Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Be Productive First Thing in the Morning

Once upon a time, I was a morning person.  Good thing that was back in high school, when I had to be in class at 7:30AM!  In all seriousness, though, mornings have become more difficult for me since having two young children.  However, I recognize the necessity of starting the day off right.  I’ve found that the earlier I attack my work, the more productive and satisfying my day will ultimately be.  Here are 5 tips I have incorporated:

Start on Time

Obviously, it’s critical to show up to the office on time if you have a clock-watcher boss who is taking notes.  But even if you work for yourself, keeping to a regular start time ensures that the day runs according to your schedule and that you aren’t in a frazzled state of mind.  This means leaving ample time for your commute, coffee, etc.  If you are the type of person who takes a little while to get going once in your office, consider sitting down a bit earlier.

Focus Mentally

 A friend of mine takes a 30 minute yoga class every day before work.  In my opinion, this is the perfect strategy to calm yourself sufficiently to give your job your full attention.  Women in particular are not as good at separating home life and work life as men are.  So if you find yourself rushing into work like a chicken with its head cut off, close your eyes and take some deep breaths before you turn on your computer.

For more tips, have a look at the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

 

How to Be More Optimistic at Work

I was born a pessimist.  From a young age, my thoughts have gravitated to the glass half-empty mentality, negatively impacting my own life satisfaction and my relationships with others.

Over the last several years, though, I’ve been working to change my outlook.  Dr. Noelle Nelson, the author of Make More Money By Making Your Employees Happy, thinks this is definitely a good thing.

Research from Yale University found that being optimistic adds an additional 7.6 years on average to our lives, which is more than low blood pressure, low cholesterol, healthy weight and regular exercise. From the Harvard School of Public Health, study results are similar: the most optimistic people had 50 percent less risk of a first heart attack when compared with the least optimistic.

“Other studies show optimists experience significantly less stress, less depression, and heal faster than pessimists,” notes Dr. Nelson. “Not only that, but optimists outperform their own abilities. You may be good at something, but if you’re an optimist, you’ll be better at it. No matter what you undertake, you’ll experience more success and joy by the simple decision to become an optimist.”

So how can you become more optimistic at work?  For recommendations, please visit Intuit's Fast Track blog.

 

Unconscious Bias is a Reality

Imagine that your employee has been talking about continuing his or her education, and is considering going back to grad school. You have a managerial position open for which this person would be perfect, but in the back of your mind, you worry that he or she will either leave or be overly distracted with school. So you create other reasons why another employee is better for the role, and leave this person as is.

This is just one example of the new workplace bias.

Bias Goes from Conscious to Unconscious

Bill Shackelford is the president of diversity consulting firm IEC Enterprises and the author of Minority Recruiting: Building the Strategies and Relationships for Effective Diversity Recruiting. In his article for Workforce Diversity Network, Shackelford says an understanding of how bias creeps into today’s enlightened workplace starts with an expanded definition, which is: 

Bias: “Intentional and unintentional, conscious and subconscious, attitudes, behaviors and actions that have a negative and differential impact on segments of the society, or favor one segment of the society.”       

As Shackelford points out, most employers have adopted fair employment practices designed to manage the classic forms of bias (i.e., intentional and conscious). Examples of intentional and conscious bias would be actions designed to intentionally discriminate against individuals because of their race, gender or ethnicity. Refusing to hire people because of their race or promote people because of their gender are classic examples from the past.  

But today’s most common forms of bias are more subtle, as in the case listed above. Decisions to hire and promote are often not based solely on the qualifications of the candidates, but are influenced by subjective criteria. When these subjective criteria relate to fixed diversity dimensions (race, gender, age, sexual orientation, etc.), the resulting decision is inherently biased.

Learn to combat unconscious bias over at the AMEX Open Forum.

Are You Selling Yourself as Well as You Could?

For several years, I’ve been recommending that people focus on being able to succinctly and effectively highlight their accomplishments because others (i.e. recruiters, managers, partners) will judge them mostly based on their past track record of success.

It turns out that’s not exactly the case.

What You Could Do is Better Than What You Have Done

According to Heidi Grant Harvorson at the Harvard Business Review, when we are deciding who to hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we don’t like the Big Thing nearly as much as we like the Next Big Thing. We have a bias — one that operates below our conscious awareness — leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone who has already achieved it.

In a series of studies conducted by Stanford’s Zakary Tormala and Jayson Jia, and Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, it is clear that human beings demonstrate an unconscious preference for potential over actual success.

