Connection

Most of us can name all the things we don’t like about ourselves.
And we’ve probably also gotten feedback on “areas for improvement” (which usually feels a lot like outright criticism).
The result?
We work on overcoming our weaknesses instead of playing to our strengths.
What would happen if we reversed that pattern?
And acknowledged our strength by asking ourselves the following:
What are you a natural at? What comes easily to you that others struggle with? Find and leverage that ability.
What does reflection tell you? Spend time in reflection, then make a list of the five things you consistently get great feedback on.
What makes you feel good? Unlike working on what we need to improve, which drains our energy, working from strength makes us happy. Think about the things you do that make you happy.
What should you focus on? You can reach your highest potential by focusing on what you do best. Don’t spend all your time working on what you are not; build on what you already are.
Why play to your strengths? Our strengths are gifts that were meant to be used—and when they are, you will find your greatest happiness. When you can play to your strength you can be more focused and more engaged. You’ll feel good because you’re growing and developing, and you’ll find higher levels of innovation and creativity.
So lets try instead of focusing too much on our weakness, instead lets learn to maximize our strength and forge forward with great confidence.
Great leaders know they can accomplish more by concentrating on their strengths—rather than always correcting their weakness.

Careers rarely follow a smooth, linear trajectory. If you’re experiencing a stalled or faltering career — and most of us do at some point or another — take a good look in the mirror. Are you guilty of exhibiting any of these common behaviors? These ten career-killing pitfalls can mean the difference between an upward ride and a downward spiral at work. If you recognize your own behaviors here, make it your mission to change them — before you have to. In time, you’re likely to see your career move from a stall to a soar.

• Misfiring on performance or values — Overcommitting and under-delivering.
• Resistance to change — Failing to embrace new ideas.
• Being a Problem Identifier vs a Problem Solver.
• Winning over your boss but not your business peer group.
• Always worrying about your next career move versus focusing on the present.
• Running for office – it’s totally transparent to everyone but you!
• Self-importance — exhibiting a humorless, rigid attitude.
• Lacking the courage and conviction to push back on the system.
• Forgetting to develop your own succession plan for when you get promoted.
• Complacency — you’ve stopped growing.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-upenn-produces-so-many-billionaires-2014-10#ixzz3HSRaZqNL

Which came first the chicken or the egg? To be or not to be? Nature versus Nurture?

Can we finally put this age old argument to rest and come to a conclusion.

Leadership: “Exercising of influence over others on behalf of the leader's purposes, aims or goals. “

Leaders are born not made:

Great Man theory and Trait theories believe that people inherit certain qualities and traits that make them better suited to leadership.

To suggest that leaders do not enter the world with extraordinary endowment is to imply that people enter the world with equal abilities, with equal talents.” (Thomas Carlyle 1840)

There are certain inborn characteristics that predispose people to be and become leaders. There is a significant difference between “learning a skill” and mastering one, in the same way that others are born with amazing musical gifts or athletic talents. They will excel naturally in these areas but others would be like a fish out of water and may struggle to get to the same point.

Born (natural) Leaders are different to made (artificial leaders). All remarkable leaders have great history behind them. They were leaders from the onset of their journey.

If leaders were solely born what is the point of the rest of us studying leadership or management?

Birth is a natural process and the notion to associate leadership with it is arguable.

Leaders are made not born:
Behavioral Theories believe that people can become leaders through the process of teaching, learning and observation. Leadership is a set of skills that can be learned by training, perception, practice and experience over time. Leadership learning is lifetime activity. Good leaders seek out development opportunities that will help them learn new skills.

The military embraces this doctrine which is evident through its leadership training programme.

Can enrolling for a programme on management and leadership makes someone a leader upon completion? Can Charisma, Influence,Integrity and the ability Inspire be taught? Will the granting of a certificate and a few letters after one’s name make them a leader?

Soft skills can be explained, but not implanted. The ability to share your vision takes more than a sophisticated PowerPoint presentation and some crisp words on a bunch of 4x6 cards.

Leadership can be learned by anyone with the basics. But an awful lot of leadership cannot be taught. Some do well but others find themselves poorly equipped rendering mediocre results.

The Verdict:

Leadership is an art rather than a science. It is a set of innate traits, refined and perfected over time with education, training and experience.

There is also an aspect of being in the right place in the right time. You may be a leader but also a matter of whether or not you are in the position within which your talents can shine forth.

