Working Resources for Leadership - Bay Area Executive Coaching

Executive Coaching Secrets to Creativity - Meaning is the Key to Engaging Creativity

Are you working in an organization that values creativity and innovation? Are the leaders in your organization open to everyone discovering meaning in their work?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What is my core identity and how can I align who I am with being fully engaged in meaningful work?” You need to know who you are to successfully achieve desired results.

Do you know your core identity? How effective are you at encouraging creativity? Are you passionate about the work you do fueled by meaning, purpose, and a creative spirit?

Meaning Is the Key to Engaging Creativity

Whenever someone has a burst of creativity, it is because they’ve spent time thinking over some problem or situation that has meaning for them. They have become immersed and totally engaged. If we want people to be innovative, we must discover what is important to them, and we must engage them in meaningful issues.

Michael Ray is a Stanford professor who has led some of Silicon Valley’s most creative entrepreneurs through his class “Personal Creativity in Business” for the past 21 years. Underlying his teaching on creativity is a search for two fundamental questions:

1.  Who is my self?
2.  What is my work?

Ray says you can’t know what or how you want to create until you know who you are and what you hope to do with your life. He believes that creativity exists within everyone. When people can’t tap into their creativity it’s because of an internal “voice of judgment” which is often heavily influenced by society, employers and parents.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and creativity, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Become More Innovative - How to Enhance Creativity in the Workplace

Are you working in an organization that values innovation and creativity? Are the leaders in your organization open to possibility?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What new ideas can we put into action right now?” You need to continually change to be successful.

How effective are you at encouraging creativity?

Enhancing  Creativity in the Workplace

People will be most creative when they feel motivated by their work, in and of itself. When people are engaged because of their own natural interest and satisfaction in their work, they will be challenged to be creative through their own intrinsic motivation. External pressures or rewards are never as effective as internal motivation. In order to tap into that resource, people must be matched to jobs that tap into underlying values that motivate and excite them.

In addition to intrinsic motivation, two other components are necessary within an individual for creative resourcefulness, according to Theresa Amabile (Harvard Business Review, 1998).

1.  Expertise: a person must have the necessary technical, procedural and intellectual knowledge.
2.  Creative-thinking skills: a person must be able to use their thinking in flexible and imaginative ways.

Trying to develop someone’s expertise and creative-thinking skills can be time-consuming. It is far easier to enhance and tap into someone’s internal motivation.

Amabile writes about six managerial practices that enhance creativity. These categories emerged from more than two decades of research that focused on the links between environment and creativity.

1.  Challenge: Matching the right person with the right job in order to play into their expertise and creative thinking skills. Making a good match requires the manager to have access to important information about employees and their preferences. This may mean using information available through assessments such as DISC, PIAV, Meyers-Briggs or other instruments that indicate values and preferences. This also requires good listening and observing. People express what interests them and excites them all the time. Are you listening?

2.  Freedom: Intrinsic motivation and ownership is enhanced when people are free to approach their work the way they choose. Managers tend to mismanage freedom by changing goals frequently or failing to define them clearly. Worse, they grant freedom in name only, declaring employees to be “empowered” and then they delineate the process to be followed and give penalties for divergence.

3.  Resources: Time and money can either support or kill creativity. Some time pressures can heighten creativity. Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. This creates distrust, or burnout. Creativity takes time. Incubation periods have to be scheduled in.

Project resources that are too limited can push people to use their creativity to finding additional resources, rather than actually developing new products or services.

4.  Work-Group Features: Managers must create teams with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. When people come together with diverse intellectual foundations and approaches to work, ideas often combine in exciting and useful ways.

Managers often make the mistake of putting similar people together. This may seem desirable because the people see eye to eye and get along, thus making decisions quicker. Their very homogeneity, however, does little to enhance expertise and creative thinking.

5.  Supervisory Encouragement: Managers neglect to praise creative successes and unsuccessful efforts and thereby inadvertently contribute to stifle creativity. To sustain passion, people need to feel their work matters and is important. A certain tolerance is required for mistakes and failures so that they can be used creatively.

Managers often look for reasons not to use a new idea. Research shows that an interesting psychological dynamic underlies this phenomenon. People believe that their bosses will perceive them as smarter if they demonstrate critical, analytical thinking.

This creates a bias that has severe consequences for the creative process. Such a culture of evaluation leads people to focus on external rewards and punishments instead of on being creative. It creates a climate of fear that undermines intrinsic motivation.

