Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Now is the time to take stock of where you want to be.

At certain times in life, people take stock of where they are and where they want to go. Deciding what is important to us in our life's journey, including where we may be stuck, is the way to begin this life planning. The gift of knowing who you are and your life's work gives you the energy to transform your life.

Every year, we gain a clearer understanding that without positive change, decline is inevitable.  The challenge is to recognize that what we are now doing can be reinvented by paying attention to our intentions. Yet, it is very hard to bring about significant change without changes in behavior.

For five reasons why it is so difficult to change behavior to achieve our New Year Resolutions, click here.

Self-directed learning helps you to discover an ideal vision of yourself to feel motivated in developing the abilities necessary to get you where you want to be.  That is, you see the person you want to be---living with the capability necessary to create and sustain the new you. This personal makeover becomes the source of the energy required to work at the difficult and often frustrating process of change.

Click here for self-help books on how to be successful, becoming a more effective leader, what you should do with your life, love, self-directed learning, personal and business coaching, the meaning of life, A.D.D. and becoming an economic survivor.

We need more than self-help books to move forward. 

Self-directed learning does not happen by walking along a path or the beach alone.  Others help us see things we are missing, affirm whatever progress we have made, test our perceptions and let us know how we are doing. They provide the context for our practice of the new rituals. Although the model is called self-directed learning, without others involvement, lasting change can't occur.

In today's environment of a recessionary global economy, changing technology and evolving complexity, we must keep growing our abilities to grasp the success and security we seek.  Success comes from persistence.  Persistence comes from the support and encouragement of daily or weekly insights (subscribe at www.CoachedtoSuccess.com).  

On-demand, immediate learning in digestible bites allows for on-the-job application while fitting easily into action-packed schedules.  Research indicates that people learn better, retain more and are positively motivated when supported by regular and frequent coaching.

Disenchantment with MBAs Today

Does MBA stand for "Me Before Anyone"?

While attending a dinner at the Stanford Executive Program last summer, Rod Kramer, currently a visiting professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, got an ear full for not teaching morality to MBA students from the wife of an important corporate executive.  She said that failure was the cause of the global financial meltdown.

Hardly a month goes by without yet another headline about apparent unethical behavior in the executive suite: from criminal misrepresentation, to tax evasion, manipulation of accounts, and a whole smorgasbord of fraud.  Hundreds of companies have been investigated by the SEC over fraudulent behavior; from Bernie Madoff to Enron, from Martha Stewart to Johnson & Johnson and WorldCom.  Today, scandals in the upper echelons of business are hardly shocking.

These scandals are forcing business schools around the country to undergo self-examination.  At Dartmouth, the Tuck School of Business now has a mandatory ethics and social responsibility requirement.  New York University's Stern School of Business added a class on policy responses to the financial crisis.  The New England College of Business and Finance offers an online master's in "business ethics and compliance." 

Harvard's January program for students will include courses in moral leadership, distressed debt, and global real estate.  Harvard dean Jay Light says what came out of last spring's faculty workshop was a "renewed appreciation that things can go wrong at all levels" and that his school hadn't spent enough energy addressing that reality.

After the rise of Michael Milken (Wharton MBA '70) and the fall of Eron (Jeffrey Skilling, Harvard MBA '79), there were predictable cries for more vigilance.  Elective courses in ethics, responsibility and moderation followed scandal-plagued eras. 

No surprise it's back now.

Source: FORTUNE, October 26, 2009

 Robert Hoyk: The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior: 45 Psychological Traps that Every One of Us Falls Prey To

Time Management is a Symptom; not the Problem.

After studying time for more than three decades, physicist Julian Barbour has come to a fascinating and counter-intuitive conclusion: Time is an illusion.
 
All that's real are instants that Barbour calls 'Nows.'  Our brains are hardwired to take the experience of these 'Nows' and create the illusion of time.  "If you try to get your hands on time, it's always slipping through your fingers," says Barbour in the Summer 2000 issue of Spirituality and Health magazine.  "People are sure it's there but they can't get ahold of it.  My feeling is that they can't get a hold of it because it isn't there."
 
Even if physicists eventually accept Barbour's theories, his ideas will, like quantum mechanics itself, be thoroughly understood by very few.  Still, to the rest of us they offer a powerful metaphor to reflect on the moments of our lives and how we might best live them.  As Barbour says, "to see perfect stillness as the reality behind the turbulence we experience" is good for us all to learn.
 
