Susan Scott's Blog, page 75

2015 Workplace Predictions: Out With the Old, In with the New

Organizations will replace outdated best practices in the coming year; results will include increased flexibility, a higher importance put on training, and an increased willingness to lead

SEATTLE (January 7, 2015) – The workplace underwent significant changes in 2014, with a shift towards eliminating “old school” management practices, embracing more open work environments and increasing in flexibility on the job.  As predicted at the start of the year by Fierce, Inc., leadership development and training experts, these changes have included less hierarchical titles across organizations, more flexibility beyond the standard 8-5 work hours, and a drop in the traditional performance review process.

As trainers and consultants to organizations ranging from Fortune-level business to startups and non-profits around the globe, Fierce, Inc. has seen their clients, CEOs and company leaders, take an inherent focus on people much more than in previous years. While significant changes occurred in 2014, Fierce predicts 2015 will prove to be even more groundbreaking.

“As organizations across the globe continue to shift to a workplace that focuses less on outdated best practices and more on people, not only are the employees going to benefit, but the entire company will” said Halley Bock, President and CEO of Fierce, Inc. “We’ve seen for years through working with companies of all scopes that a “one size fits all” model is ineffective, especially with today’s millennials.” We encourage leaders to engage in conversations from the top down, as communication continues to be the cornerstone of a healthy and productive workplace. Our clients who have embraced these conversations are seeing incredible results, from happy employees to an increase in the bottom line.

Based on the organization’s vast data and experience with organizations. Fierce, Inc. predictions for 2015 include:

Organizations will increase flexibility for employees, along with an emphasis on balancing work and life. In a study conducted earlier this year by Fierce, an astounding 70 percent of respondents cited work/life imbalance as a major cause of stress. Respondents noted that these stress levels have negatively impacted their health, including depression (34.5%), weight gain (45%) and/or loss of sleep (45%). This impact not only affects the quality of life of employees, but ultimately their value within the organization. The good news is that more and more leaders understand the connection between happy, rested employees and output. 2015 will be a progressive year in this regard, with more companies offering flex hours, telecommuting and unlimited, or increased, paid time off.

Training beyond job-specific roles will increase as older generations of workers are replaced by Millennials. As boomers continue to exit the workplace in droves, there is a great deal of institutional knowledge that will need to be passed down. While keeping Millennials happy continues to be important, there is a need to retain not only the knowledge, but the professionalism and effectiveness of these older workers. These aspects can’t be passed down in an instruction manual. The value placed on mentorship will play an increasingly important role in 2015, along with organizations putting more learning tools in place that go beyond the job at hand, and focus instead on being a better employee.

Company leaders will more deeply partner with learning and training departments to train their own teams. While leadership training in any form is beneficial, training delivered by a colleague, your boss or the department head can be highly impactful. Fierce has seen a big shift not only the willingness but the proactive requests from leaders within organizations for the tools they can use to better advance their teams. This increase in managerial courage is one that will take over in 2015, as management wants to be more hands-on and involved in the process.

For more information, visit fierceinc.com.

Fierce predictions were released via press on January 7th, 2015.

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Fierce Tip of the Week: Have Grace with Yourself

It is the first full week of 2015. So I ask: How much pressure have you put on yourself for this week, this month, this year? It is the season. This time of year tends to be packed full of new goals, resolutions, and desires to be different.

Are you trying to be healthier? Be more on time? Do what you say you will? Go see more of the world? Be happier with the everyday moments? Whatever it is, you aren’t alone.

Whatever your goal is, treasure it. And ask yourself: How realistic is it? What will get in my way?

Break it down, so that you can see progress and have small wins. We shouldn’t expect things to change overnight, so why do you expect yourself to?

This week’s tip is to have grace with yourself and make your goals realistic.

Having grace is not easy. When you start to be hard on yourself, step back and take inventory on what you have accomplished. Ask yourself if your goal is still truly what you want. It is an important step to consistently evaluate goals and be able to decipher their attainability versus the inevitable setbacks.

Is having grace with yourself something that you need to work on? How are you approaching this conversation with yourself this year?

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Fierce Resources: The Puzzle of Motivation

This week’s fierce resource was originally posted on Ted.com and the talk was delivered by Dan Pink.