The discussion about leadership also needs to identify the location as well as the environment. Are we speaking about these major performers (born or made) in a small organization, in an industry, in a society, in a country or in the world?

If the fear of leading overrides the willingness to take on the responsibilities then one is a follower. Not everyone can be a leader just like not everyone can become a good actor. Some people will never have that aspect in them while others have the latent ability and thus can be taught how to lead. All the books, classes education and training cannot turn a follower into a leader.

To be a leader in a structured environment, one needs some formal training. Most people can learn to manage well, start a business, lead a project team since good management is based on rules - rules that can be learned and mastered.

Leadership is often a Choice. A leader is a person who comes forward to take the challenge. If a leader rises up from the multitude, then that person was already a leader to begin with. Should someone have all the best training, nurturing and opportunities, but would rather be hidden in the crowd, an unwilling participant...not a leader.

Leadership styles varies with maturity, followers and situations.

In the GLOBE research across 60 countries leader attributes conclusions were thus: “Integrity; charisma, inspirational, visionary, encouraging, positive, confidence builder, dynamic, foresight, effective team building, communicating, coordinating, decisive, intelligent, and win-win problem solver,” These attributes are a combination of personality, character, skill, communicative ability, and emotional intelligence. Therefore a leader is born, developed, skilled in communications, and cultivated through life experiences.

The best estimates offered by research is that leadership is about one-third born and two-thirds made.

It all depends on how one defines leadership. It is possible for either. Depending on how you define leadership everyone can lead and be a leader.

Perhaps we should seek to quantify leaders rather than qualify.

Remarkable Leaders would include the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, Aung San Suu Kyi…etc. Individuals that seek neither wealth nor fame, selfless, loved justice, passionate about people and worked for the greater good of others.

In studying leadership, the theories can be overwhelming. It is evident you cannot really support a side and negate the other. Although there are thousands of books, decade’s worth of well documented studies, the debate can go on forever without converging to a logical conclusion.

That’s why I would like to share a true story. Well, my story.

My Story:

From the time I was little, all the elderly villagers (who have long past) would tell my mother “This child is different”. I was always focused and driven and had a passion and desire to lead. I was not born with a golden spoon or a silver spoon or any other spoon for that matter. Things were extremely tough growing up. I am actually the only one in all my relatives to have attained undergraduate education. My mother is now taking literacy classes, and I am so proud of her.

I remember two moments quite vividly from my early childhood. The first was having a conversation with my mother when I was around 5 years and telling her I wanted to go to school. But at that time she could not afford to send me. The second was playing marbles around 7 or 8 years with a neighbour and hearing his mother whispering to him “Why are you playing with Brigette. She is so serious” I was just persistent and well competitive.

Whilst most of the people in my community accepted being a victim of circumstances and floated downstream, I instinctively paddled upstream against the prevailing currents. Was it hard? “Yes”. Was it lonely? “Yes”. Did I get depressed? “Yes”. Yet, I was compelled to keep moving forward. Thank God!

I believe there must be some deep rooted spark if not an intense fire within. Are leaders born OR made? I beg to differ and shift the gauge to read both. Leaders are both born and made.

The Pareto principle 80:20 (80% is made and 20% is born) whilst past research suggests that leadership is 30 percent genetic and 70 percent a result of lessons learned. As to how the percentage is divided between both born and made, I think it is subject to individual circumstances.

What is your experience?

Why Great Leaders Are Made, Not Born BY WILL YAKOWICZ   
Stewart Friedman, author of the book Leading the Life You Want, explains the skills you need to harness to become an effective leader.

The debate over whether great leaders are made or born has gone on for ages. Stewart Friedman, the founding director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, says he has the definitive answer. 

In his newest book, Leading the Life You Want, Friedman explores the skills you need to be a leader, how to develop them, and how to devote your life to your work without losing everything that's important to you. His research has led him to conclude that people are not born to be great leaders.

"One of the myths that I am trying to bust ... is that you are born with this capacity to be great. Not true. It is a matter of, yes, skill. There is a lot of luck. But there is also persistence, discipline, passion, and courage to pursue that which is most important to you and to the people around you," Friedman tells Jeffrey Klein, executive director of the Wharton Leadership Program, in an interview for the business school's blog Knowledge@Wharton.

Friedman profiles luminaries including Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen, and Sheryl Sandberg in his book and shows how they gradually became leaders. He shows the skills they exercised and how they integrate different parts of their lives.