Focusing on what matters, moment by moment (rather than thinking of reality as what happens when a series of still pictures runs through a projector), helps us reach clarity.  B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D., tells us not to overlook the importance of attention.  By refining our attention, we can focus and thereby rediscover the sense of well-being that emerges spontaneously from a balanced mind.  Research tells us that geniuses of all kinds shared one mental trait, despite the wide range of their individual brilliance: They all possessed an exceptional capacity for sustained, voluntary attention.

To some degree, we all have an innate talent for some activity.  By focusing our attention on building the strength of our individual enduring talents and applying damage control to our weaknesses, we can choose to move from satisfactory performance to excellence.  When we know what our principle talents are and how we might apply them within the world, the application of attention allows our focused energy to push us toward success.

 Everyone you meet these days is overworked and out of time. 

  Women, Know Thyself: The most important knowledge is self-knowledge. 

  When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self-Coaching Guide for Career Women--Workbook Edition--Paperback 

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Top 10 Leadership Tips of the Decade

Here are ten popular leadership lessons learned over the last several years and recommended by The Leadership Blog:

10.  Tips for picking the right executive coach.

9.   Men can't decode the Executive Women's Dress Code.

8.   Women and Time have an uncomfortable relationship.

7.   What is a market presence?

6.   How great leaders communicate.

5.   Ethical Roots: Our perception of right and wrong.

4.   A love story: Two think as one.

3.   Spiritual breakthroughs: What you think, you bring about.

2.   The power of relationships: Fueled by the rule of reciprocation.

1.   The Brain Science of decision making.

What are your favorite lessons learned over the years from The Leadership Blog at www.CoachingTip.com?  

Ethical Traps

As children, we were primed to obey our parents.  Our very survival depended on it.  Some families demanded strict obedience; others were lenient about opposition and rebellion; still others encouraged creativity and individual spirit.

But all families required obedience to authority. This conditioning continued in school.  Consequently, as adults, when our boss orders us to do something, we quickly obey—often, without thinking.

If an authority figure orders us to do something unethical, our sense of obedience may be so powerful that we follow orders without acknowledging that we’re going against our ethical principles.

Root Causes of Traps

'Obedience to authority' is a “primary” trap, which means a strong external stimulus impels us to move in a certain direction, without regard for our ethical principles.

In business, people don’t abandon their ethics simply because they want to maximize profits.  Rather, their drive to acquire and improve their status lures them into a social-psychological trap.

This often happens in small steps—yet another trap. If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out quickly. But if you place it in the pot and slowly increase the heat, it will remain there and be cooked.

Small steps and choices create minor ethical transgressions that do little harm, but they set the direction that eventually leads to major, irreversible violations.

Primary Traps

Hoyk and Hersey, authors of The Ethical Executive, describe three types of social-psychological traps that occur in the workplace: primary, defensive and personality. They include:

1.   Obedience to authority

2.   Small steps

3.   Indirect responsibility

4.   Faceless victims

5.   Lost in the group

6.   Competition

7.   Self-interest

8.   Tyranny of goals

9.   Money

10.  Conformity

11.  Power

12.  Obligation

13. Time pressures

Carefully review and understand these traps so you can prepare for—and avoid—them.  Doing so will help ensure your choices are sound and your moral compass remains intact.

Source:  Robert Hoyk: The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior: 45 Psychological Traps that Every One of Us Falls Prey To

For more on Business Ethics click here

Individual Investors Have Jumped Into Another Fire

By Guest Author Robert Prechter, CMT

The following article is an excerpt from Robert Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist.

First they bought into the “stocks for the long run” case and got killed. Then they jumped on the commodity bandwagon and got killed. Many investors are buying back into these very same markets, but others are running to what they perceive as safe “yields” in the municipal bond market. So far this year, individual investors have “poured a record $55 billion” (Bloomberg, 11/12) into muni bond funds, with the pace running $2b. per week in August and September; many other investors are buying munis outright. These must be the people who tell us that they can’t live without “yield” and also cannot imagine their city, county or state government going bust. But as Conquer the Crash warned and as The Elliott Wave Theorist has reiterated, the muni bond market is heading for disaster.

Ethical Roots: Our Perception of Right and Wrong

Psychology and other social sciences offer a huge body of experimental studies that demonstrate the allure of cheating. In The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior: 45 Psychological Traps that Every One of Us Falls Prey To (Stanford University Press, 2008), Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey describe ethical traps inherent in any organizational environment.