The Puzzle of Motivation addresses the idea of incentives and what motivates each of us on an individual basis. As we begin a new year, think about what motivates you. What motivates your team, spouse, children, peers, or friends? If you know the answer, how will you put it to action? If you don’t, think about what you will do to create movement.

What is it that gets you from thinking to taking action?

“There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators that we think are a natural part of business do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.”

Click here to watch the full TEDTalk. 

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2014 Year End: Kaleidoscopes. Magical. Fireworks in a tube.

Do you remember the first time you looked into a kaleidoscope as a child? What a pretty picture. And then you turned it and the magic happened, one piece shifted, an explosion of color. Complete transformation. And it’s impossible to return to the picture you saw before.

The epiphany that launched Fierce occurred when I was reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in which a man is asked, “How did you go bankrupt?” He replies, “Gradually, then suddenly.” My epiphany, having had over ten thousand hours of conversations with leaders, was that our careers, our companies, our relationships, and indeed, our very lives succeed or fail, gradually then suddenly, one conversation at a time.

Business is fundamentally an extended conversation — with employees, customers and the unknown future emerging around us. What gets talked about in a company, how it gets talked about, and who gets invited to the conversation determines what will happen. Or won’t happen. Conversations provide clarity or confusion. Invite cross-boundary collaboration and cooperation or add concertina wire to the walls between well-defended fiefdoms. Inspire us to tackle our toughest challenges or stop us dead in our tracks wondering why we bothered to get out of bed this morning.

It’s time to change the conversation. In fact, it’s crucial. Here’s why: Our most valuable currency is not money. Nor is it intelligence, attractiveness or fluency in three-letter acronyms. It is relationship.  It is emotional capital. The 2002 Nobel prize for economics was awarded to a psychology professor at Princeton whose studies prove beyond any doubt that we behave emotionally first, rationally second. Let’s translate that to you, your career, and your organization. Each of us accumulates or loses emotional capital, building relationships we enjoy or endure with colleagues, bosses, customers and vendors one conversation at a time.

And what about closer to home? A friend confessed that he was often frustrated that his spouse seemingly needed to talk, yet again, about the same thing they talked about last weekend. And it often had something to do with their relationship. He wondered, “Why are we talking about this again? I thought we settled this. Couldn’t we just have one huge conversation about our relationship and then coast for a year or two?”

Eventually, it dawned on him. This ongoing, robust conversation I have been having with my wife is not about the relationship. The conversation is the relationship. If the conversation stops, all possibilities for the relationship become smaller and all possibilities for the individuals in the relationship become smaller, until one day we overhear ourselves in midsentence, making ourselves smaller in every encounter, behaving as if we are just the space around our shoes, engaged in yet another three-minute conversation so empty of meaning it crackles.

Incremental degradation — if we compromise at work or at home, if we lower the standards about how often we talk, what we talk about, and most important, the degree of authenticity we bring to our conversations – it’s a slow and deadly slide. Meanwhile, the organization’s strategy keeps stalling. Cross-boundary collaboration isn’t happening. Leaders play whack-a-mole, micro-managing versus leading. Original thinking is happening elsewhere. Employees have little or no emotional connection to the organization and its customers. Relationships steadily disintegrate, one failed or missing conversation at a time.

At such a crossroads, most leaders review measurable goals, economic indicators, cash flow projections, process and procedures. Staggering amounts of money are dedicated to reviewing basic business processes while employees long for one galvanizing conversation. Just one. I know. I’ve talked with thousands of them. It is the unusual leader who turns his or her attention to the conversations of the company and yet, our leverage point, our fulcrum, is the conversation in which we are engaged at any given moment in time. While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a company, a relationship or a life, any single conversation can.

Think about what is happening in the news. So much tragedy, pain, loss. Consider the embarrassment that is the U.S. Congress, highly intelligent men and women who cannot, will not collaborate, who apparently would rather be right, than get it right for all of us.

A leader’s job is to engineer epiphanies one conversation at a time. Conversations that reveal we are capable of original thought. Intelligent, spirited conversations that provide clarity and impetus for change.