Friedman says he chose subjects who possess what he calls the three principles of total leadership: "Being real, acting with authenticity, and knowing your values and vision; being whole, respecting the whole person, and knowing there are different parts of your work, community, and personal lives that affect each other; and being innovative, constantly learning, and experimenting in new ways to get things done."

When it comes down leading the life you want, Friedman says you first must "discover what is uniquely you." You need to harness your passions, interests, and skills and make them valuable for other people.

Below, check out how Michelle Obama leverages the three principles of leadership--being real, being whole, and being innovative--without letting her responsibilities control her life.

Align values and actions

The first skill our first lady displays is "her capacity to align her actions with her values," Friedman writes. Obama asks herself on a regular basis, "If what you are doing does not bring you joy every single day, what is the point?" Friedman says the question is a good exercise to figure out if you're leading the life that you want. This question is followed by action--you need to figure out what matters most to you and pivot, change your focus, or go in the other direction if necessary.

Manage life's boundaries

The second skill Obama exhibits is "managing boundaries intelligently," Friedman writes. As the first lady, she is a political leader, a wife, and a mother to two young daughters. All of these roles are in the public eye, but they're also private, personal responsibilities. To integrate her work and life successfully, Friedman says, Obama uses boundaries that keep space between different parts of her life. "Even under the white-hot scrutiny of the entire world, [she was able] to figure out, how am I going to bring the different parts of my life together in a way that works not just for me, but for my children," he says.

Friedman explains that every leader needs to practice keeping up their boundaries--some that are impermeable and others that are porous. The impermeable ones are erected during times of focus, when you say, "I can't do anything else, and this is the only thing I am going to do right now." The permeable boundaries are used in times when you need to "allow different parts of your life to come together in ways that are mutually enriching," he says.

Embrace change

Obama's third skill is how she can "embrace change courageously," Friedman says. Every leader needs to learn how to accept and adapt to changes. "This is a woman who has made some really difficult decisions to try new things that put her in a zone that was anything but comfortable, in pursuit of her core values and living them in a way that she learned from her father," he says.

A "Lightweight", the Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us, is "one of little consequence or ability". Thankfully, it’s quite uncommon for a leader or manager to be a lightweight in every aspect of their job. But none of us are perfect: all of us have blinds spots and areas where we need to raise the bar (sometimes a long way) to improve the quality and effectiveness of our work.

The first step in setting out to address these areas and becoming more relevant is to know what you don't know. So here are five common pitfalls that can keep you stuck in the lightweight division.

1. Blaming others for a lack of results
It's annoying, frustrating yet surprisingly common to hear leaders or managers complaining about and blaming external forces for their inability to deliver results. It might be the economy, the government, the weather, the competition, the time of year, the inventory, the shareholders or their boss, but it is invariably an excuse.
Assuming the role of victim or martyr is a convenient way to take the focus off your own failures, inefficiencies, lack of success and lack of strength and/or courage to step up.

The Antidote: Your internal decisions are what determine your success and effectiveness, not external forces. Better to look at one's face in the mirror than stare out a window. In reality, you can control about 80 per cent of what gets in your way and decide whether and how you will react and respond to it. So focus on the things you can control rather than the minority of factors that you aren’t able to influence.

You can control things like your attitude, work ethic, how and where you spend your time, effort and energy, and with whom you spend it. Equally, whether you approach and carry out everyday tasks honestly and responsibly is entirely up to you.

Until a leader or manager has mastered these aspects of their job (and their self) and moved out of the quicksand of martyrdom and victimhood, excuses (not reasons) will remain part of their DNA as lightweights.

2. Being reluctant to hold others accountable
Another thing you can control as a leader or manager is accountability - the key to creating the (healthy) pressure, energy or tension to perform the tasks required to sustain organizational culture and produce results.
The Antidote: One of the most fundamental tasks of any manager is having the courage and strength to set clear expectations and make sure they're stretching their employees (and themselves). Without clear expectations, holding people accountable for results is an impossible and often unpleasant experience for everyone involved.

It’s also important that there are consequences if established behavior and performance standards are not met. If there are no consequences for failing to meet defined goals and targets, you are simply perpetuating deficient behavior.

