When [Monty] Williams was fired by the New Orleans Pelicans in 2015, he surveyed former players, who told him they felt like they couldn’t make mistakes in front of him. He vowed that if he got another chance to coach in the NBA, he would listen to his players more. “That made me feel like an idiot,” he said. “To have any one of our players not feeling like they can be themselves. It was something I hope I’ve learned from.”
He eventually worked in San Antonio’s front office. There, he internalized a Gregg Popovich mantra about flexibility: “If the rules stifle talent, change the rule.”
The world needs your spark. The world needs your energy. The world needs you to show up for your life and take hold of your potential! We need your ideas. We need your love and care. We need your passion. We need your business models. We need to celebrate your successes. We need to watch you rise back up after your failures. We need to see your courage. We need to hear your what if. We need you to stop apologizing for being who you are and become who you were meant to be.
Jeff Haden, Contributing Editor: You said during your BUD/S (SEAL training) you were constantly doubting yourself. How did you push through those moments?
Sean Haggerty, Navy Seal: Don't confuse doubting yourself with accepting failure.
Everyone questions whether they can actually accomplish something difficult while they're doing it. That's normal.
The best thing I did was to decide that I was going to go to the absolute extreme, even if I doubted myself. I basically told myself that no matter what, I wouldn't quit. I doubted myself a number of times, but then I put away and thought, "If I fail, I fail...but what I will never do is quit."
That attitude pushes you past a limit you think you have...but you really don't.
Many of the best talks have a narrative structure that loosely follows a detective story. The speaker starts out by presenting a problem and then describes the search for a solution. There’s an “aha” moment, and the audience’s perspective shifts in a meaningful way.
If a talk fails, it’s almost always because the speaker didn’t frame it correctly, misjudged the audience’s level of interest, or neglected to tell a story. Even if the topic is important, random pontification without narrative is always deeply unsatisfying. There’s no progression, and you don’t feel that you’re learning.
Executive sponsors must communicate effectively with employees throughout the project. The sponsor plays a critical role in communicating those messages that employees want to hear from the person in charge:
A vision of where the organization is going
A road-map that outlines how the vision will be achieved
Clear alignment of the current change with this vision
Specific goals or objectives that define success
His or her personal commitment and passion for the change
...In addition to sharing their personal commitment to change, executive sponsors should directly communicate the benefits of the change to employees. They should make clear connections between the objectives of the change and the overall direction of the business. Executive sponsors may want to share success stories or struggles from other departments or from early trials with the change. Employees want to hear about the challenges endured during the transition and how they were handled. They want to hear the good and the bad, the suffering and the rewards. They want to hear that success is possible and they want to learn from the mistakes of others. Most importantly, they want to hear the primary sponsor speak about the opportunities and benefits for the business as a whole.
What is a personal calling? It is God's blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However, we don't all have the courage to confront our own dream.
Why?
There are four obstacles. First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear, and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it's still there.
If we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us going forward. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.
Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn't work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse: "Oh, well, I didn't really want it anyway." We do want it and know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this journey. Then, we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how.
I ask myself: are defeats necessary?
Well, necessary or not, they happen. When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.
So, why is it so important to live our personal calling if we are only going to suffer more than other people?
Because once we have overcome the defeats - and we always do - we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.
Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.
Oscar Wilde said: "Each man kills the thing he loves." And it's true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people, who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal - when it was only a step away.
This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.
I think the first 3:25 seconds of this interview is powerful. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:
Reporter: Following the huge win against the Pelicans we saw this team take to the court, take the locker room, go to the weight room – and that was after a big win. What has this team’s emotion and reaction been like after the Clipper’s loss?
Coach Monty Williams: It’s been the same approach…. One of the culture pieces we’ve tried to implement is we don’t let win’s and losses dictate the atmosphere and the culture we feel like we are establishing…. That’s something that I’ve learned over the years, I cannot change – no matter what happens on the floor our gym stays the same. We want everybody here excited about coming to work, and I think that allows for us to have a level of consistency in how we approach development. The most important thing is that people are excited to come to work. Nothing changed. Yesterday was the same as any other day…. We teach, we grow, we get after it.
Reporter: You’ve been preaching staying in that middle ground for a while now. When did that mentality really set in for you?... Why is that such a key in order to get this team where you want them to go?