How do you begin? By recognizing that a careful conversation is a failed conversation because it merely postpones the conversation that wants and needs to take place. Don’t linger on the edges. Small confusions are easy to clear up and can lull you into thinking you’ve addressed your subject in a comprehensive way. Instead, ask yourself: What is the deepest issue in this confusion? Speak toward it, with firmness and concentration.

Epiphanies aren’t granted to those who are sleep-walking through the manual or who pitch a self-serving agenda. Instead, epiphanies seek out those who give the purity of their attention to the next words. In 2015, let’s engage ourselves there, and tell the truth as much as we can. There is something deep within us that responds to those who level with us, who don’t suggest our compromises for us. You may try to say something trivial and find that you can’t do it. You must speak directly to the heart of the issue. You must warm your heart, open your mind and listen intently to those who see things differently.

Pushing our own limits brings exhilaration. Our edge can be a growing edge. Or it can be an edge from which we topple. The fall won’t kill us. Avoiding the topic could.

So, to supply you with material for fierce conversations of your own, gather your team together and ask:

What’s the most important thing we should be talking about today?
What do we believe is impossible for us to do, that if it were possible, would change everything?
If nothing changes, what’s likely to happen?

And on a personal note: What’s the conversation out there with your name on it? The one you’ve been avoiding for days, weeks, months, years? Who is it with and what’s the topic?

No one has to change, but everyone has to have the conversation. When the conversation is real, the change occurs before the conversation has ended.

And don’t try to have important conversations via e-mail. The most powerful communications technology any of us will ever have is eye contact. The next is voice. Dead last is words on a page or a screen. So, how about you look into my baby greens, I’ll look into your baby browns. That way, we’ll see one another a whole lot clearer.

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Fierce Tip of the Week: Make a Commitment

It is that time of year. Whether you want to be healthier, travel more, or procrastinate less, many of us have thought about what we want in 2015. After all, it is less than 3 days away!

So I ask: Do you have time devoted to reflect on and solidify your goals? 

This week I am hosting a gathering with some of my closest friends to do some goal exercises together and create vision boards. This way, we can all support each other as we embark on the things we want.

Maybe you don’t want something that formal or public. Find what works best for you.

This week’s tip is to write down your goals for 2015 and commit to them. 

Mark the time in your calendar to do this. It is that important.

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Fierce Resources: Tapping the Potential of Boardroom Diversity -Fierce Leadership Blog

This week’s Fierce Resource was originally posted on Huffingtonpost.com and was written by Debra Walton.

Tapping the Potential of Boardroom Diversity highlights the need for acquiring diversity among leadership teams and boardroom members. Although a simple idea, the complexity of finding the right mix can be a challenge. While this article focuses on gender, the idea is to gather multiple realities. Think: millennial, boomer, new hire, or tenured employee… you get the picture.

So, how does your team or organization gather multiple perspectives or diversity of thought? What could you do differently to gain variety?

“Businesses should no longer see equal opportunity as a matter of choice, but as a matter of good governance. The female perspective is not necessarily better or more insightful than the male perspective, but it is different.”

Read the full article.

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Holding Back? 3 Tips to Foster More Feedback

As we close out 2014, here’s one of our top blogs of all time. It serves as a great reminder to stay present and give feedback, even if it’s just a quick gesture of appreciation.

Feedback. We all want it, and we rarely get enough of it.

Feedback taps into our emotional desire to be seen. We crave it.

When I feel like I am not giving or receiving enough feedback, I check in. Sometimes I am scared – about what the end result will be. However, I know if I don’t hear or say what I need to – I am missing an opportunity.

And sometimes it truly surprises me. During one of my regular one-on-one meetings with a team member, I asked for feedback. She immediately responded with, “I want more feedback.” My response, “Perfect – let’s talk about that.” We then had a conversation about what feedback meant and looked like for each of us. Sometimes it is that easy to take the first step.

Here are three tips to create more feedback around you:

1.  You never know until you ask.

Like I shared, the old adage is true here. Ask for feedback. Don’t assume that it will magically appear on your office desk or your kitchen table for that matter. It is nice when it does, but hoping is never a strategy.

Ask the people most important to you for feedback – the good, the bad, the ugly. It is all a gift. It does start with you here.