3. Making easy, popular, convenient (and wrong) decisions
Some managers would prefer to derailing their team or their entire organization rather than take difficult decisions that will prove unpopular or rock the boat. That can be a fatal weakness. If a leader or managers lacks the fortitude and the psycho/emotional strength to make hard choices, it may serve them, and others, well to consider moving out of their current position and explore opportunities that are more in sync with their skills and capacities.
The Antidote: Quality and excellence do not come as a result of making decisions because they're easy, popular or convenient. Excellence only comes about as a result of decisions being taken that are right, irrespective of whether they are costly, difficult, uncomfortable or inconvenient.

The more uncomfortable a decision feels and the more discomfort a leader or manager experiences in making a choice, the more likely and probable the potential is for actualization of growth. Spending valuable time hiding in denial or searching for ways to avoid the discomfort or pain of change is a lose-lose situation. Neither the individual nor the team or organization will experience real growth.

4. Being too self-reliant
No one is indispensable to their organization - no one! Relax, you may be good, but, you’re not that good! As General de Gaulle observed, "The graveyard is filled with indispensable men.” And I might add, "Remember the window-washer (on the high-rise building) who stepped back to admire his handiwork." Disaster.
The Antidote: The single biggest obstacle to building a healthy team or organization is ego. Few things will undermine a leader more quickly or more comprehensively. Managers with an inflated sense of their own importance often unknowingly or unconsciously perpetuate a cycle of psychopaths and sycophants. They create fear, stifle engagement, undermine morale and encourage the best and the brightest to lose interest and, worst of all, leave.

An effective leader is one who empowers others. They find ways to make their people less, not more, dependent on them. In fact, the greatest measure of a leader or manager's supervision is not how people perform while they're micro-managing their work, but how well folks perform when they're not around.

5. Keeping the wrong people for too long
Every manager will, from time to time, find themselves confronted by someone who is either so unsuited to their job or so incompetent that even if they do improve to a degree, they'll never reach the level of performance required from them.
It’s no good trying to make allowances in this situation or to try to make that employee not good, better or best, but just "not bad". Excellence can’t be achieved by mediocrity, by a group of people who are "not bad".

The Antidote: It’s a sad fact that if you continue to invest energy and resources in below-average individuals and see no real upturn in their performance, you're wasting your time. The situation isn’t just unhealthy for the manager, but it is giving the incompetent employee a false sense of security, hope and stability. You may also be robbing your high-potential people of the support and attention they need to move from already-good to ‘great’.

In these circumstances, you need to find a way to honestly, yet compassionately, cut your losses and redirect your resources to your current and potential solid performers.

Questions to Get you Started
While there are certainly more genes in the DNA of lightweight leaders, these five questions are a good starting point.
What outside conditions are you prone to blame for your organization or team's lack of results?
Whose behavior must you put into check with an effective coaching conversation (with consequences attached) to turn around poor performance? What are you waiting for to initiate this conversation? Do you need to have this conversation with yourself?
Which of your people have you made less dependent on you by broadening their latitude and discretion?
What more can you do to make people more capable while you free yourself up to spend more time on high-leverage tasks?
Do you have a "project" on your team who continues to hover at a below-average performance level with no sign of an upward trend? How much more time and money will you invest in this rescue mission? And why?
There is no crime in discovering or admitting that you’re a lightweight. The crime is the reluctance to do the work needed to move up into an altogether heavier class.

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain calm and in control.

If you follow our newsletter, you’ve read some startling research summaries that explore the havoc stress can wreak on one’s physical and mental health (such as the Yale study, which found that prolonged stress causes degeneration in the area of the brain responsible for self-control). The tricky thing about stress (and the anxiety that comes with it) is that it’s an absolutely necessary emotion. Our brains are wired such that it’s difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress. As long as the stress isn’t prolonged, it’s harmless.

Research from the University of California, Berkeley, reveals an upside to experiencing moderate levels of stress. But it also reinforces how important it is to keep stress under control. The study, led by post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby, found that the onset of stress entices the brain into growing new cells responsible for improved memory. However, this effect is only seen when stress is intermittent. As soon as the stress continues beyond a few moments into a prolonged state, it suppresses the brain’s ability to develop new cells.

“I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert,” Kirby says. For animals, intermittent stress is the bulk of what they experience, in the form of physical threats in their immediate environment. Long ago, this was also the case for humans. As the human brain evolved and increased in complexity, we’ve developed the ability to worry and perseverate on events, which creates frequent experiences of prolonged stress.

