Personal Excellence - November 2022

Top Picks 09

Leaders: Ready For A Bold Answer To Service Fatigue?

3 ways to avoid the epidemic of quiet quitting

- Laurie Guest, Keynote Speaker, LaurieGuest.com

5 Strategies To Recession-Proof Your Business

From an entrepreneurial couple who survived the pandemic

- Jamie Ratner, CEO and Founder, and Brian Ratner, Co-founder and President, CertifiKID

Don’t Let Stress Overwhelm You

Practical tools for increasing your stress tolerance and hiking your sense of optimism

- Carolyn Stern, President and CEO, EI Experience

14 22 27

Seven Practical Steps To Build A Culture Of Safety And Human Reliability

From talk to action

- Jake Mazulewicz, Ph.D., Director, JMA Human Reliability Strategies, LLC.

Editorial Purpose

Excellence Publications

How to Tame Stress and Improve Focus for Greater Productivity

When work, family and other commitments fall together, there are days you get overwhelmed. You can become busy or too stressed out. And, when you feel stressed, it can affect the way you deal with these demands, or everything you do. Since you can’t remove stress altogether, you need to boost your ability to cope, so that you’ll have the energy and confidence to face any sort of challenge.

for increasing your ability to deal with stress and hiking your sense of optimism.

A recession could hit anytime, as could natural lulls in your small business revenue. There is no one way to completely recession-proof a business.

Entrepreneurial couple, Jamie Ratner and Brian Ratner, in their article, 5 Strategies

To Recession-Proof Your Business, offers helpful tips on recession-proofing small businesses and start-ups.

Personal Excellence Team

Vibha Kini Magazine (Online Version)

Submissions & Correspondence

However, this is not easy for all. While some manage to maintain a rather seamless balance between work and life, others struggle to find a way out. The November edition of Personal Excellence includes articles that will help you grow, personally and professionally and get yourself back on track toward your goal.

Laurie Guest’s, Leaders: Ready For A Bold Answer To Service Fatigue? and Felicity

Dwyer’s Prioritizing Employee Well-Being

As A Leader, highight how leaders can help their teams and organizations by developing their own skills and mindset, so they can support connection and open communication within their teams.

For customer service, or information on products and services, call 1-877-472-6648

You may think that your days are packed from the time you get up to the time you go to bed, but a closer look often reveals that’s far from the case. You actually have enough time! In his article, Bulletproof Your Schedule And Increase Productivity In 4 Easy Steps, Bill Murphy (Coach, Fairway Ignite) puts forth a four-step process to eliminate time-wasting activities and make your days more productive.

Are there tips and tools for increasing your stress tolerance? Carolyn Stern’s (EI Experience) article, Don’t Let Stress Overwhelm You, lists down practical tools

In brief, the November edition of Personal Excellence includes informative articles that focus on personal and professional development, well-being and growth. We hope you enjoy reading all the articles and get back to us with your valuable feedback.

Happy Reading!

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Personal Excellence (ISSN 2564-1948)

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Babitha Balakrishnan Editor, Personal Excellence

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In a world of unparalleled challenges (global pandemic, racial injustice, politi cal rivalry, digital 4.0, emotional malaise), uncertainty reigns. Finding opportu nity in this context requires harnessing uncertainty and harnessing starts with reliable, valid, timely, and useful information. The Excellence publications are a superb source of such information. The authors provide insights with impact that will guide thought and action.

Dave Ulrich

Rensis Likert Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Partner, The RBL Group

Excellence publications are my ‘go-to’ resource for contemporary and action able information to improve leadership, engagement, results, and retention. Each edition offers rich and diverse perspectives for improving the employee experience and the workplace in general.

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Author, Virtual /Live Keynote Presenter, Inc.’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers

I regularly read and contribute to Leadership Excellence and Talent Manage ment Excellence. I use many of the articles I read to augment my own presen tations and I often share the articles with my clients. They are always quick, right on target for the latest issues in my field, and appreciated by my clients.

If you want to stay up to date on the latest HR trends, choose a few of the different issues from the Excellence series of publications.

Dr. Beverly Kaye CEO, BevKaye&Co.

Bulletproof Your Schedule And Increase Productivity In 4 Easy Steps

Look closely at how you spend your time

By Bill Murphy, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation

Think about all of the different ways you waste time at work throughout the day. Even when you think we’re being productive, the opposite may be true. The classic example is people who spend their day putting out fires. More often than not, these people are busy being busy. Whether they realize it or not, they use putting out fires as an excuse to not do the work necessary to accomplish the most important tasks.

If you work in an office, you see the people who spend their time at the water cooler and in the hallway gossiping or talking about television or sports. On a small scale—a couple of minutes here and there is perfectly fine. Everyone needs some form of release. But if you’re not paying attention, this can eat up a tremendous amount of time.

You may think that your days are packed from the time you get up to the time you go to bed, but a closer look often reveals that’s far from the case. Here’s the secret: you already have enough time

Did you ever realize how much you get done the day before you

go on vacation? You just crank out what you need to do. You suddenly become extremely good at prioritizing, and everything you do is a high-payoff activity. You don’t have time to be a fireman that day, and you get so much more accomplished than you normally do.

Here is a simple four-step process to eliminate time-wasting activities; make your days more productive; and put yourself in a better position to accomplish your goals:

#1. Determine What Your Time Is Worth

The first thing I ask my coaching clients to do is to determine what one hour of their time is worth. Start with the amount of money you currently earn, or better yet, the amount that you realistically hope to earn. Let’s say that it’s $100,000. If you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, that’s $50 an hour. That’s your number. That’s what one hour of your time is worth. But are you living up to your earning potential?

If you determine that you are worth $50 an hour, is it beneficial to spend an hour fixing a paper jam in the copy machine when there are others more qualified for it? That doesn’t mean you’re above those tasks, but the whole idea is to get the absolute most out of your time. I see so many people at work throughout the day engaging in tasks that are not the best use of their time.

#2. Scheduling Hacks

Being productive starts with scheduling. I start with my highest-payoff activities. These are sometimes family events, but during the weekday, they are

typically my biggest revenue-gen erating tasks at work. Where I see people make mistakes is in scheduling these events, calls, or meetings back-to-back, so their entire day is packed with their highest payoff activities. On paper, it looks like a great way to be super productive, but in reality, it can set you back, because all it takes is for one thing to go wrong, or for some issue to pop up that you have to take care of. This can throw your entire schedule out of whack. All of a sudden, you find yourself playing catch-up and stuck in reaction mode.

