I Can Name 7 Habits of Highly Successful and Effective People!!

I was sitting on my deck watching the golfers go by and thought about how effective they were at communicating their shots and what the next shot would be. It reminded me of what I saw in business for those individuals I felt were highly effective managers and employees. So here they are and see if you agree with me:


1. be proactive - being resourceful, innovative and quickly accomplish goals and objectives. This motivates people 
2. Think of the end not just the beginning - they have a clear vision of where they are going and the turns along the way
3. Focus on priorities - successful people eliminate the unimportant 
4. Think win win - setting measurements that satisfy both employee and management 
5. Make sure you understand  and be understood - giving accurate and positive feedback supports enthusiasm and people really reaching to meet their objectives
6. Synergies - making sure you get all the input and understand how differences may lead to solutions and new innovations
7. Stay sharp - making sure you stay energized and focused. Also making sure your staff keeps energized. 


So tell me what you think about these 7 highly effective habits? 

Don't Dismiss Stretch Goals

by RON ASHKENAS

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

from Harvard Business Review

Recently my fellow HBR blogger Daniel Markovitz suggested that stretch goals can be demotivating, and should be replaced by confidence-building "quick wins." Frankly, this is like saying that the taste of food is more important than its nutrient value. It's a false dichotomy. Healthy organizations need both stretch and success to stay alive and vibrant, just like a well-balanced diet includes food that is both tasty and healthy.

The key to integrating the two is to carve quick wins out of long-term goals — so that each small success is a building block towards achieving a broader challenge. It's important however that these small successes themselves be microcosms of the larger goal, and not simply serve as check-marks for harvesting low hanging fruit. Rather, these small stretches (we call them Rapid Results) need to force people out of their comfort zones to try new approaches, ideas, and ways of working in 100 days or less.

Over the past several decades, my colleagues and I have seen the power of short-term stretch goals in almost every imaginable situation. For example:

• In order to achieve seemingly impossible growth targets, an adhesives materials company challenged dozens of divisional teams to each implement one "growth idea" that would generate new revenue in 100 days. One team, for instance, revised a commercial taping product for home use and partnered with Home Depot to sell it. Over the next two years, hundreds of such teams around the world helped the company increase revenues while creating further opportunities for growth. These "small stretches" also energized participants and helped them develop capabilities as growth leaders. As one manager said, "I learned more in 100 days than I had in the previous several years."


• To achieve stretch sales goals, the commercial head of a health care company challenged her global team to boost revenues from older brands without losing focus on their primary products. To make this happen, a cross-functional team from each market selected ten promising brands and focused on getting initial, measurable results on one of them in 100days.Over the next year, these teams built on the initial results so that the collective gain was over half a billion dollars.

Short-term stretch goals also work with community development and not-for-profit initiatives. As part of an effort to increase education in Southern Sudan, a team of villagers with help from an NGO took on the challenge of increasing school attendance by 30% in 100 days.The villagers were so motivated to achieve this goal, that they eventually made their own bricks to construct a new building. A few years later a child from that village was the first from his region to attend a university. Currently, an effort in the U.S. to provide housing for 100,000 homeless veterans is utilizing the same approach by carving out short-term stretch goals in a number of cities around the country.

Regardless of context, there are two keys to the effective use of short-term stretch goals.

1. The first is to make sure that the immediate goals are part of a larger, more ambitious effort so that whatever is achieved and learned is a building block, not an end-in-itself. In other words, extremely ambitious stretch goals need to be deconstructed into lots of short-term stretch goals, sometimes with multiple cycles.
2. Second, intentionally design the short-term stretch goals in ways that force innovation, collaboration, and learning — so it's not just a matter of working harder for a short period of time. In this way, each short-term success builds capability and knowledge for the next and the next.

Let's not dismiss stretch goals as demotivating or dangerous. If you tackle them by carving out short-term challenges, and learn as you go, they can be a powerful way to accelerate progress.

What's your experience with short-term stretch goals?

HR Today and Tomorrow!!!

The latest issue of HR Executive magazine is celebrating its' 25th anniversary. It is a great issue because it really tracks the progress of HR over the past 25 years and how it has arrived at the table today.


I am really proud and glad that I was a part of this growing trend in HR during my 35 years in the business and an HR leader for 30 of those great years. That being said, Hr today cannot stand on its laurels and set and take all the applause. As David Ulrich said, "the competencies that served HR well in the past will not be enough to propel it into the future." I fully agree with David on this. HR today need to look into the future and my prediction is the following:

• HR leaders will need to be even more business savvy than they are today
• HR will need to continue to drive business change and talent management
• the leaders in HR going forward may come from the line who have run business segments
• HR leaders will have to continue to innovate their business practices, master them and continue to integrate within the business
• all HR practitioners will need to understand global initiatives and global business practices
• HR executives will be chosen by the boards to run the business, and I predict within 5 years. 

These are my top of mind predictions for HR for the next 10 years. What are your thoughts on this? Write me at wgstevens2@gmail.com 

Making Your Own Fame

May 14, 2012 - 6:01 am EDT

by Paul Gillin in BtoB

I've had too many recent conversations with colleagues in their 40s and 50s who have suddenly found themselves unemployed and unprepared. Many thought their companies would always look out for them, but corporate fealty died out two recessions ago. Today, the onus is on each of us to promote ourselves. In the words of my Profitecture colleague Paul Doyle, who you know and what you know are no longer enough. You need to decide who knows you and what you are known for.