Coach: …Listening to the guys that I had coached before, they didn’t always feel excited about coming to work because they thought that I was going to push them in a way that diminished their talents. I really had to take a deep look at my approach. It was one of my prayers that if God ever gave me a chance to be a head coach again I wanted to be excited about work everyday myself, but I also wanted the players to have the same feeling – when they got up out of the bed they felt really good about coming to work…. I had some straight, black and white conversations with guys that I coached, and what I heard back – I was ashamed to be honest with you. I didn’t realize it and that’s why the communication with those guys was really important for my growth.
In Scott Keller's book Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths, co-written without colleague, Mary Meaney, he recounted a travel experience that is particularly salient on the topic of skill-sets. Scott was fortunate enough to visit East Timor some five years after it had become a fully independent country. He was disheartened to find that the country was riddled with poverty, in part due to its poor infrastructure, especially in light of the significant reconstruction investment that it and many other nations had made on independence. He wondered why things hadn’t changed.
As he was traveling through the country, he came across a field full of bulldozers, compactors, jaws, and all manner of heavy construction equipment ideal for road-making. The field was overgrown, the metal was rusting, and a few local kids were climbing on the equipment as if they were in a giant playground. “What’s all this?,” Scott asked. “Donations from China from when we declared independence,” came the response from his local guide. “What’s wrong with them?,” Scott asked. His guide replied, “Nothing, but no one knows how to use them.”
The aspiration of many countries, including China, to help East Timor develop as a nation was clearly bold and well-intentioned. The desired change, however, fell apart because the skill-set requirements to deliver the aspiration hadn’t been assessed or addressed. This example may seem extreme, but to us it’s emblematic of what we often see in failed change programs. Organizations make East Timor-like big investments in changing structures, systems, or processes without ensuring the skills are built to enable them to work the way they are intended. Our research backs up the premise: organizations that explicitly assess their current skill requirements against those required to fulfill their performance aspirations are 6.6 times more likely to succeed in their change efforts.
Last March, Microsoft unveiled Tay.ai, a Twitter bot that promised to usher in a new era of human-to-artificial-intelligence conversation.
Within hours, hackers turned Tay into a venom-spewing racist, and the project was quickly shuttered with a public apology.
In the old days of Microsoft, heads surely would have rolled.
But Satya Nadella, 49, a one-time company engineer who took the reins of the $500 billion tech giant three years ago this month, instead sent the Tay team a note of encouragement.
“Keep pushing, and know that I am with you,” he wrote in an e-mail, urging staffers to take the criticism in the right spirit while exercising "deep empathy for anyone hurt by Tay. (The) key is to keep learning and improving.”
The group responded with Zo, a new AI chatbot that debuted in December. So far, no issues.
“It’s so critical for leaders not to freak people out, but to give them air cover to solve the real problem,” Nadella says in an interview with USA TODAY. “If people are doing things out of fear, it’s hard or impossible to actually drive any innovation...”
"What I realize more than ever now is that my job is curation of our culture," says Nadella, who will explore this topic and others in a book due out this fall called Hit Refresh. "If you don't focus on creating a culture that allows people to do their best work, then you’ve created nothing.”
Risk, creativity and defining your own path is made possible only through a series of failures, some big, some small. Hide none of them. Take pride in your ability to recognize them faster and better than anyone else, and your drive to learn from them to improve yourself.
Recent statistics show that over 70% of professionals (and leaders) have or will experience Impostor Syndrome at one point in their careers. Here's some tips on how to recognize the symptoms and how to deal with them.
What Is Impostor Syndrome?
Source #1: You’re so smart! Source #2: One of these things is not like the others. Source #3: The side effects of meritocracy.
9 Ways to Combat Impostor Syndrome
Can’t take a compliment? Feel like a fake? Convinced you’ll be unmasked at any moment? Welcome to the secret circle of high achievers suffering from Impostor Syndrome. The Savvy Psychologist explains how to recognize it, where it comes from, and has 9 tips on how to combat it.