Another way to get organized is to label your activities as red, yellow, or green lights. Your green-light activities are what get you paid. Yellow-light activities are more of a personal goal or something that you’re working on for yourself, while red-light activities are a waste of time. You then color-co ordinate your calendar to better understand how you’re spending your time. The ultimate goal is to load up on the green-light activities and remove or delegate the red-light activities.

Make sure you’re getting those highest-payoff activities done every day and not wasting time on those red-light activities.

If you find that you still have too many items left over, it’s not a scheduling problem, it’s a workload and expectations problem that has to be addressed; otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

#3.

Beware of the Drift

It happens to everyone. At various points throughout the day, you lose focus, let things slide, don’t remain on task, and, ultimately, aren’t being true to your desires.. There is a fine line between taking a break and going down a rabbit hole of distractions. If you start talking to people at the office or messing around on social media, five minutes can easily turn into 10, 20, or more.

There is another side to this coin because success can sometimes hinder your progress as well. Sometimes when you experience success, you may start to feel content, and that’s dangerous because you take your foot off the gas. If you decelerate long enough, it can knock you off track and prevent you from achieving your goals. Be careful not to get complacent. Try to identify when that happens and course correct to shorten the duration of your drift.

#4.

Give Yourself a Break

When I first started in the mortgage business, I was a low man on the totem pole, so it was my job to leave the office for coffee and lunch runs. Other people hated being a gopher, but I liked it because it gave me a chance to get out of the office and break up the day. Over time, that became a habit, so when I moved up in the ranks, I would still get out of the office.

Why don’t you approach every day with that same mentality and urgency?

When I’m at the office today, I’ll typically eat lunch at my desk, but between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., I get up and get out. I don’t do any work or make any calls during that time. It’s only for 10 or 15 minutes, but I get a coffee and then listen to sports talk radio. That’s been a non-negotiable part of my routine for over 20 years. I didn’t realize the true benefit and how powerful it was until a couple of years ago when people kept telling me that I would always come back from these breaks ready to go. That’s when I made that connection.

This is not about being lazy. It’s about recharging because nobody can go full steam ahead every day. It’s important to recharge your battery. Whether I’m returning from a run, hike, bike ride, or even a 20-minute break during the workday, I’m not only refreshed and full of energy, but that’s when I have some of my best ideas.

Equally as important as breaks are what I like to call “white time.” Those are small blocks of time that I can utilize to deal with whatever comes down the pipe throughout the day. I never schedule more than two of my highest-payoff activities in a row without some white time in between. I’ve learned that it makes me more productive than if I tried to put my head down and bull-rush my way through the day.

Is there a pattern to your workday?

The closer you look, you might notice that there are times when you are more productive and in the zone, and times when you aren’t productive or feel overwhelmed. It’s different for everyone, but try to schedule your white time or breaks around those activities that are the most difficult or that leave you feeling stressed or overwhelmed. Plan it out in advance. That short break might provide the release you need

to make it through those more difficult tasks.

Try this. Set up your schedule to achieve optimal productivity, and then evaluate your execution. Look closely at how you spend your time. If you blocked off an hour for one of those highest-payoff activities, did you follow through? Were you productive? How well did you spend that hour? Are you really giving it everything you have? The simple act of auditing your day will help you better identify things you’re doing that might be killing your productivity without your even realizing it.

Bill Murphy, author of Thriving in the Storm, is a nationally recognized mortgage originator who has been a top producer for 25 years. Since 2017, he has served as a business coach for the Fairway Ignite program. From 1993 to 1998, he worked as a juvenile counselor for the Department of Youth Services in Worcester, Massachusetts. Would you like to comment?

Leaders: Ready For A Bold Answer To Service Fatigue?

3 ways to avoid the epidemic of quiet quitting

By Laurie Guest, LaurieGuest.com

Everyone’s heard of it by now: “quiet quitting” is the freshly coined phrase to describe the age-old behavior of not quite leaving one’s job entirely but rather opting to no longer go above and beyond. It’s service fatigue to the extreme, risking not just customer satisfaction but staff loyalty and your business’s bottom line, too. While the idea of “quiet

quitting” may be new to many these days, those of us who study customer service have spoken for decades about the root cause and possible solutions for this kind of disengagement and underperformance. The issues may not be new, but these innovative solutions offer new ways to reinvigorate your team.

To bust out of service fatigue and prevent “quiet quitting,” leadership must take bold action, making changes that aren’t always easy. But then again, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn’t be facing an epidemic of workplace ambivalence.

There are three foundational business elements that cause a decline in team engagement: rules, beliefs, and praise. When leadership actively turns its attention to these governing principles, the desire to untether from one’s career shrinks.

Rules of Professional Conduct

One of the biggest changes reported in a post-pandemic workplace is the decaying boundaries around acceptable behavior. With the current U.S. unemployment rate at just 3.5%, it’s an employee’s market. There’s an urgent need to keep positions filled, and it’s easy for managers to feel that having any warm body in the role is better than nobody at all. But when staff is confident they can easily get another job (and one without too much personal sacrifice),

the motivation to meet the company rules of conduct notably decreases. Too often what results is a situation where the “tail wags the dog” and employers are left with little choice but to turn a blind eye to staff misbehavior. And as soon as the poor actions are disregarded once, the issue slowly turns into fast-spreading cancer. Little by little, the “abnormal cells” influence those around them and a negative attitude becomes contagious.

Stop the spread in its tracks with bold action. During the interview process and onboarding, clearly state the company’s behavior expectations and the consequences of not following the rules. Things like dress code, arrival and departure times, and superior customer service delivery are examples of conduct that need clearly stated policies and procedures. Being able to enforce consequences is the harder part of this equation, but most issues can often be solved with respectful and productive conversations. Be bold and stand firm to enforce the essential rules and relax on those you can, in order to create the culture you desire.

