Long version:

Whether you admit it or not, the word resolution goes hand in hand with the start of a new year. Whether you make your resolutions in the form of business goals and priorities, or actual resolutions …. By mid to late January, you’re likely tired of forcing yourself to follow-through on what you set out just a few weeks ago.

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James could see that the generosity his 200-member accounting firm had shown their partners and managers — when times were good — simply had to change.

The firm could no longer support the expensive valet parking the partners blithely added to their expense reports or the extra charges for breakfast that showed up on their hotel bills. Especially when James knew personally that the hotel in question included a fine breakfast buffet with the cost of the room.

James, a founding partner of the firm and a habitually conservative spender, always allowed time to park in the same airport shuttle lot, whether he was taking his family on vacation or going on a necessary business trip. He fumed to himself as he reviewed expense reports from the firm’s tax meeting. The nine-dollar charges for breakfast were especially irritating, because he had noticed that those managers were not in the dining room while he was there himself enjoying the complementary buffet.

In good times, while struggling to retain employees who are constantly being lured away by other opportunities, it seemed picky to disallow those expenses. Now, with the decreased workload, the firm was overstaffed and he was struggling to avoid layoffs. Yet he suspected that his people would grumble at the now necessary restrictions.

Knowing how he had once struggled to overcome a reputation for insensitivity, he decided on a creative solution. He sent out a memo to all managers and partners explaining the need to cut expenses and asked them to each submit at least one idea that would save the company money.

In came suggestions to eliminate valet parking, to eat their meals provided by the hotel, to limit extra baggage charges (for golf clubs) when meeting at resort locations, to limit charges for laundry at hotels, etc. He compiled the suggestions and recirculated them with thanks. There was no resistance when those suggestions were instituted as the new company policy.

When I asked James how he was viewed in the firm, he said he thinks he is seen as a practical pragmatist and appropriate person. He did add wryly that a few people in the firm probably wished there was not a practical, pragmatic, appropriate person around to rain on their parade.

Free Mini-Course: Integrity — Use It or Lose It!

Free Mini-Course: Secrets for Turning Difficult Conversations into Amazing Opportunities for Cooperation and Success]

Are you challenging yourself to discover more effective and comfortable ways to use your non-renewable time resources? 

In trying to maintain a balance between your business and personal lives, you probably find it hard to avoid the distractions that rob you of your irreplaceable time. 

These ideas may help you think a little differently about the situation.

• Time has been used as a weapon to suppress, conform, and standardize human experience. Until the industrial revolution, people operated on their own natural rhythms. In factories, everyone needed to learn to operate synchronously. In the information age 21st century, perhaps it is appropriate to reevaluate our basic beliefs about time management. 
• Time is a gift when I grant it to myself or to others. I do not owe others my time, but I can choose to give it to them. I can also choose to grant myself the gift of time for myself. One woman described how she now takes out only the Christmas decorations she loves most, instead of taking them all out just to maintain tradition. 
• Time is a flow; I can’t get more of it, but I can do more with it. Ideas for doing more with time included interrupting automatic patterns like reading the newspaper or watching the news. Instead, just read headlines, stop reading about who killed whom, or watch non-commercial news. Access the magazine articles you really want on the internet instead of letting them clutter up your life. 
• I can take the path of least resistance, and then fully apply myself. I can pay attention to which 20% of my work produces 80% of my results, and focus on doing that instead of scattering my energy.

Here are a few simple things that make a difference. You can make a commitment to yourself to arrive for appointments a few minutes early instead of hurrying to arrive exactly on time. You can decide to stop speeding. 

Once you start to think about it, you can probably discover other the little things that make you feel as if you are in better control of your life. 

Time management is an important challenge for most people. Many problems arise when your priorities are based on other people’s needs instead of your own important values. 

Try eliminating 50% of the things you should do from your list, by delegating them or deciding that they are not important enough to do at all. Clear out your "shoulds" to make the time to do what you really love to do.

Learn more about communicating with integrity in The Integrity Course, an online, multimedia home-study course to help you say what you think without getting fired or losing your friends.

Richness is created from diversity. Sometimes survival depends on it. A series of exercises were once devised to simulate being lost on the moon, lost in the Arctic, lost at sea (in a lifeboat) or in some other life-threatening situation.

Teams were given a list of resources and told to choose those that would be most important for their survival. They needed to reach consensus about which few items they could keep. Their choices were compared with choices made by true experts in each situation.