2.  Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Get curious about what feedback means to people around you. Ask about people’s preferences.

In meetings with team members, ask them specifically how they prefer to receive feedback. Some may want group critique – some private. Some may want verbal – some written. Make sure to listen and deliver it the way they prefer.

3.  Affirm me, please.

Positive feedback is often overlooked. Don’t hold it in. Go there.

Give your team members positive feedback and make it specific. In our Fierce Feedback model, we emphasize the importance of giving concrete, specific examples of what is done well. Instead of saying “You did a great job at that meeting” – be pointed and say “The way you handled the concern about our delivery time was very thoughtful and showed you did your research. Great work.” See the difference? 

There is a lot to gain when we have more feedback conversations – both personally and company-wide. In fact, research by Gallup shows that companies who implement regular employee feedback have turnover rates that are 14.9% lower than for employees who receive no feedback.

How are you going to start?

This blog was originally published October 1st, 2014 on the Fierce blog.

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Fierce Tip of the Week: Celebrate This Year

And here we are, only one more week until 2015.

What are you most proud of in 2014? What do you want to stop doing? What do you want to keep doing?

If you are anything like me, I tend to check something off of my to-do list, smile, and then move right on to the next thing. It isn’t that I am not proud. It is just that I always have so many things I want to accomplish and do. Can you relate?

Because of my tendency, I have to intentionally take time to celebrate and reflect on accomplishments – with myself, my team, and my family.

This week’s Fierce tip is to get a group of people – from work or home – together and talk about three things you are most proud of that you accomplished in 2014. Congratulate each other.

As we teach at Fierce, the conversation is the relationship. So if you have supportive and celebratory conversations, you are building supportive and celebratory relationships.

I want to know. What are you most proud of?

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Fierce Resources: 8 Ways to Be a Courageous Leader

This week’s Fierce resource was originally published on Inc.com and was written by Steve Tobak.

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to

sit down and listen.”

-Winston Churchill

What does courage look like to you? 8 Ways to Be a Courageous Leader identifies attributes of leaders who step outside the boundaries and look at what is real and what needs to be said. We all struggle with bringing up an issue that may cause our company time and money, and it’s important to raise the issue. More times than not, you will be saving your company in the long run.

So, I ask: What does courage look like to you? What will you do that is more courageous in 2015?

“Follow your gut when everyone tells you you’re crazy. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin spent years trying to get anyone who would listen to invest in their idea of a dedicated search company. They never gave up. Entrepreneurs do that all the time.”

Read the full article here.

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Be Fierce: Step into 2015 with Courage

“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You harden if you are not stretching. While most of us think about stretching as a physical activity, we must also stretch our brains, our hearts, and our perspectives. Only when we do this, can we fully shift. It’s about going to your core – figuratively.

So I ask: How do you plan to stretch yourself in 2015? Here are two simple steps to help kick off your new year.

1. Choose your one thing. As Susan Scott, Founder of Fierce, Inc., states: Choose your one thing. “Let’s say that in the new year you want to win a promotion, find love, be a better person, complete a significant project, get healthy. Of course, if you don’t know what you want, this is a non-starter, so you’ll need to have a fierce conversation with yourself and may have to trick yourself with the question – If I DID know the one thing I most want to accomplish, what would it be? Not what you think you should want, what you really want.” So yes, you need to commit to one thing.

Tip: Choose your one thing. Be specific. Then ask yourself: What will distract you from it? Write those things and be prepared to overcome them. Brainstorm your techniques.

2. Commit to the conversations.

As you step into the new year, there are many people who will be integral to your success and achievements. There is no getting around it. You will need to have conversations. Don’t stall having the ones that are most critical. Fierce is about tackling your toughest challenge today. Today is the critical word – it is not tomorrow or when the timing feels right. Don’t wait until the music is just right, or you feel the person is most ready. Commit to having the conversation.

Tip: Write the top three conversations with the people you need to have in January to move your goal forward. Be specific. Schedule them.

There it is. Two small steps that you can take to kick off your new year. So, what’s your one thing? What conversations do you need to have? I want to hear about it.

And as we move into 2015, I raise a glass and say: Cheers to being Fierce!

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