Belief in the Mission

As a leader, you’re invested in your company’s reputation and you’re passionate about achieving successful outcomes. Ideally, your staff matches this dedication level, like two parallel lines on the same path, mirroring each other in vision, mission, and values. However, when one of the parties begins to slowly drift at a different angle, the trajectory changes and eventually the “mission gap” is wider than can be tolerated. For example, an employee may slip on their work ethic, bend the rules, or make unacceptable choices during key interactions. And remember: “mission gap” isn’t always caused by inattentive staff. Sometimes it’s leadership who changes direction and forgets to bring everyone along on the new path!

To close the “mission gap,” boldly embrace your company’s purpose, values and direction. Frequent reviews of the company’s real mission—not just reciting the words that appear on a sign hung on the conference room wall—will ensure everyone on the team is on the same page. Be as blunt as possible when it comes to communicating your company’s direction, knowing that a good team will work to achieve that goal when it is real, attainable, and shared.

Praise and Recognition

Many leaders have trouble providing genuine praise for a job well done. Countless studies show that recognition catapults engagement and productivity levels, so if it is loyalty we seek, hiding the praise is the worst possible course of action. With a global workforce dominated by those under 40, there is no doubt that the importance of attention, applause, and

appreciation can’t be ignored, but it is. And if good work goes continuously unrecognized or discipline in the workplace involves toxicity like shame or yelling, the negative habits and destructive behavior patterns only multiply.

Go bold with your praise and watch the shift in your company culture. Learn the praise formula and utilize it in the moment and as often as possible. The technique is a simple four-part approach: start with the name of the person you are praising; comment on a specific action that is praiseworthy; indicate why it matters; and finish with a sincere thank you “Kristen, you did an amazing job talking with that angry customer. Calming her down is what allowed us to close that sale. Well done, thank you.” Take note of the difference between the well thought out message and the lazy “Hey, good job everybody.” One is white noise, the other is a deal changer.

Be Bold and Bust Out of Service Fatigue

Be the courageous type of leader who is willing to adapt, who looks for ways to keep your management skills fresh and admits when things can be better. Those who have led for decades may feel like they already know everything and have seen everything. But “times, they are a-changing.” Are you changing with them? Those who are new to leadership may believe that fewer rules and more workplace fun is all it takes to keep people engaged. But this approach alone is not sustainable. To bust out of service fatigue and keep “quiet quitting” at bay, it’s imperative not only to provide the necessary tools to your team, but to continuously (and boldly) improve our skills as leaders.

A Hall of Fame keynote speaker and author, Laurie Guest, CSP, CPAE, is an authority on customer service excellence. Laurie blends real-life examples and proven action steps for improvement. She is the author of two books and is writing a third on the topic of service fatigue. Would you like to comment?

Leaders: Ready For A Bold Answer To Service Fatigue?

Do You Work In A Toxic Environment?

12 signs you should not ignore

By Thom Dennis, Serenity in Leadership

Anextensive national survey by ClickJobs.io recently showed a staggering 42% of respondents believe they work in a toxic workplace, and the same is being seen in the USA according to the Society of Human Resources Management which revealed one in four working Americans dread going to work. Whilst flawed leadership seems to be the most obvious causal factor, do we always recognize when we are working in a noxious organization?  Check out 12 possible signs that you are working in a dysfunctional, toxic environment:

1. A lack of diversity and inclusion.  Harassment, discrimination, and bullying are all obvious and unacceptable signs of a toxic environment. But microaggressions with no recourse, being treated unfairly, undermined, excluded, singled out, gossiped about, or denied basic work rights or opportunities show the detrimental power of a poor diversity and inclusion culture.

2. No boundaries Out-of-hours communication, asking you to cancel your holiday plans or interrupting you whilst you are on a break signal there are no boundaries in your organization, and your needs and work/life balance are of little interest.

3. High-stress sickness rates. If you and your colleagues feel burned out because of unachievable time and workload pressures and there are high absenteeism rates then the culture of the organization is unlikely to be people-centric.

4. Rapid employee turnover. Equally if there is rapid staff turnover and if the newly hired workers especially don’t stay for long, then this is likely to be a signal of defective working culture and faulty leadership.

5. If individuals feel trapped in their job and feel like opportunities are passing them by or are being repeatedly offered to others, and there is little chance of further training, or new opportunities and personal development. In these circumstances, they may need to reconsider their position. This is particularly difficult when they are told that they won’t find better work anywhere else, and they should be happy with their lot.

6. Limited communication. A healthy workspace will have good communication throughout the hierarchy of the organization. When respectful different opinions and thoughts are not welcomed, people aren’t listened to and there is a lack of transparency, clarity, and shared important information, then there are likely to be systemic problems afoot.

7. Happy interactions. Why should anyone submit themselves to working in an environment which is not fun? Casual conversations and interactions should be common throughout the day to create bonds between workers. Do you see people smiling or the welcome sound of laughter in the workplace every day? A lack of positive facial expressions and slumped body language and a cold or stagnant atmosphere can reveal a lot about deep-rooted problems. The old adage of “You’re not here to have fun, you’re here to work” is Dickensian and has no place in our workplaces of today.

8. Inadequate leadership skills range from being uninspiring and restrictive to passive-aggres sive, harassing, or narcissistic behaviors. Micromanaging bosses for whom nothing is ever good enough and who often say they are disappointed in you, who don’t reward good work with affirmative language, or who offer harsh rather than constructive criticism are sure signs of a toxic environment.

9. When there is no trust. Organizations with high levels of trust and purpose have better collaboration, strong leadership, better morale, and lower employee turnover. On the other side, businesses with minimal trust suffer from conflict, rivalries, lack of engagement, poor creativity, and divisive thinking.

10. Discrimination. Any sort of prejudice or bias is unacceptable. Taking sexism in the workplace as an example, inappropriate comments, misogyny, harassment, and gender condescension such as mansplaining are rarely seen in just one person and are often systemic.

11. Drama - Employee drama, conflict, gaslighting, infighting, over-emphasis on internal competition, and constant stressors breed unrest and low morale. Alarm bells should be ringing if this is happening in your workplace because it is likely to only get worse over time.

12. Your intuition says so - If you have a gut feeling that something is not right within your environment, you are probably right. The presence of negativity is often felt in minor interactions with people, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. Listen to your feelings before it begins to permanently affect your self-esteem.