Besides increasing your risk of heart disease, depression, and obesity, stress decreases your cognitive performance. Fortunately, though, unless a lion is chasing you, the bulk of your stress is subjective and under your control. Top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ under stressful circumstances. This lowers their stress levels regardless of what’s happening in their environment, ensuring that the stress they experience is intermittent and not prolonged.

While I’ve run across numerous effective strategies that successful people employ when faced with stress, what follows are ten of the best. Some of these strategies may seem obvious, but the real challenge lies in recognizing when you need to use them and having the wherewithal to actually do so in spite of your stress.

They Appreciate What They Have

Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the “right” thing to do. It also improves your mood, because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood, energy, and physical well-being. It’s likely that lower levels of cortisol played a major role in this.

They Avoid Asking “What If?”

“What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend focusing on taking action that will calm you down and keep your stress under control. Calm people know that asking “what if? will only take them to a place they don’t want—or need—to go.

They Stay Positive

Positive thoughts help make stress intermittent by focusing your brain’s attention onto something that is completely stress-free. You have to give your wandering brain a little help by consciously selecting something positive to think about. Any positive thought will do to refocus your attention. When things are going well, and your mood is good, this is relatively easy. When things are going poorly, and your mind is flooded with negative thoughts, this can be a challenge. In these moments, think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, no matter how small. If you can't think of something from the current day, reflect on the previous day or even the previous week. Or perhaps you’re looking forward to an exciting event that you can focus your attention on. The point here is that you must have something positive that you're ready to shift your attention to when your thoughts turn negative.

They Disconnect

Given the importance of keeping stress intermittent, it’s easy to see how taking regular time off the grid can help keep your stress under control. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even—gulp!—turning off your phone gives your body a break from a constant source of stress. Studies have shown that something as simple as an email break can lower stress levels.

Technology enables constant communication and the expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email that will change your train of thought and get you thinking (read: stressing) about work can drop onto your phone at any moment. If detaching yourself from work-related communication on weekday evenings is too big a challenge, then how about the weekend? Choose blocks of time where you cut the cord and go offline. You’ll be amazed at how refreshing these breaks are and how they reduce stress by putting a mental recharge into your weekly schedule. If you’re worried about the negative repercussions of taking this step, first try doing it at times when you’re unlikely to be contacted—maybe Sunday morning. As you grow more comfortable with it, and as your coworkers begin to accept the time you spend offline, gradually expand the amount of time you spend away from technology.

They Limit Their Caffeine Intake

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyperaroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. The stress that caffeine creates is far from intermittent, as its long half-life ensures that it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body.

They Sleep

I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present. Stressful projects often make you feel as if you have no time to sleep, but taking the time to get a decent night’s sleep is often the one thing keeping you from getting things under control.

They Squash Negative Self-Talk

A big step in managing stress involves stopping negative self-talk in its tracks. The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that—thoughts, not facts. When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it's time to stop and write them down. Literally stop what you're doing and write down what you're thinking. Once you've taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity.

You can bet that your statements aren’t true any time you use words like “never,” “worst,” “ever,” etc. If your statements still look like facts once they’re on paper, take them to a friend or colleague you trust and see if he or she agrees with you. Then the truth will surely come out. When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain’s natural threat tendency inflating the perceived frequency or severity of an event. Identifying and labeling your thoughts as thoughts by separating them from the facts will help you escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive new outlook.

They Reframe Their Perspective

Stress and worry are fueled by our own skewed perception of events. It’s easy to think that unrealistic deadlines, unforgiving bosses, and out-of-control traffic are the reasons we’re so stressed all the time. You can’t control your circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. So before you spend too much time dwelling on something, take a minute to put the situation in perspective. If you aren’t sure when you need to do this, try looking for clues that your anxiety may not be proportional to the stressor. If you’re thinking in broad, sweeping statements such as “Everything is going wrong” or “Nothing will work out,” then you need to reframe the situation. A great way to correct this unproductive thought pattern is to list the specific things that actually are going wrong or not working out. Most likely you will come up with just some things—not everything—and the scope of these stressors will look much more limited than it initially appeared.