Research showed the teams did much better when everyone contributed their knowledge. When they deferred to “experts” on the team, important information from less knowledgeable players was omitted and team scores declined. The livelier the discussions (arguments???), the better the team scores seem to be.

Some things you can do to make this work on your team are:

• Describe the differences of opinion or perspective that you notice
• Respectfully ask questions to clarify those differences
• Listen to the answers without unnecessary interruption
• Interrupt only to ask clarifying questions
• Do your best to understand the reasoning that leads to the differences
• If you disagree, challenge the idea and not the person
• Allow enough time to complete these important conversations.

Remember, when every one thinks alike important information is usually omitted. When everyone has the same skills tasks are completed in a lopsided way. When everything looks the same the view is boring. Go for the richness.

Communicate skillfully about sensitive subjects. Http://www.DareToSayIt.com Laurie Weiss, Ph.D., is a Master Certified Coach and communication expert. Dr. Weiss has spent 35 years helping clients resolve conflict in business and personal relationships. Email feedback@laurieweiss.com
[tags]Business Communication, Leadership, Making Decisions, Management, Managing Conflict, Self-Management, Telling the Truth[/tags]

Post-It Ideas That Stick! 222 Ingenious, Creative, Practical and Simply Preposterous Ways of Using Post-It Notes

Breaking Down the Project

As a consultant, and I teach my clients to consider every single little task necessary to accomplish particular goal, whether it’s painting a room, planning a vacation, changing jobs, or starting a business.

First, write each task on its own Post-it Note. Then, working backward from the goal, organize the notes on a large surface, repeatedly asking yourself, “What needs to be done before this task can be completed?”

Place tasks that need to be executed simultaneously in columns, and place those that need to be done sequentially in rows. Once the project is laid out, add dates and designate who is responsible for each item. As each task is completed, move its note to an area labeled “completed” so you can quickly see your progress.

Free Mini-Course: Integrity — Use It or Lose It!
Free Mini-Course: Secrets for Turning Difficult Conversations into Amazing Opportunities for Cooperation and Success

[tags]Self-Management, Management, Coaching[/tags]

As Samantha’s coach, I jumped to full alert. I had heard this story before. As the owner of a small computer servicing company, she had been so focused on covering her “off-hours” shifts that she had gotten into financial difficulty before by paying very high fees to other IT professionals.

In fact, she had resentfully gone without a paycheck for months at a time in order to keep her company afloat.

“What happened?”

“Once I agreed to pay him more than I could afford just to cover the shift, he told me he also wanted to be paid extra for every service call.”

“Why did you accept those conditions when you know you can’t afford them?”

“I KNOW he won’t accept the work unless I give in, and I really need the coverage. I’m covering too many shifts myself as it is. I’m SURE he’ll go away if I don’t do this. You know how hard it is for me to find anyone really qualified who is willing to do this kind of work.”

Samantha has all the information she needs to successfully manage the finances of her company. She has good advisors and a sound business plan. Yet she keeps undercutting herself and setting herself up for failure by making unrealistic agreements. And she justifies doing so by exaggerating what might happen if she stands up for herself.

So what is really going on here?

Samantha is afraid to negotiate. She refuses to take a stand that might irritate someone else. No matter how outrageous a request is, she is convinced that if she says no, the other party will walk away, leaving her without the services she needs.

Each time she makes an agreement with someone she feels like she loses and the other party wins. Intellectually she understands what a win-win agreement is, but she has never actually experienced a situation where both negotiators feel satisfied with the outcome.

Because of my background as a psychotherapist, I know that this belief system is not rational. Certainly her behavior does not look very rational. Both her beliefs and behavior are the result of experiences she had as a child.

Samantha and I have an agreement that I can identify therapy issues that come up in coaching. I already know that she grew up as a middle child who always had to defer to the needs of her older brother and younger sister. Her life experience was that her needs were not important and theirs were.

I suspected, and asked her, if she felt like she used to feel when she was a child (whose needs were not important) when she made the latest untenable financial arrangement. She readily admitted that she did.

Once Samantha realized that she was re-enacting an old situation where she actually was powerless, she decided that she needed to do something different.

She didn’t have the courage to reopen the negotiation with the man she had hired. Instead she found someone else who would cover the extra shifts for a reasonable fee. She rarely scheduled the one who overcharged and eventually he moved on.

Samantha has become alert to situations where her old beliefs interfere with her business success. She knows she is still vulnerable and we are still working on developing her negotiation skills.