Thom Dennis is the CEO of Serenity in Leadership.  With an MSc in Change Agent Skills & Strategies, skills as an NLP Master Practitioner, 17 years’ experience as an officer in the Royal Marines, and having worked extensively around the world, Thom brings all his experience together as a facilitator, speaker, consultant, educator and change agent as CEO of Serenity in Leadership. For the last 30 years, his career has been dedicated to facilitating transformation through organizational change. Thom is passionate about resolving the breadth of issues around good leadership and strives to bring healing and renewal in the face of dysfunction in the workplace.

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5 Strategies To Recession-Proof Your Business

From an entrepreneurial couple who survived the pandemic

By Jamie Ratner and Brian Ratner, CertifiKIDNetwork

November recognizes National Entrepreneur ship Month and what better time to celebrate the people who represent one of the best things in America: entrepreneurship.

Brian and I are entrepreneurs and co-authors of the recently released book, ParentPreneurs. After building a terrific and profitable company with no formal business background, we secured a deal with Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary for an investment in our parent-focused deal website, CertifiKID

It was during the pandemic when we acquired Macaroni KID, a risky pivot that propelled our business into the largest parent-focused digital media and advertising company in the country.

As the pandemic took an unprecedented toll around the world, we somehow continued to survive and thrive. We managed to maintain a rather seamless balance between work and life, navigate the unique challenges facing us, and find a way to take advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves.

It’s November 2022. After a chaotic couple of years, the last thing anybody–especially small businesses–wants to think about is the likelihood of a recession. Yet here we are.

A recession could hit anytime, as could natural lulls in your small business revenue.  Of course, there is no one way to completely recession-proof a business — however, with these tips, you might have a better shot at surviving an economic downturn. Below are our five strategies on how to best recession-proof small businesses and start-ups.

Master the Art of Pivoting

If you are looking to fulfill your professional and financial goals during the era of recession and a volatile economic climate, you must have the willingness and spine to pivot. You should operate your business under the assumption that you will not be able to generate the revenue that you expected or budgeted. So, what will you do about it? Do you let events control your destiny or do you take control? Most end up doing the former because they are too scared to do the latter. Don’t let this happen to you. Take control! This could mean constantly looking for new opportunities, ways to reorganize, or shifts in strategy. Second-guess everything you have been doing and try to see if there is another better way more suitable for the moment. Pivoting requires taking calculated risk, but when there is an existential threat facing your business, the greater risk could be riding out the downturn.

Act Quickly and Harshly

At the beginning of the pandemic, we got some tough love advice from Kevin O’Leary. He forecasted the dark winter we were headed into and encouraged us to act quickly and more harshly than we might have otherwise. The point was we could always build back. We took this advice in some areas, and in other areas, we didn’t. Where we didn’t, we regretted it later.  And there of course is a personal dimension when dealing with team members. But when under the pressure of declining business conditions, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for a poor performer to improve, or for a key new recruit to work out.  One strategy that worked well for us was hiring people with a three-month probation period on an independent contract basis. When we were fully certain that they were the best-suited talent for the role and knew the

business conditions could support the investment, we then were comfortable hiring them full-time.

Cut Cost

It cannot be stressed enough how cutting unnecessary expenses is key. Entrepreneurs in today’s world need to hoard cash and reduce expenses to what is essential. For office space, consider if you need office space that comes with a long-term lease, or can you operate remotely, in shared space, or have a short-term lease. With your recruitment and retention efforts, consider if you can use independent contractors, commission-based arrangements, or part-time personnel. For your third-party services and vendors, consider if you can operate with those who are sufficient and good enough, but not the platinum options. Your focus should be on spending and investing smartly and reducing your risk.

Prioritize Team Communication

As business owners and leaders of the organization, your team needs and expects effective and transparent communication. You need to be coherent and explicit about the kind of results and performance the company is expecting. Define your company values and core mission and be ready to consistently communicate both the good and bad news in real-time. Team building, morale, and loyalty especially in tough times could be supported through regular meetings and communication and an open door policy. One of the striking traits of entrepreneurs is that we have a profound understanding of the business from all its facets and angles, but are not great managers. So, when conditions are difficult, our inclination is to focus deeply on the business at the expense of managing the team who are critical to helping you navigate the choppy waters. Be honest with yourself about this and make sure the team base is covered in part by another manager on your team so it isn’t always on your shoulders.

Offer Superior Customer Service

One of the least considered must-haves for surviving recessions and crunches is the idea of ‘great customer service’. If you are aiming to achieve unparalleled customer loyalty, give them a safe and worthwhile experience when communicating and shopping with you. Customers want you to listen to their problems and provide a solution. It’s a simple compact. Customer acquisition is expensive, but once they are a customer, they will come back again and again and become a loyal customer. Treat them the way you’d want to be treated. If you do, it will pay forward for you in so many ways especially in difficult times because they will ride the waves with you.

You can’t control the timing or impact of a recession or economic downturn, so concentrate on what you can control. Approach the challenge as an opportunity to find new ways to provide value, new revenue streams, and better ways of doing business, as well as creating a stronger team and customer loyalty.

Jamie Ratner is the CEO and Founder of CertifiKID, a recognized best-deal website for parents. Over the past decade and with CertifiKID’s recent acquisition of Macaroni KID, Jamie has grown CertifiKID from a regional deal website to one of the country’s largest parent-focused digital media and advertising companies, reaching millions of families nationwide and backed by an investment from Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary. Jamie was named one of Greater Washington’s top women business leaders by Washington SmartCEO. A soccer mom and entrepreneur (aka “ParentPreneur”), she’s a leading expert in the daily deal, parent, and digital media space.

Brian Ratner is the Co-founder and President of CertifiKID. He is also a founding partner of Hausfeld, a global litigation law firm headquartered in Washington, DC, where he serves as global co-chair of the firm and specializes in global antitrust litigation. Brian has been featured on the Washington, DC Super Lawyers and The Legal 500 Leading Lawyers Lists and has been selected by Lawdragon as one of the 500 Leading Lawyers in America.

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How To Navigate Polarization At Work With Cultural Intelligence

Building a more culturally intelligent world

By David Livermore, PhD

Our jobs, more than anywhere else, are where we’re most likely to interact with people who have vastly different beliefs and values. We don’t have the option of ignoring colleagues who disagree with us about politics, sexuality, racial injustice, or abortion rights. And while these issues may seem irrelevant to an accounting firm or consumer goods company, the polarization from social media and school board meetings is forcing organizations to wade into these sensitive topics.