They Breathe

The easiest way to make stress intermittent lies in something that you have to do everyday anyway: breathing. The practice of being in the moment with your breathing will begin to train your brain to focus solely on the task at hand and get the stress monkey off your back. When you’re feeling stressed, take a couple of minutes to focus on your breathing. Close the door, put away all other distractions, and just sit in a chair and breathe. The goal is to spend the entire time focused only on your breathing, which will prevent your mind from wandering. Think about how it feels to breathe in and out. This sounds simple, but it’s hard to do for more than a minute or two. It’s all right if you get sidetracked by another thought; this is sure to happen at the beginning, and you just need to bring your focus back to your breathing. If staying focused on your breathing proves to be a real struggle, try counting each breath in and out until you get to 20, and then start again from 1. Don’t worry if you lose count; you can always just start over.

This task may seem too easy or even a little silly, but you’ll be surprised by how calm you feel afterward and how much easier it is to let go of distracting thoughts that otherwise seem to have lodged permanently inside your brain.

They Use Their Support System

It’s tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To be calm and productive, you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help when you need it. This means tapping into your support system when a situation is challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insight and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as talking about your worries will provide an outlet for your anxiety and stress and supply you with a new perspective on the situation. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can’t because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation. Asking for help will mitigate your stress and strengthen your relationships with those you rely upon.

One of the most successful video games in recent memory does not involve blood, gore or annihilating an army of bad guys. Now in its sixth year, Portal has garnered multiple Game of the Year, Best Game Design, and Most Innovative Game awards. Wired listed Portal as one of the top 15 most influential video games of the decade. Together with its sequel, Portal 2 – which sold over three million copies within three months of its release in April, 2011 – it has blown away the competition: traditional shooter games like Halo: Combat Evolved, Warcraft III, and Starcraft Battle Chest. But what’s particularly surprising about Portal’s success is its creator: Kim Swift, a female designer whose instincts—to create a problem-solving game dominated by female characters that can be finished in less than four hours—ran completely counter to the industry’s accepted wisdom.

Yet in many technology companies, an idea like Portal would never be developed because its creator, Kim Swift, is a woman. Research from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) finds that “in the U.S., 32 percent of Caucasian men in SET jobs see their ideas actually get rolled out to market or otherwise implemented, whereas just 23 percent of Caucasian women in SET (and 22 percent of multicultural women) enjoy similar success.”

CTI’s report, “Athena Factor 2.0: Accelerating Female Talent in Science, Engineering and Technology,” reveals that more than a quarter (28 percent) of U.S. women in technology feel stalled in their careers, according to research from CTI. A similar number (25 percent) believe “a female would never get a top position at my company, no matter how able or high-performing.” The result: U.S. women working in technology are 46 percent more likely than their male peers to leave the industry within the year.

What causes smart women to head for the exits?

Ambition-sapping antigens. Gender bias is a persistent and pernicious problem: 35 percent of U.S. women in the science, engineering and tech (SET) industries perceive bias in their performance evaluations. More than half work alongside colleagues who believe men have a genetic advantage in math and science.
Male leadership models. CTI research finds that 44 percent of U.S. women in SET feel that behaving like a man will help them advance in their careers and nearly half (46 percent) believe senior management more readily sees men as “leadership material.”
Lack of senior-level support. A dearth of effective sponsors leaves many women without someone to protect, advice and promote them.
In other words, because women don’t look, sound or act like the alpha male, or because they lack senior-level support, women’s ideas and innovations hit a chokepoint. Unable to contribute their full innovative potential, it’s not surprising that so many SET women have one foot out the door.

That’s not only bad for women; it’s bad for business.

How can employers stem the exodus of female talent, and sustain and advance their careers? One obvious solution: sponsorship. Sponsors help their protégés crack the unwritten code of executive presence, improving their chances of being perceived as leadership material. Most important, sponsors help women get their ideas heard – one of the best ways to engender respect and open opportunities to promotion.

The tech industry, with its “Titshare” app and frat-house culture, is notoriously unsupportive of women. Furthermore, CTI’s extensive research on sponsorship shows, sponsors tend to help people who remind them of themselves. Because senior tech leaders are overwhelmingly male, it’s that much harder for women to trigger that instinctive outreach.