Coaching Tip: People make non-rational decisions over and over again, based their early life experiences. When you know WHY you keep doing something that is against your better interests, it will be easier to change that non-productive behavior.

Is this you? “I don’t need therapy, but I could use some advice about…”

[tags]Management Development, Managing Conflict Managing Fear, Self-Management, Management, Business Communication, Coaching Conflict, Difficult Communication[/tags]

Ellen would much rather help Angelique be successful at her job than to fire her, but things have not been going well, and she is feeling like she is being set up to be Angelique’s mother.

Actually, the two women are close in age. Ellen is 34 and Angelique is 28. Angelique has been on the unit for a year and a half, but Ellen has only been supervising her directly for a few months. Ellen’s frustration began when she noticed that the social worker frequently took took time off.

“She is on a salary, and has some flexibility, but she is expected to be here forty hours a week. She was coming and going whenever she pleased. She even asked for a week off without pay because she had used up all her available sick leave and vacation time. It’s hospital policy to grant that when it is requested, so I gave her the time, but the situation isn’t getting any better.”

“I have told her that she needs to call me if she is taking time off, but sometimes she doesn’t even do that. After she ignored my warning, I followed up with a written reprimand and placed it in her file. She cried then, and promised to do better, but she hasn’t.”

“I have even told her that she is inviting me to micro-manage her, but I am reluctant to cause her the embarrassment of having to punch the time clock, when none of the other workers at her level do that. Now she wants me to let her work at another job on weekends, so she can earn the right to some additional time off.”

Manager or Mother?

As Ellen and I discussed the situation, I learned that Ellen was already micro-managing Angelique. Whenever they had a supervision session, Ellen was taking extra pains to make certain that Angelique understood exactly what hours she was expected to be on the unit. We both laughed at the absurdity of helping someone with a Master’s degree to read a basic time schedule.

Ellen admitted ruefully, “I guess I am acting like her mother, after all.”

When we looked at how Angelique had invited Ellen’s motherly response, it was obvious that Angelique was acting like a child who had not learned to respect limits and boundaries. Ellen, as the person in charge of keeping the unit running well, kept telling Angelique what the boundaries were (when she was expected to be on the job). When Angelique did not use this information, Ellen was first surprised and then increasingly frustrated.

When Angelique’s response to discipline (being written up) was tears, Ellen felt an impulse to protect her and not cause her further embarrassment. Instead she tried to be a “nice” parent rather than a “critical” parent. When that didn’t work either, Ellen asked for coaching.

It’s a Power Struggle

It isn’t unusual for a manager and an employee to get into the kind of power struggle that Ellen is experiencing with Angelique. It usually starts when one party, often the employee, has unfinished business with a parent. It is especially common for people who are still in power struggles with parents to get into power struggles with authority figures.

Managers and supervisors are readily available authority figures.

Instead of seeing the manager as just another person whose job happens to be to give others instructions about how to do their jobs, the Angeliques of the world see managers differently. They see managers the way children often see their parents: as people with whom they need to struggle to prove that they are independent and autonomous.

Struggling with parents is a normal life activity; we must all go through it on the way to experiencing ourselves as independent, autonomous adults. However, if we experienced either weak, ineffective parents, or overbearing parents, we did not have a satisfactory experience of resolving this normal rite of passage.

Being naturally tenacious and growth-oriented, we keep trying to complete this normal developmental task of childhood and adolescence.

Supervisors at work, and significant others in private life, are the prime targets for our need to establish our independence by resolving our power struggles. In order to resolve a power struggle, though, you need to create one. Angelique had managed to create one with Ellen.

Creating Appropriate Limits

Ellen, like most managers, is confused about what to do. Although she does not want to be Angelique’s mother, she does need to provide firm, matter-of-fact consequences for any team member who ignores important rules.

When Angelique experiences the discipline she probably did not get as a child, she can decide to give up the struggle and act like a mature adult in the workplace. Whether Ellen likes it or not, she probably will not be able to help Angelique become a productive member of the unit without providing these consequences.

As I coached Ellen, she confirmed that this was probably the situation. She says she knows that Angelique grew up in a wealthy, overindulgent family. In fact, Angelique’s father purchased a house for her to live in, and she has few financial responsibilities.

Ellen mused, “She even dresses like a college student. She has trouble setting appropriate limits for some of the patients she works with, too. Is this another sign of her need for limits?”

Once the situation became clear, Ellen created a plan. She decided to warn Angelique that if she does not follow the unit’s guidelines about working hours and appropriate notification, this month, she will have to punch the time clock next month, and will have written notice warning her of termination placed in her file. If she does not follow procedures with the time clock, she will then be terminated.