Many of these traps are psychological in nature, creating “webs of deception” that distort our perception of right and wrong.  Such rationalizations lead us to believe our unethical behavior is normal and appropriate, and they have contributed to large-scale corporate disasters like the Enron and WorldCom affairs.

The Brain Science of Traps

Fish are caught in wire cages with funnel-shaped entrances, which are designed to direct the fish to swim inside.

In the same way, individuals and organizations move in a certain direction—one that may trap them if they fail to reverse an ill-fated course.

At any given moment, we have impulses that motivate us to act. They are reactions to internal or external stimuli, which may be powerful enough to trigger automatic behavior.  At this point, we may rationally ignore other (and better) options.

Other times, we’re aware of several distinct choices, but the stimulus’ effect overrides these potential actions. We may desire a specific outcome so strongly that it propels us to move in an unsound direction. Anxiety and stress may also compel us to make choices that alleviate our short-term distress, yet lead to irrevocable long-term consequences.

The Irresistible Urge to Cheat

Not a month goes by without some highly publicized ethical scandal. Be it tax evasion, executive pay excesses, sexual dalliances and outright fraud, many individuals are simply unable to resist temptation. 

Does this make the perpetrators corrupt sociopaths?

Sometimes, but usually not. They’re often leaders and pillars of the community, and their actions leave us shaking our heads and wondering what were they thinking.

The sad truth?

Cheating isn’t limited to those in positions of power. While power is certainly fraught with opportunities and temptations, each of us faces daily choices that involve doing the right—or wrong—thing. Only when a CEO, politician, celebrity or sports legend gets caught does the problem rise to front-page news. Just ask Tiger Woods.

But the same ethical traps lie in your path. Even the little guys transgress. Often, people feel an urge to cheat—a strange pull to try to get away with something. Sometimes it’s small; other times it’s scandalous. Sometimes it matters; other times it goes unnoticed.

  Robert Hoyk: The Ethical Executive: Becoming Aware of the Root Causes of Unethical Behavior: 45 Psychological Traps that Every One of Us Falls Prey To

K-12 Educational Leadership

Say Yes to Education values and realizes the promise and extraordinary potential of Syracuse City School District students according to Ned Deuel, chair of the Board of Education.

The Say Yes to Education: Syracuse program combines comprehensive, high-quality and sustained academic, social, emotional, health and family supports throughout the K-12 years, and culminates with the incentive of free college tuition for SCSD graduates who meet residency and college admission requirements into one of nearly 100 higher education institutions in the Say Yes compact.

The Say Yes Higher Education Compact eliminates the most significant obstacle faced by families across the income spectrum—the high cost of a quality post-secondary education.  K-12 supports include after-school and summer camp programs, tutoring, mentoring, family outreach and engagement, social work/counseling services, health and wellness programs and legal clinics.

The mission of Say Yes is to value and realize the promise and extraordinary potential of economically disadvantaged youth  and families.  Say Yes recognizes the daunting challenges faced by children living in poverty, but knows through experience and field tested results that children can overcome these challenges when given holistic support.

Syracuse is making history, implementing the only program of its kind and scale in the nation.  By innovatively linking the chain between the public, private, and non-profit sectors, Syracuse Say Yes is not so much a ‘program’ or a ‘project’, but rather a citywide college-access movement poised to rejuvenate the city and build a sustainable model for developing our most precious asset---our children and youth---and, ultimately, positioning the Syracuse economy to compete globally.

To download the December 2009 Say Yes Update, go to:

http://wpbdc.syr.edu/email/sayyes/enews12-09.pdf 

If there was just one thing you could do for your customers....

Ask a Las Vegas cab driver, 'What's the best show in town?'  He will probably reply with something like this, "Oh, Jay Leno!  My wife and I just went to see him. He gives a special show for taxi drivers at two in the morning.  Otherwise, we could never afford to go.  Kenny Rogers does the same thing when he's in town."
 
You wouldn't think that anyone as big in the entertainment field as Jay Leno and Kenny Rogers needs to give away their performances, but they do.  Both realize that some of the best word of mouth advertising they could have would be taxi drivers raving about their shows.
 
If you could do just one thing to help your customer and your business, what would that be?  The short answer is to give more of what you have away.