My colleagues and I have spent the last 25 years researching cultural intelligence (CQ). Some of our most recent findings indicate that the same skills that help us work effectively with someone on the other side of the world can help us work effectively with someone who votes for the other party.

Research: Cultural Intelligence for All of Us

Cultural intelligence is the capability to relate and work effectively with people from diverse backgrounds. Having surveyed more than 250,000 individuals from 168 countries, we know that working effectively across borders requires a sixth sense of adaptability and understanding comprised of four competencies: CQ Drive (motivation and curiosity), CQ Knowledge (cognition), CQ Strategy (meta-cognition), and CQ Action (behavioral flexibility). These same competencies can help us overcome polarization at work.

Zoom Out to a Common Problem

The first step of navigating polarization is developing the motivation to work together.

Work groups often do better navigating differences than social groups because work provides a shared objective and focus as a source of motivation. But the onslaught of news alerts and social media updates are making it harder to separate our feelings about what’s going on in society from work. Jumping on a Zoom call and ignoring the news of another mass shooting feels disingenuous.

In addition, many of the social and political issues dividing us force decisions at work. I recently worked with a group of HR leaders at a US company who wanted to design an initiative to develop and promote more Black employees into executive roles. The group was unified in the importance of more diversity at executive levels but disagreed on whether the focus should be on Black employees.

The group was stalled in fearing the backlash from individuals who would see this as tokenism, Critical Race Theory, or sacrificing competency for diversity quotas. So we zoomed wider to a problem everyone could agree on: Despite a high percentage of Black employees in junior roles, there were none at the executive level. This reality is in direct conflict with the HR group’s north star: “To be a place where everyone can thrive and grow.”  The group agreed that Black employees were not thriving or growing at the company. That was a problem they were motivated to address.

Zoom in on Diverse Perceptions of the Problem (CQ Knowledge)

Next, we need to better understand the different perspectives surrounding the problem at hand. Just as it makes no sense for a company to ignore the differences between their Chinese and German employees’ work styles, it’s counterproductive

to silence divergent perspectives on sensitive issues.

Any perspective makes sense if you understand the reasoning behind it. Exercise perspec tive-taking by trying to explain a view that is contrary to your own.

For the individuals on the HR team who were adamant that this program should be laser-focused on Black employees, we had them voice the perspective of a trans employee who may feel like their challenges reaching the executive suite were overlooked. We asked the reverse of those reluctant to develop a program specifically focused on Black employees. The process provided some emotional distance and promoted an admission from everyone that the problem was complex and any solution would likely be criticized by some.

Try arguing against your point of view. Ask your counterpart to do the same. Don’t cancel each other. Don’t call names.

This isn’t just about civility. It’s about deliberating until we truly understand the different perspectives.

Develop Solutions that Require Diverse Commitments (CQ Strategy)

This leads to the application of CQ Strategy—designing a plan for using differences to solve complex problems. Problem-solv ing with people who disagree usually defaults to winners and losers or a vanilla “agree to disagree” approach. But with cultural intelligence, you keep pushing through the differences to find third-way solutions that only work if opposing sides are in on it. Stay focused on the common problem and use the power of your different perspectives to develop an innovative solution.

Some of the HR leaders believed that a program focused on Black employees should focus on the employee’s personal responsibility and initiative before being considered for an executive role. Others believed the emphasis should be more on teaching existing managers and executives to equitably mentor Black employees, while others thought the solution rested more with updating the company’s interviewing and hiring policies. The team designed a solution that incorporated all of these perspectives, not to placate everyone but because it offered a more robust design that ensured the solution addressed multiple root causes.

Implement Solutions with Leadership Support (CQ Action)

Stress, exhaustion, and roadblocks can quickly diminish the resolve to adapt to one another in the name of solving common problems. We may need to step out of the work periodically to replenish our physical and emotional reserves. But the most

important resource to ensure continued collaboration and adaptation is leadership which provides the vision and resources to implement solutions.

The HR group couldn’t have arrived at their solution without leadership that allowed them to have uncomfortable conversations. They already had

a strong sense of psychological safety, they established some ground rules for their working session, and they put political correctness to the side. Consistent with the culturally intelligent teams we’ve observed across the world, they were led by a leader who was comfortable with debate and friction while using cultural intelligence to guide the team toward a workable solution.

When Basecamp attempted to silence all discussion about sensitive topics, it backfired. Not only did a third of their staff resign, but they also lost the potential for innovative solutions to wicked problems.

Cultural intelligence not only helps manage traditional forms of diversity, it provides an evidence-based model for translating ideological diversity into an innovative source of workplace solutions, while simultaneously building a more culturally intelligent world.

David Livermore is a social scientist and thought leader devoted to the topics of cultural intelligence and global leadership. He’s a founder of the Cultural Intelligence Center and the author of DIGITAL, DIVERSE & DIVIDED: How to Talk to Racists, Compete with Robots, and Overcome Polarization (2022).

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Don’t Let Stress Overwhelm You

Practical tools for increasing your stress tolerance and hiking your sense of optimism

By Carolyn Stern, EI Experience

Life comes with stresses that drain energy. Since you can’t remove stress altogether, you need to boost your ability to cope, so that you’ll have the energy and confidence to face any sort of challenge. Stress tolerance can help you manage demanding workloads, establish clear priorities, meet deadlines, and perform well under pressure. Hiking your sense of optimism also adds to your ability to deal with stress. Here’s what you need to do to control stress and hike optimism:

Tips and Tools for Increasing Your Stress Tolerance

1. Prioritize daily tasks and eliminate nonessentials.

2. Build your emotional resilience. 3. Leverage your energy. 4. Engage in self-care.

1. Prioritize Daily Tasks and Eliminate Nonessentials

Organizing your daily priorities can reduce a major source of stress. Creating to-do lists and organizing tasks by priority will help you understand what needs to be done, what can wait, and what can be delegated. It will also show you whether you have too many tasks. If that is the case, be comfortable asking for help.

2. Build Your Emotional Resilience

When people are busy, they respond by taking on more, not less. This creates burnout because you do not have the opportunity to build your emotional resiliency. To develop your emotional resiliency, try these ideas:

● Practice relaxation techniques. Your body is not a machine. It won’t function well if you don’t give it time to rest. Try to meditate or practice deep breathing techniques.

