transformational leaders also model concern for their team’s welfare, creating an atmosphere of trust. By <a href="https://positivepsychology.com/coaching-mentoring-counseling/">coaching and mentoring</a> with empathy, they promote growth and development while garnering meaningful insights into any problems occurring on the ground.

Individualized consideration

Transformational leadership is often juxtaposed with transactional leadership. The latter leaders “cater to their followers’ immediate self-interests” instead of uplifting the morals of their followers through inspiration Transformational leaders foster creative, innovative problem solving, as well as a culture that regularly challenges the status quo.

Intellectual stimulation

EI (Emotional Intelligence) is virtually synonymous with good leadership. There are five elements of emotional intelligence:
<ul>
<li>Self-awareness: The ability to recognize and understand one’s own emotions, as well as one’s effect on other people. </li>
<li>Self-regulation: Being able to manage one’s emotions appropriately. </li>
<li>Social awareness: Skillful interactions that build meaningful relationships. </li>
<li>Empathy: The ability to understand how others are feeling and respond with care. </li>
<li>Self-motivation: Being able to harness passion, as opposed to extrinsic incentives, to fulfill one’s inner needs.</li>
</ul>

Transformational Leadership & Emotional Intelligence

A large body of evidence shows that transformational leadership positively aligns with how well companies, the military, governmental organizations, educational institutions, and nonprofits perform.Here are five specific research findings that found a link between transformational leadership and employee/organizational effectiveness:<ul><li> Team performance</li><li> Employee job performance</li><li>Communication</li><li>Employee outcomes</li><li>Inspirational motivation</li></ul>

Effectiveness Of Transformational leadership

Transformational Leadership isn’t a blanket solution to be used in every scenario and across every setting. Some argue that some teams need a more transactional style, meaning closer supervision and greater direction. This might especially be the case when followers are unskilled and require more oversight.Transformational leadership is also more effective when applied in smaller, privately held organizations compared to larger, more complex ones

Advantages & Disadvantages of Transformational Leadership

<ul><li> Limited interest in group-level processes</li><li>Ambiguity about transformational behaviors</li><li>Ambiguity about transactional leadership</li><li>Omission of important behaviors</li><li> Insufficient specification of situational variables</li><li>Insufficient identification of negative effects</li><li>Heroic leadership stereotype</li></ul>

Criticisms of Transformational Leadership

Five key elements of optimum leadership in healthcare settings:<ul><li>Inspiring visions at every level, along with upholding a shared, holistic view of care</li><li>Clear, aligned objectives for all teams, departments, and individual staff</li><li>Supportive and enabling people management and high levels of staff engagement</li><li>Learning, innovation, and quality improvement embedded in the practice of all staff</li><li>Effective teamwork</li></ul>

Applying Transformational Leadership in Healthcare

We explore the origins of transformational leadership theory, which can cause top-down paradigm shifts in the way organizations are run.

Transformational Leadership: How to Motivate & Inspire Teams

Investors don’t seem to care so much about a company’s assets or how much money it makes in the present, they're most interested in seeing growth. But after the core business matures, growth usually plateaus. This is the time to work on new growth opportunities, but trying new things is risky. Innovation doesn’t always make growth happen fast enough for investors, even when money is thrown at the effort.

The Growth Imperative

<ul><li>New-market disruption: this is where disruptive products compete with non-consumption. They create new markets and reach people who previously weren’t consumers. As their performance improves, they run into some existing markets to disrupt. </li><li>Low-end disruption: this doesn't create new markets, it just takes over the bottoms of established markets. Traditional competitors usually don't focus on defending the low end of the market (they have the eyes on higher market levels) and they don’t recognize the disrupters as a threat until it’s too late.</li></ul>

The Two Types of Disruptive Innovation

“Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at."__

Customers "hire" products to do specific "jobs". Customers - people and companies - have "jobs" that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can "hire" to get the job done.Effectively, conveniently, inexpensively as possible.

What Products Customers Want to Buy

Marketers put a lot of emphasis on market segments, dicing up the populace and finding the percentage that will need or want the product. But if you get the process wrong, you can end up without any actual customers. To accurately segment the market, don’t focus so much on the attributes of people and things. Instead, look at the circumstances people are in when they make a purchase decision. There are many tasks that people do routinely; people are always looking for things that will do those jobs or help them do those jobs.

Understanding Your Market

Instead of asking what their company does best today, managers should ask, "What do we need to master today, and what will we need to master in the future, in order to excel on the trajectory of improvement that customers will define as important?"