Yet there are steps smart women can take to get the leverage they need to succeed:

Go for the leaders with “juice.” Women in SET overwhelmingly confuse mentors, role models and people who like them with sponsors, or people who can actually help them and are motivated to do so. Don’t look for comfort; seek out clout – leaders who have the power to make a real difference in your career.
Grasp the power of performance. Sponsors back people who over-deliver – not just for the sponsor but for the firm. Hit those deadlines, deliver on targets, and drive superior results that will burnish the sponsor’s legacy and show your commitment to the company’s mission.
Deploy your difference. Draw on insights afforded by your gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and/or socio-economic, religious or cultural background. Look for gaps – in strategies or even your sponsor’s skills – and use your experience to fill them. That’s what Portal creator Swift did in creating a game that appealed to a broader audience than typical gamers.
Exude executive presence (EP). Are you “leadership material?” More importantly, do others perceive you to be? Focus on the three pillars of EP: appearance (looking like a leader); communication (sounding like a leader); gravitas (acting like a leader). The more you can convince your sponsor that you have EP, the more likely he or she will believe you do.
The demand for top tech talent is intensifying: Tech leaders like Facebook, Amazon, and Apple will need to fill more than 650,000 new jobs by 2018 to meet their growth projections, and two-thirds of those new hires will be for technology roles. Women are the obvious answer. After all, no company wants to miss out on the next Portal.

Ben Bradlee and the future of journalism
By Brian Stelter  @brianstelter October 22, 2014 
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
"Put out the best, most honest newspaper you can today, and put out a better one the next day."
Every journalist can relate to those words, written by Ben Bradlee toward the end of his 1995 memoir "A Good Life."

Bradlee, who died Tuesday at age 93, was the longest-serving top editor in the history of The Washington Post. He ran the newspaper with verve and determination from 1965 until 1991 and stayed closely associated with it for the rest of his life.
"He was the best," said Donald Graham, The Post's publisher during the latter half of Bradlee's tenure. "He pushed as hard as an editor can push to print the story of the Pentagon Papers; he led the team that broke the Watergate story. And he did much more."

Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, pictured in 2005.
In the outpouring of remembrances of the man, there's a sense that with his passing, an idea has died too, an idea about print journalism and impact and government accountability.
I think that's a premise that Bradlee would have ripped up.
As Graham said in a statement on Tuesday, Bradlee's "drive to make the paper better still breathes in every corner of today's Post newsroom."
Last year The Post was among the newspapers and web sites that turned Edward Snowden's cache of NSA documents into compelling stories about mass surveillance -- a clear example of "impact."
Still, it is worthwhile to reflect on what's changed, now that the notion of publishing "the best, most honest newspaper you can today" feels like it belongs to a prior generation.

Bradlee received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
David Remnick, once a young reporter for The Post and now the editor of The New Yorker, wrote that Bradlee ruled the newsroom "at a time before Craigslist, before newsroom cutbacks, before Politico, before the sullen loss of confidence," and before the Graham family sold The Post to Amazon (AMZN, Tech30) CEO Jeff Bezos for an underwhelming $250 million.
Bradlee was on top when newspapers were on top.
"It is tough to imagine a newspaperman ever playing the kind of outsize role that he once did in Washington," wrote David Carr of The New York Times. "Newspapers, and people's regard for them, have shrunk since he ran The Post."
"What was great about Ben," wrote "This Town" author Mark Leibovich, "was that he embodied a much more confident time in American journalism -- before everyone was so terrified of offending readers, not giving them what they wanted, being accused of bias, not being sufficiently solicitous of the staff's feelings or constituency complaints or whatever grievance was trending on 'social media.'"

Bradlee reviewing the front page of the Post, which read: "Nixon resigns."
"Confidence" came up repeatedly in The Post's front-page obituary of Bradlee. Robert G. Kaiser, a 50-year veteran of The Post, started to write the obit 15 years ago.
Last week, coincidentally, Kaiser published "Bad News About The News," an essay for the Brookings Institution warning that "news as we know it is at risk" due to eroding business models in the digital age.
Some are more optimistic. There's a sense, as of late, that The Post is a revived force in reporting -- much attention has been paid to its recent scoops and to the fact that about 100 new employees have come aboard since Bezos bought the newspaper last year.

Bradlee pictured in 1994.
Amid all the tributes, a comment from Bob Woodward stood out. Woodward and Carl Bernstein led The Post's Watergate reporting while Bradlee led the editing, inspiring legions of young people to seek jobs in journalism in the 1970s and '80s.
Bradlee "was the editor of the 20th century," Woodward said. "His passing, in a way, marks the end of the 20th century."
Woodward said that to Politico, The Post's chief rival in Washington, a digital news operation created by two former Post reporters.
Bernstein, on CNN's "New Day" on Wednesday morning, said Bradlee "viewed the world like the young reporter he started as."
What might that young reporter say today?
"Put out the best, most honest home page you can this minute, and put out a better one the next."

