Define your personal operating principles

 -  Sustainable
Do you get really nervous when the internet is slow? Frenetically push the ‘close door’ button when you are in an elevator? Always in a hurry? Quickly losing your temper? Less decisive than before? Chances are you are putting more demands on yourself than is ideal, pushing yourself so hard that you arrived in the unsustainable zone of ‘diminishing returns’. It’s time to take action and get your life in balance again. Defining your list of ‘personal operating principles’ will prove very effective.

Enrollment gets teams moving – Compliance doesn’t

 -  Teamness
You know exactly what your team needs to do. You know precisely how they should do it. But they keep on doing things differently. The wrong ‘what’, the wrong ‘how’, and poor results. If after many sessions of (im)patiently listening and trying to influence them, things don’t change, chances are you are either thinking about buying a book on ‘influencing skills’, or you have decided to make use of your authority to get your point of view implemented. Well – set yourself up for additional moments of disappointment, because in most cases that’s the result you’re most likely to reach.

A radical approach to stress (Accounting for stress: tolerance vs burden)

 -  Sustainable
Too much stress in your life? Wrong question! It’s not the intensity of stress that matters, it’s the sustainability. Stress is not a mono-dimensional indicator; like a cash-flow statement, stress has two entries: burden or exposure on the negative side; and tolerance or resistance on the positive side. Your stress sustainability is simply your net stress score (tolerance – burden). Knowing your burden and tolerance levels, generates precise stress tactics; knowing your net stress score, generates your stress strategy. It’s very actionable.

Invite Socrates to your Executive Committee

 -  Teamness
Executive Committee and Board meetings have an advocacy to inquiry ratio of about 90% to 10%. That means, in our experience, that 9 interventions out of 10 are about explaining one’s opinions, for only 1 being an inquiry about others’ opinions. This results in misalignments, misunderstandings, poor cohesiveness, and occasional unsatisfactory decisions and personal prejudice. Business executives, when in meetings, have long lost their ability to question, to probe, to investigate. One man can change that. If he were still around, we would recommend you to hire him, at Board level or in your Executive Committee.

Beware with rewards – they rarely motivate

 -  Leadership
You want to motivate your managers to focus more on business critical items? Such as the development of their team members? Or prospection at new accounts? Chances are you’ve included these critical items in their objectives, with a performance-linked bonus. Nothing against that if you only want to encourage and co-responsibilise your managers in the short term. But there’s a catch: if you want to create intrinsic long-time motivation, forget about rewards. They just don’t work. In business they don’t work and at home they don’t work. So what does?

Get rid of your limiting beliefs

 -  Positive
We all have our limiting beliefs. From “People can’t be trusted” to “I will never be able to”, our thoughts are constantly polluted with limiting beliefs. About ourselves, about others, about the world. Most often, these limiting beliefs hamper us from creating the life we desire the most. So, you want to get rid of those beliefs that are blocking your life? Here is how to proceed…

Add Citizenship to Workmanship

 -  Teamness
Successful careers are driven by ‘worksmanship’. Because workmanship is the main component of performance appraisals. Of incentives. Of rewards. This leads to a high performance (individualistic?) culture of KPI’s meet-my-targets. Adding ‘citizenship’ as a second dimension offers a more complete picture and opens up new perspectives on talent management.

2 simple tricks to be in the right job

 -  Sustainable
You are looking for a new job? You have this opportunity to move to another division or country inside your company but hesitate? You consider launching your own business? Or you simply want to make sure your current job is the right one for you? The answer is simple: passion and talent – or pass.