Building your online profile doesn't have to require significant time or effort. Consistency is more important than volume. Search engines and social networks are wired to reward people who constantly share expertise about very specific topics. Spend 15 to 30 minutes a day on the following tasks and you will see results.

Start a thought leadership blog. It's best if you can own the domain name, but if you have to use Blogger or Tumblr, so be it. What's more important is to contribute at least two entries per week that leverage keywords that you want others to use to find you. Short entries are fine. Few people have time to read long stuff anyway.

Make LinkedIn a daily habit. When was the last time you scrutinized your LinkedIn profile? It should be up-to-date, well-written and tagged with all the right keywords. Once your profile is complete, make it a point to answer two questions in LinkedIn Groups or Answers every day. Contact current and past colleagues and ask them to write recommendations for you, then return the favor. Send a connection request to any current or past contact who might have value to you.

Make sharing instinctive. Did you just read a useful book? Write a short review for your blog and link to the author, who'll probably return the favor. Instead of emailing links to colleagues, post them on a social bookmarking site like Delicious and click the option to tweet your discovery. Make sure your Twitter stream also flows to LinkedIn. Instead of emailing an answer to a common question, post it on your blog where search engines can find it and email the link. Dig out your last half-dozen professional presentations and upload them to SlideShare, then “favorite” presentations by people you want to know.

Make downtime productive. Got a smartphone? Use idle time in the checkout line to retweet a couple of messages from people you'd like to work with or share a recent insight of your own. Call in a comment to a professional podcast you like. Jot down two new topics for your blog. “Like” a customer's Facebook post.

How can you create meaningful business relationships by managing your email lists?

Carolyn Kopprasch Agency Relations Associate, Emma Inc.

May 10, 2012 - 10:46 am EDT

Your list isn't just a collection of email addresses—it's a collection of 
people who've shown interest in your product or service.It's important 
to keep these relationships personal. As soon as they become 
fields in a spreadsheet, it's easy to treat them as data points. Even 
the easily automated task of managing your email list can become 
personal, to build trusted business supporters.


You can personalize your message in a few ways. Think of any relationship
—you interact differently with strangers, casual acquaintances and trusted 
friends. That logic applies to your subscribers, too. A brand-new customer 
has different needs than a long-standing one; a prospect who is just 
collecting information has an entirely different set of interests. When 
you meet people 
where they are in the customer life cycle, you show respect.


Beyond that, you can invite people to share information with you that will 
help you provide content they'll find relevant and interesting. Take 
advantage of preference centers, where customers can specify 
interests (like certain product lines) and frequency (like monthly or quarterly 
updates).


Every interaction you have with potential and current customers is a 
chance to build trust and demonstrate expertise, and the emails you send 
are no exception. Especially for b2b users, expert content is how your emails 
stand out in the inbox. Your past email data provide a unique segmenting 
opportunity as well. Take a few moments to gather the folks who click on 
certain types of content, and then send more of that information to those 
groups.


Instead of just bombarding your audience with messages, keep the 
conversation timely and useful. Just like social media, your email marketing 
strategy should be about engagement, not frequency.


Nielsen Co. statistics show that 93% of us subscribe to at least one 
business' email marketing list. Just because email is the most widely 
consumed medium doesn't mean it has to be the most stale one. Keep 
it fresh and keep it personal. Remember, there's a real person on the other 
side of that inbox.




Carolyn Kopprasch works with email marketing services provider Emma's (myemma.com) agency partners to 
provide training, resources and personalized consultations.

Who Is that Leader in the Mirror?

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall," asked the Queen in Snow White, "who is the fairest of them all?"
Things got sticky when the Queen got the answer she didn't want to hear, but at least her mirror was honest. Too many bosses are looking in the mirror and being told that they're doing just fine, despite evidence to the contrary.


An article in Training Magazine titled "The Blind Leading the Company" reported on research into manager confidence in their skills and the accuracy of their self-perception. Here's the money quote.
"97 percent of the managers who think they are “good” or “excellent” also believe they know their strengths and development areas. Compare this to only 63 percent of the managers who think they are “fair” or “poor.” Data reveals the managers most confident in their skills are also most confident that they see themselves."


I don't find this surprising at all. Study after study shows people in all kinds of situations are likely to over-estimate their abilities and underestimate the need for improvement. But if you're a boss and you want to be a good one, this research has three powerful implications.
You can't trust your mirror. No more excuses. After reading this post you can't fall back on the "nobody ever told me I overestimated my abilities" excuse.


You must commit to the rigorous and discomforting process of getting the true picture of who you are and how you're doing. Seeking feedback must become a habit. Hearing the feedback and acting on it, hard as it is, must be part of your plan. You can get some help from Mary Jo Asmus' excellent post, "The Value of Knowing Exactly Who You Are."


You must commit to the difficult habit of getting better. As you grow and develop, that target will move as Marshall Goldsmith wrote in What Got You Here Won't Get You There.


Boss's Bottom Line
Lieutenant General Robert Forman summed it up: "In the pursuit of excellence there is no finish line."