Ellen was relieved. “I want to get out of the power struggle and supervise her appropriately. She is certainly intelligent enough to keep her job if she wants it.”

Learn more about communicating with integrity in The Integrity Course, an online, multimedia home-study course to help you say what you think without getting fired or losing your friends.
[tags]Management, Supervision, Business Communication, Coaching, Conflict, Difficult Communication[/tags]

If you read this blog, you probably do your best to communicate constructively. When I read this about eight years ago I had already written extensively about win-win communication. I was already practicing much of what Thomas suggests here. Still, this material had a huge impact on me.

When I used his material to remind myself about how I wanted to act, I felt as if my effectiveness increased. Not only that, when I did NOT comment on negative behavior, it seemed to melt away anyhow.

I still believe that confronting (literally helping people to face) negative patterns is useful in some situations. Thomas Leonard thought differently. Read this and decide for yourself.

The Top 10 Ways to Be Unconditionally Constructive, 100% of the Time

1. Point out the person’s strengths, not their weaknesses.

2. Point out what was good that was behind a person’s actions, even if the result didn’t work out.

3. Empathize, then endorse and reinforce, repeatedly.

4. Make the person feel normal for whatever they are experiencing.

5. Acknowledge the person, accurately and without puffery.

6. Don’t refer to the failure/error, ever.

7. Tell them who you are for them (a fan, a supporter, a source of
business/love, etc.).

8. Don’t compare today’s performance/progress with yesterday’s.

9. Focus/speak to the spirit of the other person, not just their
actions or achievements.

10. Have others who are always unconditionally constructive with you.

About the Submitter:
Submitted by the late Thomas J. Leonard, whose work can be seen on the web at http://thomasleonard.com/

Copyright 1997, 98, 99, by Coach U, all rights reserved.

This content my be forwarded in full, with copyright/contact/creation information intact, without specific permission, when used only in a not-for-profit format. If any other use is desired, permission in writing from Coachville.com is required.

Learn more about communicating with integrity in The Integrity Course, an online, multimedia home-study course to help you say what you think without getting fired or losing your friends.
[tags]Self-Management, Telling the Truth, Management, Business Communication, Coaching, Emotional Intelligence[/tags]

Professional coach come from a variety of different backgrounds, and can assist you to identify and reach different objectives.

A coach with a background of business consulting (with or without an MBA) may have realized that just providing expert advice about a business problem isn’t enough. Although a client may know what to do about a problem, s/he may often have difficulty implementing the solution without ongoing support. The coach provides this support.

A coach skilled in career development may help an unemployed client through the job search process. This may involve helping them identify target companies, write a resume, and learn to present themselves well in an interview.

A life transitions coach may focus on helping her clients discover the unique work path that will help them feel truly alive and successful, instead of on just finding employment.

A financial coach may be a financial planner who provides ongoing support to help you implement the plan you have designed together.

A personal or life coach may come from a background in the helping professions and hold a professional degree, certification or license in psychology, social work, or counseling. S/he may also be a senior member of any field who has broad life experience and training and a commitment to the success of the client.

Choosing a Professional Coach

Choose your coach with as much care as you would choose any other member of your professional support team. First consider the specific support you need and ask your associates whether they know of anyone who can help. A surprising number of people already work with coaches. The expertise of the coach you are considering and your comfort with the person who offers this very personal relationship are both important factors.

You should expect your coach to be committed to helping you define and achieve your own goals. Your coach should help you examine possible courses of action, help you identify and solve potential problems, and support you enthusiastically every step of the way.

Laurie Weiss, Ph.D., Master Certified Coach, is a partner in Empowerment Systems, offering personal and professional development coaching, for women in business. 303-794-5379.

laurieweiss@empowermentsystems.com

Laurie offers a free thirty minute introductory session to readers who mention this article.

[tags]Self-Management,Management,Management Development,Managing Change,Life Transitions,Business Communication,Coaching[/tags]

A week later, during her next coaching call, Linda reported that she had managed to cut 20 hours off her workweek, and was feeling almost human again.

The work was getting done and she was ready to start thinking about changing other aspects of her life to bring it into a better balance. She decided to start on some of the self-assessment and personal development programs I had suggested that she consider using. I recommended that Linda choose only one program to focus on instead of trying to do them all.

 If you enjoyed this article, The Integrity Course will provide you with much more information that I believe will be useful to you.