How to Be Happier than Anyone You Know

Deepak Chopra MD (official)

Founder, Chopra Foundation

The psychological study of happiness has waited a long time, which seems peculiar. Everyone seeks to be happy, and yet modern psychology has been focused on mental disorders for almost all of its history. Only recently has the field of positive psychology emerged, and it has had a hard time getting a handle on happiness. Few really reliable facts have emerged, and there are leading theories that throw up their hands, claiming that lifelong happiness is an impossible ideal.

The reason for such a gloomy conclusion comes down to a belief that human beings, first of all, are bad predictors of what will make them happy. For example, having a baby is supposed to be a blissful event, yet among the biggest stresses in a woman's life is taking care of an infant. Making more money doesn't make people happier beyond a certain point, the point where finances don't promote anxiety and insecurity. Some happiness researchers believe in an emotional "set point," a predetermined level of happiness to which each person returns. If your set point is low, even the happiest experience will be temporary--within six months you will return to your set point.

But the least hopeful conclusion about happiness is that it occurs randomly. The notion that we blindly stumble into happiness, experience it for a while, and then move on implies that there is no control over being happy and no method for making it last. Therefore, when around 70-80% of Americans tell pollsters that they are happy, they are either fooling themselves, saying what is expected of them, or have very low expectations. Probably all three factors are at work.

These are the conclusions I discovered while researching my book, The Ultimate Happiness Prescription, and yet it seems possible to have a very different, and far more hopeful, view of how to find lasting happiness. The key lies with a teaching found in India and other wisdom traditions around the world, which says that a person must choose between the path of pleasure and the path of wisdom. The path of pleasure tries to achieve happiness by increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. In many ways, this path is inevitable for almost everyone, because since infancy we've been conditioned to follow it.

The natural instinct to maximize pleasure and minimize pain isn't all that natural, however. Near the end of a marathon or a football game, muscles are painfully sore, but athletes are driven by other motivations, such as the desire to win. Soldiers endure pain out of patriotism; mothers endure the pain of childbirth because they want to have a baby. In a word, higher motivations exist in everyone, for better or for worse. A wife who stays with an abusive husband may be motivated by wanting security, feeling hopeless that she can exist on her own, or believing that she must be a loyal spouse. In complex ways the simple maxim of being happy through maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain simply doesn't work.

The first step on the other path, the path of wisdom, is to reject the pointless project of pursuing pleasure, and for most people it's too big a step. In modern America we are overwhelmed by mass media, advertising, and pop culture. These combine to reinforce the myth that endless consumerism is the key to happiness, along with a belief that if you distract yourself with TV, movies, video games, restaurants, etc., you will wind up being happy. You can spend a lifetime floundering around in this welter of illusions, which is why the path of wisdom, although thousands of years old, remains rare.

The path of wisdom seeks to untie the bonds that force us to identify with pleasure-pain. A new identity, based on a secure self, must emerge, and once that is accomplished, the foundation is laid for a higher self. All of this happens "in here," as awareness expands, matures, and transcends old conditioning. The methods for walking the path of wisdom are well-known by now: meditation, mindfulness, contemplative practices, and so on. Practical things like taking downtime and "in time" every day are useful. So is avoiding and reducing stress, attending to symptoms of anxiety and depression, and working on personal issues embedded from past traumas and wounds.

There's a lot to do that consumer culture ignores and minimizes, because consumer culture, including the culture of corporate success, is totally external, relying on the illusion that if you change things "out there" (by getting more money, possessions, status, and power), everything "in here" will be taken care of. The path of wisdom teaches that the exact opposite is true. Taking care of things "in here" is the prerequisite for happiness. The prospect of achieving lifelong happiness begins there, with one simple but profound realization.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Culture is what people do when no one is looking

Doug Williamson

President and C.E.O. at The Beacon Group

For decades, organizations have conducted formal employee surveys and, until recently, these have been geared to measure employee satisfaction and opinions. These types of surveys have helped organizations gauge a number of elements within their organization, however, they were rarely tied back to the organization’s culture. In other words, the questions on these surveys measured the parts, and never the whole.

Today, with increasing appreciation of the importance of culture (and the concept of organizational DNA), the time is right to shift the focus of employee surveys to the health and fitness of the organization. With a tested value set as the foundation, coupled with a desire to develop a strong culture, these sophisticated tools allow leaders to measure trends across a number of key areas affecting their employees, and ultimately, the organization itself.

Here are Some Tips to Getting your Measurement Tool Right:

The survey, and its administration, must be created with purpose, or the results will not be useful.

Content. There are indeed right and wrong questions that can be asked on Organizational Culture surveys. To effectively measure their culture, organizations must spend an extensive period of time crafting their values, and then developing appropriate questions to assess them. Further still, it is important to understand that employees at different levels have different vantage points on the organization, and it is wise to create subsets of questions to be delivered to these targeted groups. This ensures that the survey process gathers as much relevant information as possible from the employee population

Get the right feedback from the right places.