● Be grateful. Start a gratitude journal, and every day, write five things you are thankful for.

● Spend quality time with the people you care about. Build solid relationships to increase the level of support around you.

3. Leverage Your Energy

Remember, time is finite (there are only twenty-four hours in a day), but your energy is not. Are you a morning person or a nighthawk? When you have a full workload, it is advantageous to know when you do your best work, so you can prioritize your schedule to focus on the most demanding tasks when you are at your best. Save your downtime for less demanding duties.

4. Engage in Self-Care

Taking care of your body and mind will enable you to become more stress tolerant. A healthy diet, regular exercise, and solid sleep help mitigate the stress and damage your body deals with daily. Also, set boundaries with others by learning to say no to tasks you can’t complete. Schedule quiet time between meetings, and make sure you unplug from your workday, so the lines between work and home are not blurred.

Hike Your Optimism

When you believe that anything is possible, you eliminate barriers to achievement. When you model this behavior, it causes others around you to feel that they can also achieve at a high level. Optimistic people tend to expect good things to happen and anticipate the best outcomes in any situation. They trust that things will turn out well, which helps ward off stress.

Tips and Tools for Increasing Optimism:

1. Set small, realistic goals you can achieve.

2. Accept that failures will happen.

3. Phone a friend and talk through your negative thoughts.

4. Add positive practices to your daily routine.

1. Set Small, Realistic Goals You Can Achieve

To improve your mindset, you must balance realistic and aspirational goals by outlining where you are, where you want to be, and how you plan to get there. When it comes to enhancing optimism, you can dream big, but start small. Taking baby steps toward larger goals is a simple way to boost your confidence as you achieve the goals you set for yourself.

2. Accept That Failures Will Happen

You will mess up. However, how you choose to recover from your missteps can lead to an optimistic outlook. Failing is simply part of learning. So when it happens, don’t stop! Even if you don’t feel optimistic about having failed at something, finding the knowledge contained in the mistake will help boost your feelings of optimism.

3. Phone a Friend and Talk Through Your Negative Thoughts

Share your ups and downs. Lean on a friend when you find yourself ruminating over the same negative thoughts. By sharing them with your friend, you will be able to let them go. Sometimes, simply speaking your negative thoughts out loud can help you hear them for what they truly are, just thoughts and not facts.

4. Add Positivity Practices to Your Daily Routine

Positivity can feel hard to come by when you have low optimism. Similar to taking baby steps toward your goals, find small ways to feel good about yourself, because once you do, seeing gloomy things in a brighter light becomes easier. To challenge your negative, self-limiting beliefs, write out positive affirmations, keep a gratitude journal, or share the positive highlights of your day with family and friends.

Carolyn Stern, the author of The Emotionally Strong Leader, is the President and CEO of EI Experience, an executive leadership development and emotional intelligence training firm. She is a certified Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Development Expert, professional speaker, and university professor whose emotional intelligence courses and modules have been adopted by top universities in North America. She has also provided comprehensive training programs to business leaders across the continent in highly regarded corporations encompassing industries such as technology, finance, manufacturing, advertising, education, healthcare, government, and food service. Stern lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Simple But Powerful Lessons From Legends

We often fail by tripping over the

things

as big things

By Jim Stovall, Narrative Television Network

I’ve enjoyed many amazing experiences in my life. Among them is having over 50 of my books published. Even beyond the thrill of having my books published is the experience of having eight of them made into movies, and at this writing, a wonderful production team is working to bring my novel, Will to Win to the screen. In my movie

career, I’ve worked with incredible performers such as James Garner, Peter Fonda, Raquel Welch, and Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett Jr.

I had the opportunity to work with the great actor, Brian Dennehy on three movies. One day on the production set, I asked him about

his philosophy on being a great actor. Brian told me that early in his career, he worked with legend ary actor Spencer Tracy. He asked Mr. Tracy for any advice he might have for a young actor. Without hesitation, Spencer Tracy simply responded, “Show up on time, hit your mark, and know your lines.”

While this might seem overly simplistic, we often fail by tripping over the little things we mistakenly perceive to be big things. If you can’t show up on time, your odds of ever having success in this life are greatly diminished. Much of success comes from building great relationships. If you are habitually late, you are communicating to others through your actions that you think your time is more valuable than theirs. My brother and I agree that one of the enduring lessons we learned from our father comes from his statement, “If you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late.”

little

we mistakenly perceive

Hitting your mark in acting is tantamount to simply doing your job. No matter how well you perform a scene, if you are out of position and fail to hit your mark, the scene will have to be re-shot, and you will cause everyone in the cast and crew to do it again because you failed to hit your mark.

Quality work and customer service are so rare today that someone who does their job on time and on budget can exceed expectations and stand out among their competitors. As an actor, knowing your lines simply means that you are prepared to do your job and to

do it well. Oftentimes, people don’t fail on the job; they fail to prepare, so they never really hit their mark.

As you go through your day today, remember these simple but powerful lessons from legends.

Jim Stovall is the President of the Emmy-award-winning Narrative Television Network and a published author of more than 50 books—eight of which have been turned into movies. He is also a highly sought-after platform speaker.

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Seven Practical Steps To Build A Culture Of Safety And Human Reliability

From talk to action

By Jake Mazulewicz, Ph.D., JMA Human Reliability Strategies, LLC

Atechnician spills a toxic chemical. She isn’t injured, but she easily could have been. The Hazmat cleanup costs over $10,000 and shuts down a critical building for a week.

An electrical engineer flips the wrong switch in a substation control room. He isn’t injured. But within seconds, a $50,000 transformer is destroyed.

Three financial clerks in two countries are processing payments for a large bank. They intend to schedule a routine $8 million payment. Antiquated software makes errors hard to catch. The clerks accidentally wind up sending $893 million instead.

From Talk to Action

Talking about building a culture of safety and human reliability is easy.

But how many great ideas get talked about and never actually get put into practice?

The real skill is to be able to transform good ideas into practical steps that you and your people can apply immediately. In this article, that’s what you’ll get.

There is no one secret or solution. Instead, many successful companies around the world have built a culture of safety and human reliability using a “Consolidation of Subtleties” – a combination of practical steps like these.