6.  Organizational Support: Creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports it. Leaders can support creativity by ensuring that information sharing and collaboration is the norm. Political problems and gossip take people’s attention away from work. That sense of mutual purpose and excitement that is so central to tapping into the power of intrinsic motivation must be encouraged and supported. It can be killed by cliques and political factions.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Become More Innovative- Creating a Culture of Innovation

Are you working in an organization that values innovation and creativity? Are the leaders in your organization open to possibility?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What new ideas can we put into action right now?” You need to continually change to be successful.

How effective are you at encouraging creativity?

An enterprise that does not innovate will not survive long. Management that does not learn to innovate and foster creativity will not last long. Businesses and organizations have to be designed for change as the norm. They must create change rather than react to it.

Innovation is the means by which the entrepreneur creates new wealth-producing resources. It also enables existing resources to have enhanced potential for creating wealth. Innovation is an effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential.

Some innovations come in a flash of genius, but most result from a conscious and purposeful search for opportunities. Above all, innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge, ingenuity and focus. Without diligence, persistence and commitment, all the talent, ingenuity and knowledge are to no avail.

In order to innovate, there must be a fertile atmosphere of creativity. Unleashing creativity requires more than brainstorming sessions. It is more than problem solving. People have ideas all the time. The real question is, “Which ideas are you going to use?”

Few workplaces actually encourage creativity. Management inadvertently stifles it with procedures and the status quo necessary for stability and performance. Individuals stifle it internally through their own voice of judgment.

Negativity, judgment and fear are the enemies of creativity. To the extent these exist in the work environment, there can be little creativity. In business, it isn’t enough for an idea to be original; it must also be applicable to creating greater economic growth. It must improve a product or service in some way.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching to Create High Performance Companies – The Halo Effect Delusion

Are you clear on what contributes to your company’s high performance? Do you need to clarify exactly what are the drivers of performance in your business?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask as a leader is “What are the true drivers of our performance?” You need to make attributions based on reliable data.

Are you sure what makes your company successful?

The Halo Effect Delusion

Psychologist Edward Thorndike researched the ways superiors rated subordinates during World War I. If a soldier was given a high rating for one trait, his superior officer usually provided high ratings for all other traits. And if a soldier was rated sub-par on a trait, he usually garnered low ratings for all other traits.

Thorndike called this the “Halo Effect”: our tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression. It’s difficult for most people to measure discrete traits; we tend to blend them together. The Halo Effect tricks the mind into creating and maintaining a coherent, consistent picture.

For example, after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush’s overall approval rating rose sharply. The percentage of Americans who approved of his handling of the economy also rose. There’s no reason to believe the latter suddenly improved in the weeks after Sept. 11, but it was hard for Americans to separate these issues.

Our minds become uncomfortable when we approve of one area of performance, but not another. We create consistency by conferring a halo across the board to avoid cognitive dissonance.

When companies are profitable and sales are growing, we routinely attribute positive evaluations to other performance particulars. Numbers don’t lie; we trust them. So, when we make inferences about company culture, customer outreach and core strategies based on financials, we succumb to the Halo Effect.

It’s hard to know in objective terms exactly what constitutes good communications, optimal group cohesion or appropriate role clarity, so we make attributions based on other data we believe to be reliable.

Good People Equals Good Results?

It’s widely believed that companies that manage people well will outperform those that don’t. This was the conclusion of the landmark book Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results With Ordinary People, by Charles A. O’Reilly III and Jeffrey Pfeffer (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). A company that attracts people, provides them with an environment where they can be productive and creative, and motivates them to work for the common good ought to do well. But how much of the research is influenced by the Halo Effect?

We bestow halos on CEOs all the time, but they’re always based on company performance. In all of the books written about good leadership, descriptions are always accompanied by company performance based on financial data.

Why is it so hard to understand why some companies succeed and others fail? Because our thinking is shaped by the Halo Effect. Even when we try to gather data in large-scale samples like Fortune Magazine surveys or Great Places to Work studies, we often multiply the Halo Effect.

This is less of a conscious distortion and more of a natural human tendency to make judgments about abstract, ambiguous concepts based on seemingly objective criteria. Our desire to find answers and create a coherent story is too compelling to withstand.

Awareness of such tendencies may help us guard against the Halo Effect. Of course, solid research also helps.

While the Halo Effect is not the only delusion that distorts our thinking about business, it’s the most basic one. This flaw permeates most surveys and interviews, weakens the quality of data, and diminishes our ability to think clearly about important factors that lead to key decisions.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a high performance leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets for High Performance - What Makes Your Company Successful?

