REPOST: Blurred lines: why working through the weekend works

 It has always been tricky to get that perfect life and work balance. This article by Alexandra Tselios of The Age talks about how work and life need not be separate. 

Busy, and happy to spread the load across the weekend. Photo: iStock | Image Source: theage.com

Every Friday, I will inevitably receive a ‘Happy Friday!’ greeting from an overly excitable colleague or client; or, if it’s a Wednesday, I’ll get at least one ‘Happy Hump Day!’ (which just sounds gross, sorry). But the worst of all of these is the ‘ugh, it’s Monday’ comment.

I really don’t understand the disappointment felt when Sunday night comes to an end. Similarly, Fridays don’t really mean ‘countdown till wine-o’clock’ for me, it is simply another part of my week; and being a grown-up, I can technically have a glass of wine any time I like.

Do I feel anxious about Mondays? Never. Do I feel overly excited about Friday 5pm? Nope.

The reason is that my work and home life have blurred into one. I don’t feel the need to have a clear separation between the two, and while my work doesn’t define who I am, it is definitely a very inclusive part of my life (regardless of the day of the week).

It seems a shame that emotions and mood can be determined simply by what day it is, especially as each new day is inevitable and out of our control.

Staying connected 24/7

 

In a 24/7 connected world, it is misguided of us to manically draw the line between work and pleasure. When once one would rise and check the business papers for an update on the news that broke overnight, now we can check using our phones at 2am while getting a glass of water in the middle of the night.

Almost everything we need to know is at our fingertips at a moment’s notice. But with that overabundance of information (and misinformation), comes a new set of responsibilities. Most professional roles and industries have an expectation that their workers don’t switch off at 5pm, and the onus is on the individual to manage this using clear communication with their employer (or employees).

Working as the online publisher for opinion site The Big Smoke, I wouldn’t think twice about responding to an email at 7am on a Sunday. Instead of it stressing me out on a weekend, it does the opposite; I feel less anxious about coming into the office on Monday.

The best approach to work, and to life in general, is to take it in bite-sized chunks, while referring back to the big picture. This means I don’t have the luxury of ‘switching off’ on the weekend, and nor do I want to. It also gives me the flexibility to work in a way that is conducive to nurturing other important areas of my life -  family, friends and hobbies.

Because I don’t have strict parameters around work and life, it means I can take that hour-long call from a friend who’s having a crisis at 2pm on a Tuesday, because I know that the time I’ve spent with her will be made up working later that evening.

Blurred lines

 

If you have a fixation on these boundaries and an attitude of ‘No I won’t answer a work call, it’s 6pm’, it will only cause you extra stress and pressure over the coming weeks, because you can bet that there will be  a competitor who will happily take five minutes out of their dinner to answer a quick question.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a risk I am not willing to take. It is not viable to assume that in a global marketplace your clients are going to fit in with what you deem to be reasonable hours.

For many professionals, completely switching off is the only way they can feel completely in the moment and if that’s what works, then fantastic. However, there always needs to be some level of connectivity to ensure things aren’t missed.

The concept of the end of the work-free weekend isn’t about turning people into workaholics. It’s about removing the angst that comes with battling to remove all facets of work from your social time, which inevitably builds up the to-do list and results in an unhealthy dislike for Mondays. 

At the end of the day, clients and competitors don’t disappear just because you want to spend the weekend in the Blue Mountains. So look at your career differently and don’t be misguided into taking a technology detox. Instead, continue working on the smaller tasks so that when you return from your break, your duties are manageable.

Take control back

 

If you Google work/life balance, there are a range of self-help articles available, but the common thread between all of these is that the searcher has lost an element of control and needs direction. Get control back by stepping out of the constant internal conflict to compartmentalise your social, family and work time – and embrace them all as parts of your messy, illustrious, productive and sometimes confusing life – whether it’s Monday or Friday.  