In an experiment related to the workplace, hiring managers evaluated two equally impressive candidates who varied on one factor:  one had two years of relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership achievement, and the other had no relevant experience but scored highly on a test of leadership potential.  Interestingly, the evaluators believed the candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at the new company than the candidate with a proven record of leadership ability. The researchers documented this preference in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.

For more, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

It's Time to Tip Over Those Sacred Cows!

I have to admit, when my colleague Jake Breeden told me the title of his new book, I had to look up what it meant.  But once I did, it made perfect sense.  Jake’s book, Tipping Sacred Cows, is about the hidden beliefs that keep us from achieving our true potential.  While they are mostly virtuous, they can also be dangerous because they are rarely questioned.  Some of them really resonated with me, and I bet they will with you as well:

Balance

This value is often misconstrued to mean constant compromise, but bold leaders must make tough choices. And when we as leaders move from doing one thing well to many things poorly, our organizations suffer. Leaders who hide behind balance as an excuse to avoid taking a stand for an unpopular position do themselves and their companies a disservice. In short, when balance encourages us to say yes to everything all at once, we end up saying no to leadership.

Collaboration

Too often collaboration is automatic, meaning that we work on something together by default instead of making the purposeful, conscious choice to do so.  The default state of working should be working alone; leaders should collaborate only when they must.  Depending on your role, that may mean a significant part of your job requires collaboration.  But ask yourself the question: does this work really need more than me?

Creativity

This value can backfire because of a leader’s need to add her own ideas.  Adopting someone else’s best practice doesn’t give you the same sense of pride and accomplishment as generating a new best practice.  Creating a needless innovation feels better to the innovator than does creating nothing at all. In such cases, creativity has stopped being a tool used in service of larger goals, and has become the very personal source of a leader’s narcissistic needs.

For more sacred cows you should consider tipping, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Advice for Those Struggling to Stay Motivated

Over at Intuit's Fast Track blog, we received the following reader question:

Here’s the question, with our experts’ responses below:

Do you have any tips for concentration or productivity in the office? I’m more than a year into my first full-time position in marketing, and I’m either experiencing burnout or a newfound case of ADD. My company is small, and sometimes I get to the office and am alone for several hours of the day. I seem to get sucked into checking blogs, wanting to sleep, texting friends, thinking about coffee breaks, etc. I put off my work, thinking that I’ll tackle it later that night, but when I get home, I am so exhausted that I barely move from the couch.

When I do have a deadline, I am able to meet it, but it’s not because I work ahead – more like I rush until the end. The work my company does is very meaningful, but I just stopped caring recently and don’t know what to do. I want to be successful, productive and energized but it seems my mind and body are fighting against me. How do you stay motivated?

Here's my answer:

Although you ask about productivity, I’m going to focus your last statement on motivation because I believe this is the crux of your issue.  Getting motivated isn’t easy in today’s professional world, which is stressful and chaotic even in organizations with meaningful missions.  However, the good news is that your own level of motivation is in your control, and you have the power to change it.

The lowest hanging fruit here is to read (or re-read) a few of the great business classics – I recommend Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People/How to Stop Worrying and Start Living and Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – and posting some of your favorite inspirational quotes in your cube or office. Share the concepts that resonate with you most with others, and you’ll be surprised how much easier it is to believe in them yourself.

Sign up for any personal development or leadership courses your company offers, and stay busy so you don’t have time to sit around and think about your lack of motivation, or waste time, which just makes you feel worse.  If you haven’t already done a self-assessment or thought carefully about what you really want out of work and how you can get it, now’s the time.  Once you formulate a big picture, don’t let it out of your mind.  Do something every week, like mastering a new skill or taking on a new project, that brings you one step closer to your overall career goal, and celebrate your little successes along the way.

There will still be days when you just can’t get it together.  When that happens, be patient and wait for the mood to pass. Pretend it’s your first day of a new job, and imagine approaching every task with confidence, eagerness, and enthusiasm. You can do the same thing by imagining that this is the best day of your working life.  When you get home from work, you are still full of energy because you have accomplished so much and touched so many people.  Keeping these types of thoughts at the forefront will help you battle the malaise that inevitably creeps into everyday life.

For more great tips from the other experts, check out the full post.

How to Avoid Self-Destructing on Foreign Soil

On April 20, 2010, the oil rigger Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry.  After the explosion killed or injured 28 workers and released 4.9 million barrels of crude oil, the gushing wellhead was finally capped. British Petroleum (BP), the multi-billion dollar oil and gas company, was indisputably responsible.

