#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Running a business is an inherently emotional experience. Even the most stoic leaders are bound to find themselves becoming invested not only in outcomes, but in people and processes as well.

While emotional leadership is often regarded as a liability, lack of personal investment can also bring about negative outcomes.

I’ve learned that the best leaders are those who can recognize emotionally-charged situations, rise above the passions of the movement, and maintain a level head. Good leaders are quick to listen and slow to anger.

Are you getting enough sleep? Before you answer, try this: Sometime during your workday, sit down (at your desk is fine) and close your eyes. For the next few minutes, just focus on your breathing, paying attention to each inhale and exhale. This is a standard mindfulness exercise. If you find yourself getting drowsy, then sorry, but you’re not sleeping enough.

The contemporary business world lauds those who are seen as creative. Innovators such as Elon Musk and Jony Ive have become household names. Yet, for many of us, despite our best efforts to be recognized as creative thinkers, our suggestions in meetings are ignored and our pitches to bosses get rebuffed.

If your colleagues have already formed an opinion of you as technically competent but a little staid, it’s going to take a lot to change their minds and get them to listen — a situation that’s especially true for women, who, research suggests, are often unfairly viewed as less creative than men.

Every morning at the construction site down the street from my office, the day starts with a familiar hum. It’s the sound of the regular drone scan, when a small black quadcopter flies itself over the site in perfect lines, as if on rails. The buzz overhead is now so familiar that workers no longer look up as the aircraft does its work. It’s just part of the job, as unremarkable as the crane that shares the air above the site. In the sheer normalness of this — a flying robot turned into just another piece of construction equipment — lies the real revolution.

Great business leaders should always seek out ways to work smarter, not harder. Efficiency is incredibly important, especially when time is money. Hard work is draining and long hours keep you away from your family and social life. It's important to keep a healthy balance between your work and personal life, so it only makes sense that you would want to find better ways to get things done. Here are five tips on how to work smarter, not harder:

How should teams of experts working on knowledge-intensive projects be structured? Should they be hierarchical? Or will flexible, self-organized groups perform better? 

Teams often struggle with how to get the most value from the members’ expertise, to minimize conflict, to integrate their diverse expertise, and to leverage it during all phases of a project.

The traditional approach is to put the person with the most experience and expertise in charge — for example, a head coach or a chief programmer. The assumption is that this person has the expertise to make the best decisions about how to allocate tasks and responsibilities. Teams that adopt this model feature a rigid hierarchy, whereby final decisions are centralized through this single, formally designated individual.

We love talking about what millennials know. As a group that’s become the dominant force in the workforce, we applaud their smarts on tech, social media, and even the age-old practice of branding. Yes, millennials might arguably be one of the overall most intelligent generations to come around. However, that’s not to say they still don’t have a lot to learn, especially when it comes to face-to-face communication.

As the generation that grew up with communication becoming more efficient via digital, their biggest strength could also be a critical weakness. While the way they say things has become more direct, their messages sometimes lack. Why?

Because as one of the first to grow up in a digital world, they’ve been afforded a privilege not found in our day-to-day.

Each morning from 8:30 to 9:05 AM at our company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, we serve free breakfast to every employee. And I’m not talking about stale muffins and dry bagels. Today I ate a sloppy joe, cheesy scrambled eggs, home fries, crispy bacon, and sausage links. Healthy, I know. Tomorrow, I’m definitely going to grab a yogurt and some fruit. And don’t forget all the vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options. After all, this is California.

I know what you’re thinking. Free food is the cost of admission to the Silicon Valley tech scene. Our startup, Pivotal, calls the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood home, alongside companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Adobe, Slack, Salesforce, and Uber. So, of course, Pivotal serves free, catered meals. It’s just expected.

Maybe you want to start a business. Maybe you want to change careers. Maybe you want to get fit, or gain a new path, or in some way take your life in a new direction.

To do that, sometimes all you need is a little push, a little nudge. A little burst of motivation and inspiration.

Here are fifty of those nudges.

Pick the one that makes your skin tingle, your heart race, your motor rev, and place it somewhere you'll see it every day: your monitor, your screen saver, your background, and let it help take you to the place you've always wanted to go.