Are you clear on what contributes to your company’s high performance? Do you need to clarify exactly what are the drivers of performance in your business?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask as a leader is “What is the best decision I can make to achieve intended results?” You need to be clear on what will work for your enterprise not simply applying lessons from other companies.

What makes your company, law or accountancy firm successful?

Do you really know what contributes to your company’s high performance — or are you making assumptions based on faulty logic?

It turns out that most of the data regarding why one company succeeds and another fails is rife with errors in thinking and researcher bias.

For all of the business bestsellers that proclaim to share the secret formula of successful companies and heroic CEOs, the drivers of performance in business are as elusive as ever — especially at a time when global competition and technology are evolving at unprecedented rates.

But this doesn’t stop consultants and business school professors from writing “authoritative” books that claim to have the formula for driving company success. If you haven’t already guessed, high performance cannot be attained by simply applying the best practices of General Electric, Toyota, Starbucks or Google to your own enterprise. Nor can you hire rock-star CEOs to guarantee high performance in your organization.

I’m sorry to report it’s not that easy, but I have a hunch you already know that. What you may not be aware of are the common biases and flawed thinking that affect the way individuals make decisions under uncertainty. When it comes to evaluating company performance, it’s easy to fall into a variety of universal traps.

For the last 20 years, managers have bought into popular business books such as In Search of Excellence, Built to Last and Good to Great.

Writing in The Halo Effect…and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Free Press, 2007), Phil Rosenzweig claims many books that focus on company success are based on flimsy research and delusional thinking:

“For all their claims of scientific research, for all their lengthy descriptions of apparently solid and careful research, they operate mainly at the level of storytelling. They offer tales of inspiration that we find comforting and satisfying, but they’re based on shaky thinking.”

We must peel away the layers of jumbled thinking to thoroughly investigate the elements that lead to high performance. Recognizing these lapses in logic is the only way to pull back the curtains to see what’s really going on.

With full awareness, we can identify the elements that truly drive company performance, provided we recognize the fundamental uncertainties at the heart of all businesses. Delusions can be replaced with more discerning ways to understand performance based on a respect for probabilities.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a high performance leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of  a high performance company or law firm.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Become More Productive - Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments

Are you constantly agreeing to take on more than you can handle? Do you need to clarify exactly what your commitments entail?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What is the desired outcome and what action do I need to take right now?” You need to stay focused on being in the present moment with an empty mind.

How effective are you at managing your commitments to become more productive?

Basic Requirements for Managing Commitments

Here are some basic activities and behaviors you can implement to free up your mind and be more productive:

1.  Empty your mind. Anything you consider unfinished must be captured in a trusted external system. This “collection bucket” must be reliable, and you must return to it regularly to sort through it.

2.  Clarify exactly what your commitment entails, its desired outcome and what you have to do to make progress toward fulfilling it.

3.  Once you’ve pinpointed all of the next-action steps you need to take, keep reminders of them organized in a system you can review regularly.

Employing next-action decision-making results in clarity, productivity, accountability and empowerment. When you hold yourself to the discipline of identifying the real results you want, you will obtain them.

Things that have your attention need your intention. Here are some questions to regularly ask as you go over your list:

•  What does this mean to me?
•  Why is it here?
•  What do I want to be true about this?
•  What’s the successful outcome?
•  How do I make this happen?
•  Which resources must I allocate to make it happen?
•  What’s the next action?

Everything you experience as incomplete must have a reference point for “complete.” Your life and work are composed of outcomes and actions.

When your newly adopted behaviors help you organize everything that comes your way, a deep alignment will occur. Wondrous things will emerge. You will become highly productive, achieving your desired outcomes with minimal stress and maximum results.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a less stressed and more purposeful and productive leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Manage Projects - Twelve Simple Rules to Get Things Done

Are you constantly agreeing to take on more projects than you can handle? Do you need to take on something big and achieve a desired result?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What circumstances can I create that can help me navigate this project to its intended result?” You need to stay focused on being in the present moment to get things done.

How effective are you at completing projects and getting things done? In Beyond Booked Solid, Michael Port describes a simple list of rules to getting things done.