The work of Dr. Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, sheds light on a common parenting mistake. Well-meaning parents often praise kids with labels like ‘You’re so smart!” or “You’re so pretty!” These labels, while meant to be complimentary, actually hinder kids. How? They imply that there’s nowhere left to grow. “You’re smart” implies that “smart” is a you’ve-got-it-or-you-don’t characteristic. Either you’re smart or you’re not, and there’s nothing you can do to alter it. Therefore, whenever kids make a mistake, they question the “smart” label. “If I got a C this once, then maybe I’m not smart after all? Mom must be wrong.” As a result, it stifles kids’ willingness to try new things, for fear they might prove their label wrong. This lays fertile ground for Impostor Syndrome.
Women, racial minorities, or LGBT individuals may feel like they're living a high-achiever's version of the Sesame Street song, “One of These Things is Not Like the Others.” Indeed, individuals who don’t “match” the larger, majority culture of their school or company often struggle to feel legitimate. They may feel like they don’t belong, despite qualifications and accomplishments.
Navigating unfamiliar waters without a role model or mentor can exacerbate this kind of Impostor Syndrome. For instance, being the first in the family to attend college or have a white-collar career is a pioneering achievement, but can feel like a floundering imitation without an experienced guide. First-generation achievers may feel out of step both at home and in their new environment.
High achievers are only high achievers when compared to others. Such folks have been compared to others their whole lives—when earning grades, winning honors, being selected into colleges, landing jobs. They often come out on top, which does two things. First, they value the process of comparison because they have done well by it. Second, they are extra alert to the process. Awareness of being evaluated and caring deeply about the outcome is an important mindset for success, but when it backfires, it lays a foundation for feeling like a phony.
So what's a phony-feeling high achiever to do? Here are 9 ways to combat Impostor Syndrome.
1) Know that feeling like a fraud is normal
Impostor Syndrome is widespread. It is rampant in any exclusive circle, from high school honor societies to Nobel Prize winners. It is rarely discussed because each person feels they are keeping a secret. There is an element of shame and the fear of being discovered, so sufferers keep silent. However, whenever someone pipes up, hundreds more breathe a sigh of relief.
2) Remind yourself of what you’ve accomplished
Academics keep a curriculum vitae, roughly translated as “life’s work.” More than a resume, it is a list of everything they have accomplished. Do the same and read it over from time to time. Read your old letters of recommendation. If you’ve been given an award, read the inscription. You don’t just look good on paper; you accomplished each and every achievement on that paper.
3) Tell a fan
Disclose your feelings to a trusted friend, your favorite teacher, or close colleague. Hopefully, you’ll come away with a pep talk to bolster your spirits. Warning: change the subject if your fan simply tells you to stop feeling insecure. If you could stop, you would have already!
4) Seek out a mentor
Ask a senior colleague, teacher, or coach for guidance navigating work or school. If possible, seek out a mentor who matches your gender or ethnicity. Get-It-Done Guy has a wonderful article on Choosing a Mentor.
5) Teach
Or become a mentor. You’ll be surprised how much you know. We often forget what it’s like not to know something. Furthermore, as we become experts in a field or rise to the top of the class, we are conscious enough to realize how much we have yet to learn, which amplifies the sense of fraudulence. Only when we contrast ourselves with true newbies do we gain perspective. Remind yourself how far you’ve come by nurturing the next generation.
6) Sometimes it’s OK not to know what you’re doing
After experiencing any big life event, like starting at a new school or a new job, there is a steep learning curve of adjustment. Rather than hiding, think of yourself as a “public amateur” or a “purposeful impostor” - someone who is learning and gaining expertise in the public eye. It’s OK to come to the table with nothing to offer, as long as you’re enthusiastic about learning.
7) For kids, praise effort
To counteract the mistake of praising traits, as in “You’re so smart!,” praise effort instead. Compliment kids with, “You worked so hard on that!” or “You kept at it even when it didn’t work out.”
8) Build in an expectation of initial failure
The author Anne Lamott titles every new work “Sh*tty First Draft.” My neighbor told her child, “Here’s your new scooter. You have to fall off at least 10 times before you get good.” Allow yourself similar leeway to stink it up at any new beginning.
9) Keep a little Impostor Syndrome in your pocket
Stay humble, my friends. A balancing point exists between Impostor Syndrome and slick, grinning egomania. Authentic modesty keeps you real.