Third-party administration. It is basic human nature to be reluctant to deliver harsh news directly.  Therefore, it is particularly important for organizations to consider the use of a third-party organization to administer the survey, collect the data, and present the comprehensive results. This will not only reassure employees that their views will be kept anonymous, and confidential, but it will allow them to provide truthful, unfiltered feedback.

Maximize the likelihood of full disclosure.

Delivery. The goal of any survey is to get honest and candid feedback from employees. Therefore, ensure your organization embraces technology in any way possible to distribute and collect the surveys in as short a timeframe as possible. Be sure to seek out third-parties who can distribute and collect information from your employee population in a secure and protected manner. And reassure employees, at every step of the process, that their “candid” feedback is what is desired to help grow the organization.

Corporate culture is a powerful force. If an organization is fortunate enough to get it right, and has a culture that promotes effectiveness, and growth, it can move at pace through the challenges of the business world. If, on the other hand, its culture hinders progress and holds the organization back from reaching its true potential, it is critical to be able to turn this around.

Either way, being able to identify where your organization’s culture is, and where you want it to go is an important factor for achieving long term success.

Five Questions That Make Strategy Real

Jack Welch

Executive Chairman, The Jack Welch Management Institute

By Jack and Suzy Welch

Lots of people – most notably academics and consultants – tend to talk about strategy as if it’s some kind of high-brain scientific methodology. We come from a different school of thought. That strategy is a living, breathing, totally dynamic game. It’s fun – and fast.  And it’s alive. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and 100-plus page reports that “gurus” suggest. They’re time consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them. In real life, strategy is very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.
How?

The first step of making strategy real is coming up with a big “a-ha” for your business – a smart, realistic, relatively fast way to gain sustainable competitive advantage. To do that, you need to debate, grapple with, wallow in, and dig into – and we mean dig deep into –your playing field (that is, your competitive situation) and its players. Let the following five questions guide you in that process, with meetings that are alive and continually ongoing.

WHAT DOES THE PLAYING FIELD LOOK LIKE NOW?

• Who are the competitors in this business, large and small, new and old?
• Who has what share, globally and in each market? Where do we fit in?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor? How good are their products? How much does each one spend on R&D? How big is each sales force? How performance-driven is each culture?
• Who are this business’s main customers and how do they buy?  

WHAT HAS THE COMPETITION BEEN UP TO?

• What has each competitor done in the past year to change the playing field?
• Has anyone introduced game-changing new products, new technologies, or a new distribution channel?
• Are there any announced or potential new entrants, and what have they been up to in the past year?

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO?

• What have you done in the past year to change the competitive playing field?
• Have you bought a company, introduced a new product, stolen a competitor’s key salesperson, or licensed a new technology from a start-up?
• Have you lost any competitive advantages that you once had – a great salesperson, a special product, a proprietary technology?

 WHAT’S AROUND THE CORNER?

• What scares you most in the year ahead -- what one or two things could a competitor do to nail you?
• Is your top talent secure, and are you caring for them appropriately, with pay, perks, and a culture that inspires them?
• What new products or technologies could your competitors launch that might change the game?
• What M&A deals would knock you off your feet?

WHAT’S YOUR WINNING MOVE?

• What can you do to change the playing field – is it an acquisition, a new product, globalization, or better talent?
• What can you do to make customers stick to you more than ever before and more than anyone else?

Now, after you complete this exercise, the next step is to put the right people in the right jobs to drive the big a-ha forward. The facts are, you get a lot more bang for your buck when strategy and skills fit.

From there, it’s just a matter of relentlessly seeking out the best practices to achieve your big a-ha, adapting them, and continuously improving them. Strategy is unleashed when you have a learning organization where people thirst to do everything better every day. They draw on best practices from anywhere, inside or out, and push them to ever-higher levels of effectiveness. You can have the best big a-ha in the world, but without this learning culture in place, any sustainable competitive advantage will not last.

Strategy, then, is simply finding the big a-ha and setting a broad direction, putting the right people behind it, and then executing with an unyielding emphasis on continuous improvement. There’s no mystery to it!

Jack Welch is Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch Management Institute. Through its online MBA program, the Jack Welch Management Institute transforms the lives of its students by providing them with the tools to become better leaders, build great teams, and help their organizations win.

Suzy Welch is co-author, with Jack Welch, of  The Real-Life MBA -- Your No-BS Guide to Winning the Game, Building a Team, and Growing Your Career, which debuted as a #1 Wall Street Journal and Washington Post best-seller, and of the #1 Wall Street Journal and international best-seller Winning.      

A Team Is A Group Who Work Together

5 Things Leaders Look For in a Difference Maker

David Bookbinder

Attitude is everything.

Or is it?

Great attitudes are infectious and can positively impact the behaviors of others.  Of course, poor attitudes can also be infectious, and not in a good way, but that's a subject for another chapter.

So when we think about what defines a positive difference maker, is it really all about attitude?

 

In the last chapter of this series, we discussed the valuation technique used to value the assembled workforce.  We made the observation that people are not fungible, and that there's more to think about than just the cost of replacement when assessing the value of employees.  We also noted that within the aggregated workforce there are "difference makers." 

In chapter 2 of  The New ROI: Return On Individuals, we discuss what defines a difference maker. 