Getting the Scope of the Business Right

Three classes or sets of factors that define what an organization can and can not accomplish:<ul><li>Resources: they include tangible things like people, equipment, and real estate, but things like brands, information, and reputation are also valuable resources.</li><li>Processes: they turn resources into value and include patterns of interaction, coordination, and communication, as well as the way things are developed, manufactured, and marketed.</li><li>Values: employees at all levels, even those at the bottom of the hierarchy, make decisions. Under the framework, values are standards that determine how employees prioritize these decisions.</li></ul>

The “RPV” Framework

DELIBEDeliberate RATE planning (traditional / for existing-sustaining):
<ul>
<li>make assumptions about the future</li>
<li>make a strategy based on those assumptions & build financial projections based on that strategy</li>
<li>make decisions to invest based on those financial projections</li>
<li>implement the strategy in order to achieve projected financial results</li>
</ul>
Discovery-Driven Planning: (for disruptions):
<ul>
<li>make the targeted financial projections</li>
<li>what assumptions must prove true in order for these projections to materialize?</li>
<li>implement a plan to learn - to test whether the critical assumptions are reasonable</li>
<li>invest to implement the strategy.</li>
</ul>

Deliberate Planning vs Discovery-Driven Planning

An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. A seminal work on disruption—for everyone confronting the growth paradox. For readers of the bestselling The Innovator’s Dilemma—and beyond—this definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen and Raynor give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams. Based on in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is a necessary addition to any innovation library—and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders worldwide.

creativity

Creativity

An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. A seminal work on disruption—for everyone confronting the growth paradox. For readers of the bestselling The Innovator’s Dilemma—and beyond—this definitive work will help anyone trying to transform their business right now. In The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor expand on the idea of disruption, explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves. This classic work shows just how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen and Raynor give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine. The authors identify the forces that cause managers to make bad decisions as they package and shape new ideas—and offer new frameworks to help create the right conditions, at the right time, for a disruption to succeed. This is a must-read for all senior managers and business leaders responsible for innovation and growth, as well as members of their teams. Based on in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is a necessary addition to any innovation library—and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders worldwide.

Clayton Christensen

Michael Raynor

The Innovator's Solution

The pandemic has been an extended experiment for most companies who are trying to manage people working from home.
Instead of making it mandatory to attend the office physically like before, many companies have adopted a hybrid model where one could go to the office once a week and work from home the rest of the days.
This new approach changes the purpose of coming to the office.

The Purpose Of The Office Has Changed

Office time can be utilized to do collaborative teamwork and promote interaction. Technology can be used more effectively to allow high-quality video conferencing with team members sitting in remote locations.The office itself need not be the size it was before the pandemic struck. As more co-working spaces are added, the need for an expansive office is lessened.

Collaborative And Smaller Offices

New research shows more than two-thirds of the workforce feels disconnected or alienated from their fellow colleagues.
Companies need to adapt the office to meet the growing demands and unique needs of a hybrid, always-connected workforce. New office designs would be aimed at teamwork, creativity and fostering connections.

A Hybrid Workforce

<ul><li>Google Docs, videoconferencing, and Slack have made the physical presence of workers less crucial in most activities.</li><li>The new physical office aims to be more social and facilitate specific kinds of work, like a meeting or a brainstorming session.</li><li>The more virtual work becomes, the more crucial it is to communicate face-to-face so that the virtual existence is supported.</li><li>Health is now a bigger concern, with access to nature and workout sessions a priority.</li></ul>

The New Office

teamwork

Teamwork

career

Career

How to Manage a Hybrid Team

As companies shift to hybrid, the purpose of the office has changed. Workers will start seeing different floorplans, functions and technologies.

remotework

Remote Work

What the office could look like now

Some questions are fundamental: Fiction or Nonfiction? Cat person or Dog person? And this: Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
Each of these identities has its pros and cons, but no one can say that a particular one is better. Extroverts have long been celebrated and rewarded due to their natural people skills. Introverts are, strangely enough, proven to be better CEOs, though the confident attitude of an extrovert is better suited for the image of a CEO.

Introverts Vs Extroverts

<ul>
<li>A 2013 study challenged a long-standing myth of extroverts being better in a sales environment.</li>
<li>Another study found that introverts are actually better managers.</li>
<li>People with a flexible pattern of talking and listening, along with a dose of assertiveness can persuade in the best way and close a sale.</li>
</ul>

Black Or White Or Grey

Ambiverts, part introverts and part extroverts, are enthusiastic, social, but also are good listeners and can do well without having the need to hog the limelight. 
It is a requirement for leaders and managers in this age to be a blend of extroverts and introverts, having the strengths of both, in order to work in flexible and empathetic work environments.

The Ambivert: Optimal Blend Of Introverts And Extroverts

The ongoing once-in-a-century pandemic makes ambiverts (part introverts and part extroverts) an ideal blend in the corporate world. One has to be adaptive and take on the traits of both, like listening well, or being a dynamic personality in meetings, in a measured way.
One needs to be able to initiate conversation or small talk without hesitation. One also needs to be quiet and let the others take centerstage.