I’m not suggesting we all turn into robots. But we do need to become professionals who can discern, focus and include their work organically as part of the bigger picture of their lives

The Bertrand Management Group provides extensive organization and employee training seminars to help improve business workflow and efficiency. Read more articles like this by subscribing to this Facebook page.

REPOST: "Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People"

In many cases, managers find that some of their most creative people are difficult to manage, and as a result they resort to different tactics just to get them to comply.  But the iron fist isn't the answer to handling creative people, and this Harvard Business Review article provides some insightful tips on how to make the best out of these employees:

Image credit: Harvard Business Review

Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can't just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a malign organizational tumour. Although every organization claims to care about innovation, very few are willing to do what it takes to keep their creative people happy, or at least, productive. So what are the keys to engaging and retaining creative employees?

1. Spoil them and let them fail: Like parents who celebrate their children's mess: show your creatives unconditional support and encourage them to do the absurd and fail. Innovation comes from uncertainty, risk, and experimentation — if you know it will work, it isn't creative. Creative people are the natural experimenters, so let them try and test and play. Of course, there are costs associated with experimentation — but these are lower than the cost of NOT innovating.

2. Surround them by semi-boring people: The worst thing you can do to a creative employee is to force them to work with someone like them — they would compete for ideas, brainstorm eternally, or simply ignore each other. That said, you cannot surround creatives with really boring or conventional people — they would not understand them, and fall out. In line with this, recent research indicates that teams made up of diverse members who are open to taking each others' perspective perform most creatively.

The solution, then, is to support your creatives with colleagues who are too conventional to challenge their ideas, but unconventional enough to collaborate with them. These colleagues will need to pay attention to details, mundane executional processes, and do the dirty work: Messi needs Busquets and Puyol; Ronaldo needs Alonso and Ramos.

3. Only involve them in meaningful work: Natural innovators tend to have more vision, research I've done indicates. They see the bigger picture and are able to understand why things matter (even if they cannot explain it). The downside to this is that they simply won't engage in meaningless work. This all-or-nothing approach to work mirrors the bipolar temperament of creative artists, who perform well only when inspired — and inspiration is fueled by meaning. This rule can also be applied to other employees: everyone is more creative when driven by their genuine interests and a hungry mind.

As novelist John Irving said, "the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me". At the same time, in any organization there will be employees who are less interested in, well, doing interesting work; they are satisfied with simply clocking in and out, and are incentivized by external rewards. Companies should ensure that trivial or meaningless work is assigned to these employees.

4. Don't pressure them: Creativity is usually enhanced by giving people more freedom and flexibility at work. If you like structure, order and predictability, you are probably not creative. However, we are all more likely to perform more creatively in spontaneous, unpredictable circumstances — because we cannot rely on our habits. Don't constrain your creative employees; don't force them to follow processes or structures. Let them work remotely and outside normal hours; don't ask where they are, what they are doing or how they do it. This is the secret to managing Don Draper, and why he never went to work for a bigger competitor. This is also why so many top athletes fail to make the transition from a small to a big team, and why business founders are usually unhappy to remain in charge of their ventures once they are acquired by a bigger company.

5. Don't overpay them: There is a longstanding debate about the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Over the past two decades, psychologists have provided compelling evidence for the so-called "over-justification" effect, namely the process whereby higher external rewards impair performance by depressing a person's genuine or intrinsic interest. Most notably, two large-scale meta-analyses reported that, when tasks are inherently meaningful (and creative tasks are certainly in this condition), external rewards diminish engagement. This is true in both adults and children, especially when people are rewarded merely for performing a task. However, providing positive feedback (praises) does not harm intrinsic motivation, so long as the feedback is perceived as genuine. [Editor's note: This is clearly a controversial point; Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has expanded on it in his new article, "Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research." In line with his comments in the thread below, we've also updated the header on this section to be more accurate.]