The current business environment, and the world in general, is moving faster than it ever has before. Organizations across the globe are faced with more change than most can handle – in order to compete and dominate their segment they are required to grow faster often giving them less time to focus on managing all of their financial goals. They are forced to grow quickly with fewer resource - to do more with less. Managers have to learn to excel in managing themselves, their teams and meeting organizational goals simultaneously.

It is a common understanding of a vast majority of leaders that the employees are a company’s most important asset. But in reality, that is only true when the majority of the workforce is fully engaged in their work. If not, they are either adding minimal value or actively working against the organization.

There are three types of employees in any organization:

The impact of work cultures on the bottom line is a hot business topic. More execs and HR leaders are connecting the dots on how an ecosystem of commonly held values, beliefs, and positive work behaviors drives engagement, innovation, and high performance.

Yet culture doesn't just happen. It takes visionary, servant leadership at the top creating the environment for intrinsically motivated employees to release discretionary effort.

These are selfless leaders who shine the spotlight on others instead of themselves. They have one thing in mind: How do I empower my tribe to reach their potential? You'll find that they are givers--in a personal, leadership, and organizational sense.

When we travel to a country that has a different culture than ours, many of us spend time learning ways to communicate and connect with the people there. We might look up the meanings of common terms and access maps of key attractions.

Similarly, when you first become a manager, it’s helpful to spend time up front connecting and creating a common language with your team. When your team knows how you like to work and how you plan to manage them, they’re able to produce results faster. When you know how each of your direct reports likes to work and communicate, you’re able to save time when setting direction and following up.

In a national report released today, two out of three adults surveyed said they want to spend time with people who aren’t their age, while three in four wish there were more opportunities to get to know different age groups. Why, then, aren’t there more intergenerational programs and initiatives?

You call a meeting--everyone groans and trudges to the conference room, already absorbed in their smart phones. Wouldn't a creative and engaging meeting be a nice change? Will that happen?

Probably not--poor communication runs rampant in meetings. But a talented communicator can fix all of the pitfalls of the typical meeting.

A Harvard Business Review study "found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a team's success." And what better way to communicate than using the tools of the best communicators around: TED speakers?

Bring the energy and effectiveness of TED into your company's discussions. Leave the useless and dreaded meeting structure behind. Captivate your employees and have them invested in what you're discussing.

Who isn't tired of obsessing over their body and their food? The struggle to break free from yo-yo dieting and self-sabotage is real, and yes I know it sounds a little like an infomercial, but it's actually Sheila Vier's ethos.

After successfully exiting her first company in 2015, she decided it was time to develop a company - SheilaViers.com - to help people recognize that entrepreneurs are still human and that they have all the same issues and insecurities that are human nature.

But part of being the best CEO you can be is feeling powerful in your own skin. That's what Sheila Viers helps her clients capture. I have always tried to empower women through my agency's work, and to do that you have to address issues of health, wealth, relationships with ourselves and others, and even spirituality. It has to be a well-rounded approach to achieve stasis.

Here are Sheila's best practices to manage the tightrope walk of life as an entrepreneur.

Let's call this call this curator friend Cynthia. Cynthia wrote back, “Two other curators worked with me on this (and may join us!), so I can’t take full credit.” She asked that I instead reference her with the significantly less exciting descriptor, “one of the curators of this exhibition." She was understandably hesitant to get all the credit and wanted to make clear that there were other people involved with the exhibition. While accurate, the new version was far less descriptive and complimentary than what I’d suggested.

Feel familiar? The balancing act women navigate surrounding self promotion can be exhausting.

Can you imagine working for someone in a high-level leadership role, perhaps a CEO, and suddenly it dawns on you: This person isn't leadership caliber.

Your next thought may be, How in the world did he (or she) make it this far up the ladder?

It's a fair question. People are promoted into leadership roles every day who have no business belonging there.

Sometimes it's political; other times it's the easier choice--promote from within and avoid the high cost of recruitment--but a bad choice, nonetheless.

The biggest challenge leaders face is performing to the set standards of the best in the business. This means raising the bar really high--as the ten hugely successful CEOs I wrote about recently have done.

In the end, you'll find the leadership journey is predicated on two things that drive success: Results and relationships. You can't have results at the expense of people. And serving your tribe well without getting results is merely putting lipstick on a pig.