1) Take a Learning-Based Approach to Errors

If you’re in a work culture that’s stuck in the old-school, Control-Based Approach of eliminating all errors, then consider labeling it that way. “Hey, are we stuck in a Control-Based Approach as we’re discussing Tuesday’s incident?” The more you label it, the more you’ll be aware of it, and the less you’ll be stuck in it. When ready, propose the alternative –the Learning-Based Approach. How? After the next incident or unwanted error, don’t start by asking, “What went wrong this time?” Instead, start by asking, “How do you all get this job done right 99% of the time?”

2) Create Psychological Safety

It’s easy to destroy and challenging to create. Yet research from Dr. Amy Edmonson at Harvard and Google’s Project Aristotle reveal that Psychological Safety is key to successful, safe, engaged, and reliable teams. After an error, instead of saying, ”Joe failed to do [X]...” ask, “What DID Joe do, and why did it make sense for him (at the time) to do that?”

3) Lead After Action Reviews (AARs)

For over 30 years, these psychologically safe, semi-structured, post-job team debriefs have been used by an increasing number of high-hazard industries worldwide. After your next successful, complex project, instead of asking, ”What could we have done better?”, ask these four questions initially developed to accelerate learning in the US Army…

1. What did we set out to do?

2. What did we actually do?

3. How did it turn out that way?

4. What will we do differently next time?

4) Transform Investigations

Traditional investigations often “Name, shame, blame & retrain.” The result? Fear, silence and box-checking on Corrective Actions. The alternative? Instead of asking, “What was the error, and who made it?” ask, “How did our processes set that person up to make that error? And how can we improve our processes to set our people up for reliability and success instead?”

5) Apply Defenses

Peer Checks. Three-Step Communication. Checklists. These and other simple, yet powerful defenses have proven successful for decades. You can learn them in a few hours, and get real-world results immediately. Pick a job that you and your team regularly do. Consider writing or updating the checklist for that job to include ONLY the 3-7 items most often missed. One physician from Baltimore helped save 1,500 lives in 18 months with this classic defense.

6) Improve Systems

Instead of trying to “fix” your workers, improve your work processes & systems. How? Pick a process that you regularly do. With trusted front-line experts, brainstorm one low-cost, low-risk, low-fear, low-main tenance process improvement that would make it

easier for front-line experts to do the right thing in that process. For example; companies with fleets of trucks have dramatically reduced serious injuries and saved millions of dollars each year by simply avoiding left-hand turns.

7) Build Resilience (Advanced)

The world’s most High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) don’t try to eliminate all errors. They don’t “Proceduralize Everything” either. Instead, they build resilience so that most errors become easier to detect, recover from, and learn from. How do HROs do this? One method they use is to look for “weak signals,” like the sound an engine makes when it’s just starting to develop a problem. Novices miss weak signals. But experts sense them and act on them quickly to manage errors before they cascade into catastrophes. So talk with 1-2 trusted peers and identify one weak signal for a complex job you all do. Name that weak signal, and what to do about it. Then teach that to your apprentices instead of hoping they’ll discover it on their own.

If these seven steps seem like a lot, don’t worry. Just pick the one that resonates with you the most right now, and discuss it with a few trusted colleagues. When ready, try it out in a low-cost, low-risk micro-ex periment. A few small, quick wins will help you build momentum fast!

Jake Mazulewicz, Ph.D. is the Director at JMA Human Reliability Strategies, LLC. He has a decade of experience in Safety for electric utilities and served as a firefighter, an EMT, and a military paratrooper.

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Seven Practical Steps To Build A Culture Of Safety And Human Reliability

Things You Can Do In Six Minutes

Give yourself the gift of exploratory writing

By Alison Jones, Practical Inspiration Publishing

What can you do in six minutes? Make a cup of coffee. Check social media. Knock out 20 press-ups—all good ideas. But here are some even better ones: Solve a problem. Mend a relationship. Improve your well-being. Calm your anxiety. Come up with a new idea.

Sound a bit ambitious? That’s because you haven’t yet tried exploratory writing.

Usually, when we’re writing, we’re dealing with answers. We know what we want to say, and we’re using the act of writing to communicate that message to other people. We’re trying to influence, inform, and maybe even inspire. That takes time, and it doesn’t much help with the more mysterious process of coming up with the ideas in the first place.

Exploratory writing is a very different kind of writing. First of all, it’s not intended for anyone other than yourself to read. Secondly, like all exploration, it starts with questions, not answers: when you start a sentence in an exploratory writing session, you generally have no idea how it will end. And thirdly, it’s a mess. Forget journaling in a beautiful notebook: exploratory writing happens on scrap paper, or at best a sheet from a scruffy refill pad.

And fourthly (and finally), it’s fast. To break through the internal censor (‘You can’t say THAT!’, ‘Are you

sure that’s how you spell it?’, ‘You just said that, you fool…’), an exploratory writing session is done against the clock. I recommend six minutes – it takes a couple of minutes to get going, but you can’t write by hand without stopping for much longer than that without it disintegrating into an illegible scrawl. (Or at least I can’t.)

I don’t care how busy you are: you can find six minutes in your day.

But why should you bother?

Because exploratory writing is one of the most powerful tools for taking on some of the most profound issues we face as human beings in a complex, disrupted, technology-led world.

It gives you time and space to stop reacting to other people’s stuff and focus on your own. To stop consuming and start creating. When you know that no one else will be reading it, the page becomes a safe space for you to spill out the mess and noise inside your head so you can look at it, which is the first step towards sorting it out. It’s amazing how the worry that seems so overwhelming when you lie awake ruminating on it shrinks to manageable proportions once it’s put into words on paper.

Humans have instinctively known from our earliest days that there is power in naming things –exploratory writing is a way of naming and thereby taming the forces that threaten to overwhelm us each day.

It can also be a way of capturing the lightning in a bottle – helping us tease out the earliest glimmer of an idea, giving it shape so that we can look at it ourselves, build it out, and share it with others.

Or it can simply be a way of processing and making sense of whatever’s happening to us right now

to regain our equilibrium and make better, more thoughtful decisions.

There’s no wrong way to ‘do’ exploratory writing, but if you’re just starting out, I suggest you find a quiet space where you won’t be disturbed, put all electronic devices out of reach, and give yourself a moment to check in with yourself. What’s on your mind? Where do you need to lean in and explore – even if it feels uncomfortable?