The moral of the story? The more you pay people to do what they love, the less they will love it. In the words of Czikszentmihalyi, "the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake." More importantly, people with a talent for innovation are not driven by money. Data from our research archive, which includes over 50,000 managers from 20 different countries, indicates quite clearly that the more imaginative and inquisitive people are, the more they are driven by recognition and sheer scientific curiosity rather than commercial needs.

6. Surprise them: Few things are as aggravating to creatives as boredom. Indeed, creative people are prewired to seek constant change, even when it's counterproductive. They take a different route to work every day, even if it gets them lost, and never repeat an order at a restaurant, even if they really liked it. Creativity is linked to higher tolerance of ambiguity. Creatives love complexity and enjoy making simple things complex rather than vice-versa. Instead of looking for the answer to a problem, they prefer to find a million answers or a million problems. It is therefore essential that you keep surprising your creative employees; failing that, you should at least let them create enough chaos to make their own lives less predictable.

7. Make them feel important: As T.S. Eliot noted, "most of the trouble in this world is caused by people wanting to be important". And the reason is that others fail to recognize them. Fairness is not treating everyone the same, but like they deserve. Every organization has high and low potential employees, but only competent managers can identify them. If you fail to recognize your employees' creative potential, they will go somewhere where they feel more valued.

A final caveat: even when you are able to manage your creative employees, it does not mean that you should let them manage others. In fact, natural innovators are rarely gifted with leadership skills. There is a profile for good leaders, and a profile for creative people — and they are rather different. Steve Jobs had better relationships with gadgets than people, and most Google engineers are utterly disinterested in management. One of the reasons for the rapid plateau of start-ups is that their founders tend to remain in charge. They should learn from Mark Zuckerberg who brought in Sheryl Sandberg to make up for his own leadership deficits. Research confirms the stereotypical view that corporate innovators — intrapreneurs — exhibit many of the psychopathic characteristics that prevent them from being effective leaders: they are rebellious, anti-social, self-centered and often too low in empathy to care about the welfare of others. But manage them well, and their inventions will delight us all.

Read more updates on structure development, strategic planning, and operational improvement by visiting this Bertrand Management Group Facebook page.

Organizational Transformation Liberating the Corporate Soul

This article by Richard Barrette shares that a lot of business leaders wonder how to unleash innovation and creativity in the workplace.

In a world where change is growing exponentially, fortunes are increasingly being won or lost on the ability of companies to anticipate trends and create products to meet these demands. But in the 21st century, unleashing innovation and creativity will not be sufficient to guarantee success. From here on, success will also hinge on whether, in the eyes of its employees and society-at-large, the company is a trusted member of the community, and a good global citizen.

Who you are is becoming just as important as what you sell. The values that corporations stand for are increasingly affecting their ability to hire the best people and sell their products. There is an awakening awareness of the causal link between the rapidly escalating environmental and social issues and the philosophy of business. Govenments and communities are recognizing that the pursuit of self-interest is not only destroying the planet’s life support systems, but the social fabric as well. The era of corporate autocracy is coming to an end. There is too much at stake for it to be otherwise.

Successful business leaders of the 21st century will need to find a dynamic balance between the interests of the corporation, the interest of the workers and the interests of society as a whole. To achieve this goal they will need to take account of the shift in values taking place in society, and the growing demand for people to find meaning and purpose in their work.



The main reason that organizations are unable to mine the creative potential of their employees is that they fail to understand the importance of linking the well-being and survival of their employees to the well-being and survival of the company. When the link between effort and reward is severed, and employees are paid to do rather than to think, there is no incentive to achieve optimal performance. It is only when people feel a direct link between their own contribution, the success of the company, and their personal reward, that they assume responsibility for the whole. When this happens they feel encouraged to fulfill their potential. In other words, moral and economic democracy are essential components of a culture that nurtures innovation and creativity, and taps human potential.

This calls for open, more transparent forms of corporate governance where individuals are encouraged and rewarded for developing their potential and making contributions that impact on the good of the whole. Such cultures can only be based on trust.