So there we have it: 9 things you can do to things you can do to mitigate the effects of Impostor Syndrome. And of course, you’re not alone. Simply remember the words of Tina Fey, a self-described impostor: “Everyone else is an impostor, too.” ;
It’s awfully hard for managers and staff to get motivated when they believe that the latest project from on high is going to die just like the last one - no matter what they do. Fear makes change intensely personal. People fear for their income. They worry about their families. They wonder what will happen to their careers. When people are afraid, they literally can’t hear or think as well. It’s much harder for them to take in important information when their minds are reeling. This can be a big distraction that undermines your team’s ability to focus and stay productive… just when you need to them most...
So how do the best leaders and managers mitigate change... fatigue, keep fear at bay and keep the team engaged and energized?
By doing two things: identifying and celebrating early successes and creating cultural experiences that support the vision and keep the change train on track.
The curious thing about organizations is that having more people somehow doesn't equal more output. “As size and complexity of an organization increases, productivity of individuals working in that organization tends to decrease,” he says. As headcount grows, so too does the policy-and-paperwork stuff that gets in the way of rapid iteration and scale.
Why is this the case? “I think it comes down to human nature and the way we react to problems,” Curtis says. Our natural response to any problem — from a downed server to a social gaffe — is to try to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. In companies, more often that not, those solutions take the form of new policies. “What happens when you create a new policy, of course, is that you have to fit it into all of your existing rules.” And so begins a web of ever-increasing complexity that's all about prevention. Soon, you start to hit safeguards no matter what it is you're trying to do.
To avoid this type of bureaucracy from the very beginning of your company, you should adopt two particular tactics: “First, you have to build teams with good judgment, because you need to be able to put your trust in people,” Curtis says. “Then you shape that good judgment with strong principles.”
Minimizing rules that become roadblocks in your organization will only work if you’ve built a team that will make good decisions in the absence of rigid structure. Your hiring process is where you can take the biggest strides toward preventing bureaucracy.
Never underestimate the power of personal integrity; always set an honorable agenda; adhere to a code of professional conduct; never try to justify dishonesty and deceit; rather fail with honor than win by cheating.
According to a Boston Consulting Group survey... "improving leadership development" and "managing talent" are top priorities for the companies surveyed, yet the respondents--more than 4,000 senior business leaders from around the world--also ranked these two areas as their greatest weaknesses.
Debbie Lovich, the leader of BCG's Leadership and Talent Enablement Center, says the trouble is that training become separated from companies' objectives.
"Senior executives often think that they must focus on the business and delegate talent development--which they see as 'training'--to HR or someone else without continued involvement," Lovich said in a press release. "With that approach, leadership development instantly becomes disconnected from the business priorities. The training that employees receive does not develop the skills that will enable them to have a meaningful impact on colleagues, customers, and business results."
The main reasons leadership development seminars, events, or workshops do not produce results is the same reason cramming for a skills-based test doesn't result in you mastering a skill.
BCG found three main reasons leadership and talent development programs do not produce results:
Many companies have one-off events and workshops, but "true capability is developed over time and regularly reinforced."
Programs that are aimed at "broad, generic themes" like success or leadership do not help to develop specific skills. Instead, programs should focus on two or three areas that your employees can work on.
The success of most programs is measured by attendance and attendee satisfaction. The best way to see if a workshop was successful, however, is to assess the skills attendees developed.
"People don't develop skills from simply reading a book or going to a one-off workshop," Lovich said. "They build skills by having to do something, failing, and trying again and again."
The most effective leadership development involves daily in-the-field experience with opportunities to practice and reinforce new skills, Lovich said. Regularly practicing new skills while working helps to make training relevant to the company's business.
"A few simple things done consistently well across daily routines can drive cultural change," she said. "By teaching through practical daily routines and providing simple tools to practice and observe leadership at work, organizations can give their people a practical way to improve every day."
Leadership is all about team. It is easy and somewhat understandable to get self-absorbed when you are responsible for a project in crisis. During those Xbox trials, I certainly fixated on what I should do differently and why I was failing. I took a sabbatical shortly after the launch of the first Xbox, and with the help of some fabulous advisers, I realized that I was not the secret to success. Instead, the team around me held all the keys required to unlock our potential. My job was to give them the necessary strategy framework and direction and then allow them to apply their unique skills to improving our results. Great leaders find a way to attract the right people, and the right people form great teams, and great teams win.
_p141_SOPHOCLES.jpg)