Then turn that barely articulated awareness into a prompt designed to move you forward:

● ‘What’s bothering me about this is…’,

● ‘The reason this is so important is…’,

● ‘One thing I can do today to move this forward is…’.

Don’t worry too much about the exact form of words you use – this is just a jumping-off point, and might be miles away from where you land. And then just write.

Don’t judge, don’t censor yourself, don’t worry about your spelling or grammar, and don’t stop.

One of the secrets that all professional writers know is that there’s no point in waiting around for an idea before you start writing: the act of writing generates ideas.

Whatever it is you need right now, take a pen, paper, and six minutes, and give yourself the gift of exploratory writing. Who knows where it will take you?

Alison Jones is the Founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing and host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast. Formerly Director of Innovation Strategy at Palgrave Macmillan, she now works with business leaders and entrepreneurs to help them clarify their thinking and communicate more effectively.

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Prioritizing Employee Well-Being As A Leader

How encouraging connection can help

By Felicity Dwyer, felicitydwyer.com

Pressure

and uncertainty are realities in many of today’s workplaces and can affect the well-being of leaders themselves.

Leaders may be dealing with geopolitical factors outside their control that impact the economic and business climate. And there will be day-to-day business challenges to navigate. And external pressures can affect employees, who may feel insecure or overworked. Both leaders and team members may experience stress and a lack of balance.

The negative impact on a business of a lack of well-being is extensive, for example, it can lead to:

1. Poor decision-making

Pressure and uncertainty can make both managers and employees feel unsafe. People can react by going into a fight or flight mode where small requests

can feel like significant threats. The physiological reactions to pressure make it harder to make clear and rational decisions.

2. Poor performance

Employees who don’t feel physically or mentally well are not going to perform at their best. And putting further pressure on them is likely to make things worse, leading to…

3. Absenteeism

If people are too unwell to come to work, this is not only bad for the business but puts additional stress on coworkers. This can lead to a downward spiral of pressure, de-motivation, and poor performance across a team.

Given the risk to a business of poor mental or physical health issues, it’s important for leaders to prioritize the well-being of

their people, at all levels of an organization.

How Encouraging Connection Can Help

I believe one way how leaders can support well-being within a team or organization is by focusing on connections. In my years of running peer learning groups and leadership workshops, I’m struck time and again by the relief people express when they share their feelings in a safe environment. “It’s not just me.” Sharing with others allows us to take a step back and see that our challenges are not necessarily personal failures, and to ask for help and ideas.

Leaders can help their teams and organizations by developing their own skills and mindset, so they can support connection and open communication within their teams.

Connect with Yourself and Your Impact as a Leader

A starting point for connection is to slow down a little and connect with what’s going on for you. What kind of thoughts and feelings are you experiencing? What strategies do you have in place to look after your own well-being? Given the importance of leaders as role models, it’s hard to be a positive influence if you are feeling disconnected from yourself. Look in the mirror first, connect with what is important to you, and be willing to show up as fully and honestly as you can at work.

Ask for, and be willing to receive feedback about the impact that you’re having on the team. For example, you might think that you are being very honest and direct in the way you communicate with your employees, but they

might experience you as rude or uncaring. Or you might think you are supportive and kind, but they experience a lack of clarity in what they are expected to do. This ambiguity can be a source of stress.

Connect with Your Team

Connect with your team members and find out how they are thinking and feeling. For example, do people feel inspired to achieve? Or do they feel that their work is never good enough?

Most people are motivated by a sense of achievement they want to go home with, feeling they’ve done a good day’s work. Conversely, they are demotivated by excessive expectations. Asking people to meet targets and goals that are unrealistic leads to a sense of failure. Set

people up for success with clear expectations and provide support if needed to help people manage their workload.

Recognize good work where you see it. Look for what people are doing right and express appreciation. Aim to give more positive feedback than negative, so that employees feel valued. This can contribute to their sense of self-worth and support their well-being. Take the time to sit down and listen to people, to understand their challenges and concerns. Sometimes, listening is all you need to do, to help people work through a difficult situation. And listening is also the best springboard to providing targeted support, so you can give employees what they truly need, and not what you may be assuming they need.

Connection Within the Team

Encourage team members to connect with each other.  We are social beings and need a sense of belonging. Psychologists from William James onwards have identified the extent to which feeling isolated or disconnected from others has a highly negative impact on mental health and well-being. Most of us want friendly faces and supportive relationships at work. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to keep an eye on team dynamics, to help mediate any conflict, and to model respectful communication yourself.

Allow space in team discussions to share feelings as well as thoughts. This doesn’t mean that team meetings turn into therapy sessions. But if you pretend that feelings don’t exist or matter, that doesn’t mean they go away. Instead, they can leak out in unhelpful behaviors, or employees can bottle them up, which can lead to a lack of physical or mental well-being.

There is a skill in both, allowing space for people to express negative feelings and knowing when to steer the conversation toward solutions. It’s important to acknowledge negative feelings before moving on to problem-solv ing. For example, by saying: “given the frustrations that you’re feeling at the moment, what might we be able to do to help manage the situation?”

When you understand the pressures your employees face, it’s easier to find ways to help them cope. Ensure priorities are clear so people work on the right tasks. Be clear about the standards required, so people aren’t working to a level of perfectionism that isn’t needed. Be mindful of personal issues in people’s lives, that might lead to a temporary reduction in productivity.

Signpost to Support

Make sure staff are clear about the help that’s available to them, such as employee assistance programs. Encourage them

to take up the support that’s available. Normalize discussions around how people can look after themselves and their well-being.

The Starting Point

Ultimately, there’s a lot you can do as a leader to support connection with your teams and organization. But it does need to start with taking an honest look at yourself. In my book, Crafting Connection, I explore three dimensions of connection: with yourself, with others, and with the wider communities to which you belong. The benefits of focusing on connection include bringing a greater sense of meaning and purpose into your life, as well as forging better relationships at work and beyond. These connections can support and sustain well-being in difficult times.

Felicity Dwyer is a facilitator, trainer, coach, and speaker, specializing in leadership and communication skills. She delivers programs for the UK’s two leading leadership and management institutes and facilitates group learning for organizations in the UK, Europe, and the USA. Felicity is the author of “Crafting Connection: Transform how you communicate with yourself and others”. Would you like to comment?

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