Corporate Consciousness

Corporate cultures can be categorized into seven levels:

1 Survival Consciousness Totally focused on profits. An autocratic, uncaring and fear-driven culture (corporate survival).

 2 Relationship Consciousness Benevolent dictatorship where loyalty between workers is stronger than company loyalty. Lacks flexibility and entrepreneurship.

3 Self-esteem Consciousness Desire to be the biggest or the best. Hierarchical power structure. Search for efficiency, productivity, quality and excellence (corporate fitness).

4 Transformation Self-discovery, vision, mission, and values. Balanced needs scorecard. Shift from control to trust, fear to truth, privilege to equality, and fragmentation to unity.

5 Organization Consciousness Release of innovation and creativity. Search to create conditions for cohesion, community spirit, trust, diversity, and mutual accountability. Recognition of the importance of strategic alliances with suppliers and customers. (corporate well-being).

6 Community Consciousness Voluntary environmental and social audits. Support to local community. Seach for long-term sustainability. Relationships with local suppliers.

7 Global/Society Consciousness Contribution to resolving social, human rights, and environmental issues beyond local community. Focus on ethics. Search for truth and wisdom (global/society contribution).

Transformation

Successful organizations in the 21st century will be those that complete their transformation and live out values that support the common good (three higher states of consciousness). Corporations that cannot move beyond self-interest (three lower states of consciousness) will find themselves struggling to survive. The transformation from the lower to the higher states of consciousness involves liberating the corporate soul. It demands enlightened leadership—CEOs and executives who have completed their own transformation.

The fundamental change that occurs during corporate transformation is a shift in attitude from “What’s in it for us (me)?” to “What’s best for the common good?”—a shift from “self-esteem consciousness” to “organizational consciousness.” This involves moving from an exclusive focus on the pursuit of profit to the broader pursuit of a group of objectives that are instrumental in meeting shareholder, worker, customer, supplier, community, and societal needs. In order to measure progress in all these areas, I have developed a balanced needs scorecard based on the seven levels of corporate consciousness:

Balance and Values in Practice

In Built to Last, Collins and Porras identify eighteen visionary companies that, between 1926 and 1990, achieved a growth in shareholder value 15 times greater than the general market.

Their research shows that all these companies had a strong core ideology (values + purpose), and that contrary to business school doctrine, “maximizing shareholder wealth” was not the dominant driving force of these visionary companies. They have tended to pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one. Visionary companies had objectives that transcended purely economic considerations.

When I analyzed the mission statements of the eighteen visionary companies in Built to Last, I found that sixteen had three or more objectives. The majority of their objectives (44%) concerned well-being, and only 20% concerned corporate fituess. Surprisingly only 6% of the objectives mentioned corporate survival (profits or shareholder value).

What is remarkable is that all 18 companies had objectives concerning corporate well-being, whereas 13 had objectives relating to corporate fitness, and only 6 to corporate survival.

Some of the more inspiring values-driven examples of statements adopted by these companies are:

“We are in the business of preserving and improving human life.” “People as the source of our strength.” “Improving the quality of life through technology and innovation.” “People are number one—treat them well, expect a lot, and the rest will follow.” “Corporate social responsibility.” “Honesty and integrity.”

The conclusion I reach (indeed, one of the main messages of Liberating the Corporate Soul), is that an organization's performance is directly related to its ability to tap into its human potential. For the average person, work is one of the most important ways he or she gives expression to who they are, and find their fulfillment.

When a group of people are committed to a common purpose, are given responsibility, and at the same time feel supported and trusted, then, and only then, will they tap their deepest potential. Emotional energy, not mental energy, is the true motivator of the human spirit.

Emotional energy has its source in what people believe and value. Values give meaning to people's lives. When there is an alignment between an organization's values and its employees values then people respond by fulfilling their potential and tapping their deepest levels of creativity.

Source:http://work911.com/cgi-bin/links/jump.cgi?ID=4601