Twelve Simple Rules to Get Things Done

1. Collaborate - If you work with others you should accomplish greater things than you could alone.
2. Explore a variety of perspectives – Inquire as to how others view a situation.
3. Coordinate meticulously –A project is an ever-evolving network of commitments and critical
    conversations.
4. Listen generously – Ask questions and seek the opinions of others.
5. Build relationships – Start your projects by building relationships among team
    members.
6. Create clear intentions – Your intention is made up of your passions, talents, contributions, and
    commitments.
7. Develop habits of commitment – Progress depends on the successful
    fulfillment of promises.
8. Couple learning with action – Learn while doing.
9. Engage your talents – Talents are a person’s unique strengths.
10. Bring passion to the project – Passion is a requisite for producing remarkable projects.
11. Embrace uncertainty – Expect the unexpected.
12. Develop a compelling story for your project – Your story is about why this project matters to 
      you and others.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a less stressed and more purposeful and productive leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Getting Work Done - Empty Your Mind

Are you constantly feeling stressed out with too much to do? Does it feel like you are falling further and further behind in your agreements and commitments?  Create the intention to be more energetic, focused and productive.

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What requests do I need to say no to right now?” You need to stay focused on being in the present moment with a quiet and uncluttered mind.

How effective are you at emptying your mind to become more productive?

Empty Your Mind

There’s no real way to achieve control if your mind is racing. If it’s stuffed with worries, to-do lists and generalized anxiety, you’ll never be as productive, innovative or successful as you desire.

“The art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of our great men.” —Captain J.A. Hatfield

Most of the stress we experience comes from inappropriately managed commitments we make or accept. Even those of us who aren’t consciously “stressed out” can experience better focus, greater relaxation and increased energy when we learn to more effectively control the open loops of our lives.

Anything that’s pulling at your attention is a source of stress, which distracts from your ability to be innovative and productive. You must identify and gather up all of the stressors that plague you.

Next, plan how you will handle them, using outcome thinking and writing down next-action steps. This may seem like a simple task, but in practice most people don’t do it in a consistent way.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a less stressed and more purposeful and productive leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Improved Productivity - A Bottom-Up Approach

Are you constantly feeling overwhelmed with too many conflicting priorities?

Does it feel like information is just stacking up in endless piles or are you energetic and highly focused and productive?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What baby steps can I take to begin taking action right now?” You need to focus on getting started and getting something done even if it seems inconsequential.

How effective are you at taking a bottom-up approach to being more productive?

A Bottom-Up Approach

Many people think the most appropriate way to tackle productivity should be from the top down:

•    First, uncover personal and corporate missions.
•    Next, define critical objectives.
•    Finally, focus on the details of implementation.

But productivity expert David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, says otherwise:

“…The trouble is that most people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective.”

Start with the most mundane, ground-floor level of current activity and commitments. Catch up by taking control of your in-basket and your mind — right now. You will unleash creative, buoyant energy that supports your attempt to reach new heights. Your confidence will increase as you more effectively handle the spoils of your newfound creativity.

You will experience an immediate sense of freedom, release and inspiration. These rewards come naturally to those who roll up their sleeves, dig in and take care of the little things.

As your in-basket empties, you’ll find yourself better equipped to handle the big picture and higher-level thinking.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a less stressed and more purposeful and productive leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self-management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to be More Focused - Manage Your Mind to Manage Action

Are you constantly feeling overwhelmed with the pressures of information overload? Does it feel like information is just stacking up in endless piles or are you energetic and highly focused and productive?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What is the best use of my time right now?” You need to focus on what is important based on your values and purpose.

How effective are you at managing your mind to manage action?

Manage the Mind to Manage Action

Now, for the good news: You can train like an athlete to be faster, more responsive and more focused on your work. You can learn to think more creatively and effectively, with greater ease and control. You can minimize loose ends and open loops, leading to increased productivity with decreased effort.

That said, you can’t have more time. You can’t stop the deluge of incoming information. You can’t manage priorities; you can only have them.

The answer lies in managing your actions: what you do with your time, your information, and your mind, body and focus. You must decide how to allocate your limited resources. You must answer the question: How do I make appropriate choices regarding what to do at any given point in time?

We get stuck when we fail to define our next steps. The real problems are lack of a clear vision and an inability to define what a project truly entails, as well as its corresponding future action steps.

No Defined Steps

On its face, this problem is an obvious hurdle to progress. But most people haven’t adequately determined next actions in their commitments and projects. They leave key steps undecided and vague.

Most of us think the major issue is lack of time. In reality, we haven’t adequately defined our project’s scope and specific requirements.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a less stressed and more purposeful and productive leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.