Instead of expressing true remorse and compassion for the disaster, then CEO Tony Hayward committed a series of cultural gaffes that enraged U.S. citizens and lawmakers. For instance, well before the Gulf crisis was resolved, Hayward proclaimed that he “wanted his life back.” Then, as efforts to plug the leak continued feverishly in the U.S., he casually took in a sailing race with his son off the Isle of Wight in the UK.

Hayward’s American Disconnect

This behavior was consistent with Hayward’s work/life balance philosophy.  He once said publicly that he didn’t work weekends and took all of his holidays no matter what.  What the British Hayward failed to realize was that most Americans don’t necessarily agree with this point of view. It is the American way to take responsibility for one’s mistakes and do everything you can to remedy a bad situation. Until the problem is solved, free time does not exist. Since Americans were affected most when Deepwater Horizon exploded, many wanted to see Tony Hayward on a boat participating in the clean-up.

Although much of his business is conducted in the U.S., Hayward did not demonstrate strong global competence. His lack of understanding regarding how the crisis would be received in the U.S. led to a backward slide of goodwill and a plunging stock price for BP. That summer, it would also cost him his job.

To find out how you can avoid a Tony Hayward-like PR catastrophe, read my advice over at the AMEX Open Forum.

 

Imagine That You Are Free

When my grandfather passed away over the summer, he left me a book called The Seth Material by Jane Roberts.  Without going into too much detail here, the book is about an intelligent consciousness that has survived death and uses Roberts to share the universe’s secrets with living humans.

One of Seth’s messages is that we create our own reality.  Apparently, this notion is supported by quantum physics, which suggests that physical reality is created by and differs for every individual.  20^th century Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck had this to say about man’s effect on matter:

“There is no matter as such.  All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.  We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.  This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

I have touched on the idea before that changing our thoughts can improve attitudes at work.  And if consciousness is really the birthplace of physical reality, then we can also create situations by believing in them.  Here are some ways to get started on the right path.

If you could spend your time doing anything in the world, what would that be?  Think about where you would be right now if you were unencumbered by your current financial or familial constraints.  Jot down how you would use your expertise to benefit society if you weren’t held back by mitigating factors or extenuating circumstances.  Imagine that you are free.

Over at the Fast Track blog, I talk more about how to create your own reality and happiness.  I hope this can be my gift to you this holiday season.

Holiday Laziness is Not the End of the World

I have a confession to make.

I have not been as productive as usual lately.

I have set aside 35 hours a week to work, and I’ve written articles, consulted with clients, developed presentations, and done media interviews during approximately 25 of them.  That means that I’m spending 10 work hours a week doing…not much.

I’ve never considered myself lazy.  But well, here we are.

According to my friend Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, however, this is not the end of the world and I shouldn’t feel too guilty about it.   “Lazy means that your body and mind are tired and want to rest. That’s a sign that you should actually rest. When you ignore these signs, it leads to burnout. So rest, and feel good about it!”

Babauta also suggests that one can work all day in a flurry of frenetic activity only to get a little done that actually matters.  On the contrary, one can do a few things that take a few hours but lead to lasting achievement.  You might do less, but the time you spent counts for more.

This last point, which is like a sensible distillation of Tim Ferriss’ early work, has become my new mantra.  But I do think it’s easier said than done.  After all, if everyone could be more effective working a few hours a day, we’d all be doing it.  For some of Leo's ideas, which I've been trying to employ myself, have a look at the Fast Track blog.

 

Stop Being a Victim of the Re-Org

I was at a meeting in which a c-suite executive proclaimed that her organization had experienced too much tumult lately.  This organization had decided on a new policy: managers in new positions would now have to wait a full year before changing absolutely anything.

Halleluyah.

It is well known that in the business world, people starting a new job will try to make their mark immediately, and this inevitably involves many transitions that may or may not be in the best interest of everyone involved.  Since human beings are not big fans of change, this often causes quite an uproar.

A Fact of Life

It’s good news, of course, that senior leaders are becoming more enlightened, but this does not mean that re-organizations and management upheavals are going to go away.  They are a fact of life.  And how you conduct yourself in the midst of a transition says a lot about you as an employee.  If you think about it, you have two choices: 1) you can leave the company, or 2) you can stay and add value through the transition.

If you choose the latter option, it’s critical that you are perceived as flexible, capable, and supportive of the company’s direction.  For guidance on how to do this effectively, check out my post at the Fast Track blog.