Adaptive And Assertive: The Ambivert

Being both an introvert and an extrovert(as per the requirement) is about how you are able to energize yourself, refilling your mental energy tank. It can be a 15-minute break sitting alone, or a trek with a group of people, or even sitting in a buzzing cafe.
One has to balance the scale and maintain an equilibrium to be able to be an ambivert.

Energizing Yourself

Blending both extrovert and introvert personality types can make you indispensable in the office – and finding that balance is a skill we can all master.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

Why ambiverts are better leaders

People with high emotional intelligence are more likely to understand the root cause of the problem and solve it in a calm manner instead of dismissing it as a nuisance.
When we respond rather than react we take the time to pause, perceive, and pursue the action that we think best for the scenario.

Responding rather than reacting

Those who are emotionally intelligent believe that it is important to show people their true selves whenever faced with difficult situations to show people others that challenging situations should always be faced headstrong with transparency and emotional honesty instead of hiding behind a mask and taking all the responsibility by yourself and refrain from asking help when needed.

No faux personalities

This is usually a trait we need to look for from everyone, but emotionally intelligent people have a technique called the "six second pause" to gather their thoughts instead of blurting out whatever thought comes to mind.
The chemicals of emotion inside our brains and bodies last about six seconds. If we take the time to pause, even for a short while, this helps prevents a flood of chemicals to take over the rational part of your brain.

Thinking before speaking

The people we consider to be reasonable people are those we see that practice restraint over themselves and the ones do not let their emotions control them.
Self-control is a necessary emotional skill that provides long-term pay off because this skill provides a work environment that has low drama and high productivity.

The emotionally intelligent practice self-control

While it is important to look the the details we shouldn't forget that the whole picture is important as well. 
People who have higher emotional intelligence act with a high degree of self-awareness. They are able to see both sides and understand the situation of both sides.

Looking at the whole picture

They’ve come out on top and you can too.

mentalhealth

Mental Health

Brilliant Things Successful People Do Under Pressure

Constructive conflict can lead to positive growth and transformation, along with the capacity for understanding ourselves and the world around us. It is helpful to recognize the reasons why we wish to avoid conflict.
For example:
<ul>
<li>I want to be liked by everyone.</li>
<li>It's better not to rock the boat.</li>
<li>I might strain the relationship.</li>
<li>I don't know what to say or do.</li>
<li>I would feel too awkward.</li>
</ul>

Transform Conflict Into A Growth Opportunity

Conflict in leadership and life is unavoidable. Instead of seeing conflict as something to be avoided, see it as an opportunity to achieve greater levels of fulfilment.
<ul>
<li>Take the time to really listen before you jump into the conversation. </li>
<li>Pause before you speak. Instead of reacting instinctively, take a deep breath to realign yourself before responding.</li>
<li>Press your internal "reset" button. Pause, take stock, breathe deeply, then determine the "right" next move.</li>
<li>Change the way you view your world. Use your emotions as a gauge to help you understand when your needs are met, and when they are not.</li>
<li>Clearly define your intentions. Being able to articulate your intentions effectually increase your chances of achieving what you want.</li>
<li>Be mindful of body language. Over 90% of our communication with others is nonverbal.</li>
</ul>

Strategies For Successful Courageous Conversation

"Issues that aren’t talked out get acted out in snide remarks and innuendoes, higher absenteeism and turnover, and lower productivity and engagement. When you are discussing something sensitive, what is left unsaid is often what the conversation really needs to be about."

Transforming unproductive conflict into a courageous conversation produces powerful results in leadership and life. Here are some smart tips to guide you.

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Authentic leaders have courageous conversations.

<ul><li>Use analytic techniques that don’t require high accuracy.</li><li>Prepare for multiple outcomes</li><li>Find and rely on the predictable elements of the situation</li><li>Focus your evaluation of initiatives on the inputs (the quality of the process that went into its planning and execution) not just the outputs </li><li>Remain agile, and strive to respond quickly. </li><li>You have to prepare for failure, success, and everything in between. But as long as others find you trustable, you’ll never be on your own</li></ul>

Strategies for dealing with uncertainty in business

A few years ago, my son graduated college and asked me to back him financially so he could launch a business.What business? I asked.New type of tanning salon, said he.So, you got a business plan?

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6 Strategies For Dealing With Uncertainty In Business

Blame and biases — such as hindsight bias — give us a convenient story about what happened in any negative situation. To the extent that a story feels comfortable, we believe that it's true but when we get to that convenient point we stop learning.Skipping the learning process alleviates the discomfort of dealing with complex systems, but it costs in the long-term because you ignore the context of the incident and don’t address areas of fragility.

Don’t Trade Context For Convenience

The security incident at Symantec. The Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal. The market rigging allegations at Citigroup. In each of these cases, employees were singled out as the root causes for an organization's failures. Yet given the operational scale, complexity and clip of these companies, is it viable - or beneficial - to put the onus on specific individuals?

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Michelle A.