The greatest mistake every young negotiator makes is to respond to aggressively competitive bargaining moves by offering concessions. That's how bullies get their way. They accuse, threaten, annoy, pester, shame, raise their voices, shake their fists and sometimes even get physically pushy. So long as your mental and physical well-being is assured, understand that these are playground tactics and you are the playground monitor.

Because knowledge is power (and bullies don't tend to be scholars of the word but students of the calibrated threat) your best protection against the workplace bully is identifying the tactics he's using and resisting them without raising the stakes or escalating the conflict. Your game will be a subtle one in which you keep a cool head, respond to contentious tactics with an even tone and demand rational responses.

Responses to Threats, Insults and Shouting

The bully bargainer will only out-negotiate your cool-headed plan if you are prepared to push back whenever you are pushed. If the conversation is starting to spiral out of control, use one of these immediate, quietly intoned, statements.

Let's come back to this when you're in a calmer state of mind.
I'm happy to continue discussing ways to satisfy both of our interests but I don't countenance threats, insults or shouting.
Do you need a break to calm yourself?
I'm going to terminate this discussion right now but if you're willing to continue this negotiation later in a more civil tone, I'm happy to reconvene.
The secret of the successful negotiator is her refusal to terminate the negotiation until the deal is done even when she's being bullied. Push back against brutish conduct if need be, but do not fold, nor cut and run. You are in control of you and there is nothing the bully bargainer can do to take your agency away, including your willingness to walk away for good if you feel emotionally or physically threatened.

Tough Competitive Bargaining Techniques

You'll sometimes need to deploy aggressive competitive bargaining tactics yourself, particularly when your negotiation partner puts so little money on the table that his offer is not worth a counter, plays his cards too close to his chest and refuses to engage in problem solving.

The savvy interest-based negotiator (one who is treating the bargaining session as a problem solving exercise rather than a world war) should counter unrealistically high demands with unrealistically low ones, noting after several fruitless exchanges that the parties will never reach agreement if they don't begin to bargain within a range of reason.

Competitive negotiators also bluff, mislead, and threaten retaliation if the other side does not comply.

The smart "opponent" calls his bargaining partner's bluff by asking for evidence or asking him to "bet" on his own predictions. This is particularly useful when the negotiation involves the prediction of future events like prices falling or rising.

If the parties have different views on future events, the savvy negotiator will offer a contingency that will favor his counterpart if the future he projects arrives and a better one for you if you're certain enough of yourself to place your bet on your own positioning of the issues. From years of experience I can tell you that this particular exercise usually ends up with both parties waving the white flag on the accuracy of their prognostications.

Additional Competitive Tactics

Competitive negotiators also sub-divide concessions by dividing issues into their smallest possible parts, offering concessions only on the sub-parts; making ambiguous or hypothetical offers that they can later disown; demanding principled justifications for their bargaining partner's positions; and, responding to intransigence with intransigence.

These tactics can also be relatively easily pushed back if you recognize them for what they are - your bargaining partner's attempt to get the biggest slice of the single bargained for pie. Speak truth to power by openly diminishing the value of concessions on sub-divided issues, ask for clarity where ambiguity reigns, make hypotheticals concrete and invite your counterpart to consider baking a few more pies rather than trying to split the one he's fighting you over.

The Interest-Based Bargainer Should Prevail

Once you've worn the competitive bargainer down, the following questions will help you turn the negotiation into a more cooperative endeavor:

what do you think a "fair" solution might look like (and why is that fair to both of us or if you were me, what would a fair solution look like?)
which issues are most important to you; we might be able to trade less important issues to me for more important issues to you
what are the intangible risks and hidden business costs of failing to close the deal
what would a future with the deal in place look like

Knowledge is power. If you have learned as much as you can about your bargaining partner's interests - his goals, values, needs, desires, fears, preferences and priorities - you can characterize your own interests as his, give up bargaining chips that you don't care as much about as he does and uncover hidden value that a strictly competitive negotiation wouldn't.

Stories to put meat on the bones of all these tactics will follow. If you'd like a step-by-step negotiation plan that includes preparation, strategy and tactics, check out our resources page over at She Negotiates.