 

In author and speaker, John Maxwell's book called The Difference Maker,  John busts the myth that "attitude is everything" and explains that while attitude is important, it isn't 'everything.'  There are certain things that attitude alone can't overcome.  A good attitude isn't a substitute for experience.  Attitude also can't overcome a lack of skill, nor can it overcome certain facts.  In other words, despite my love of hockey and desire to play in the NHL, the fact that I am past the prime age of a typical hockey player and lack the skill to ice skate, prevents me from living that dream.

That said, he writes that attitude is a primary component in determining success.  John explains that attitude is the difference maker in how we approach and deal with relationships and challenges.  It might be the one thing that we always have in our control, regardless of the circumstances. 

What makes people become difference makers?
Studies conducted by OC Tanner Institute, including research conducted with Forbes Insight, was published in the book entitled Great Work.  In summary, it describes the mindset of people who achieve noteworthy results as follows:

"Great difference makers shift from seeing themselves as workers with an assignment to crank out, to seeing themselves as people with a difference to make."

 

So difference makers have the attitude that they are, in fact, difference makers.

The results of a study of roughly 1.7 million people across all industries found that what sets these high performers apart isn’t a set of traits like intelligence or ambition.  Difference makers, or 'high performers,' simply do things differently at work.

The specific things that difference makers do to achieve better results are:

1) They Ask the Right Questions
Difference makers ask things like “Why does this take so long?” “Why can’t we…” “What if …”  Difference makers are not going to be satisfied with a "that's the way we've always done it" mentality.

2) They See How Things Work
Difference makers look at work in ways that others haven’t. They recognize the importance of seeking to understand the work from the recipient’s point of view.  This perspective allows them to better tailor their deliverables for the recipient.

  

3) They Have “Out of Network” Conversations

Difference makers regularly talk to people outside their immediate network of friends and associates.   They understand that their immediate networks have a high correlation with similar contacts who might look at issues through similar lenses or experiences.  By going outside of their network, difference makers will build on the ideas that result from this variety of perspectives.

4) They Improve Things
Difference makers are looking to develop new techniques and strategies, to optimize processes or products.  For a difference maker, there are always possibilities.  "Good enough" is never good enough.

5) They Take Ownership
Difference makers don't pass the buck or hold the belief that something is "not my job."  Difference makers get great pleasure from the sense of accomplishment.  This feeling inspires them to take on even more difference-making endeavors, and the upward-spiral continues.

In conclusion, a great attitude is only one characteristic of a difference maker.
Next up is a discussion about another defining characteristic of a difference maker: Grit.
In the meantime... 

If you've just discovered this Series and want to get caught up, you can visit these chapters: 

The WHY Behind the Series 

Chapter 1: The Value of the Workforce

 About the Author:

Dave Bookbinder is a Director of Valuation Services at GBQ Consulting where he helps his clients with the valuation of businesses, intellectual property, and complex financial instruments.  More than a valuation expert, Dave is a proactive problem solver who consults with companies of all sizes, both privately held and publicly-traded.  Dave strives to lend his business experiences to help people with a variety of matters.  For more about Dave, or to schedule a conversation, visit his LinkedIn profile.

Skills have methods, habits have sources

We spend way too much time and effort on developing outer leadership skills, and not enough attention on unearthing the inner sources for bad leadership habits, releasing the hold those habits have on us, and developing more useful ones.  In order to learn, you likely have to unlearn first.

Thought for the day

Skills have methods, habits have sources

- Gilbert Ryle

1.    Leadership skills have methods:  We can teach leadership skills, through methods.  This is informational learning or what is sometimes called horizontal learning.  It is about adding applications to our personal operating systems (our mindset) or filling up our toolbox with additional skills, knowledge and competencies. It addresses the outer game of leadership, or “what a leader does”.  

2.    Leadership habits have sources: This is a different beast, as these habits are there to protect an image we have had of ourselves. These habits are like an immune system that protects us from change or developing and sustaining new skills.  We have to discover the source, and this source likes to hide deep within us.  This source is usually in the form of a big assumption or a belief, that maintains the “bad” habit.   We then have to question or test its validity, or accuracy, in terms of today’s world.  Does this habit still serve me, or only get in my way?   If in the self-reflection and testing process, we see that the belief or assumption is no longer accurate, than we can begin to release the habit without threat to our identity or integrity. This is transformational learning, or what is sometimes called vertical learning.  You can’t do this through adding applications to your personal operating system (mindset).  You have to change or evolve the operating system into something bigger or more complex.  This vertical journey addresses the inner game of leadership or “who a leader is”.  The process is like discovering how we have the brake on and then learning how to release it, so that when we apply our foot to the gas (developing a new leadership capability) the adaptive progress won’t be sabotaged by that hidden foot on the brake. 

Brian Brittain

Executive Development work,  through helping executives and their  teams get results by talking about what matters

Brian.brittain@brittainconsulting.ca

416-999-3217

http://brittainconsulting.ca/

How to Be a Leader, Not a Manager

The trick to being a master of both skill sets is understanding the nuances that distinguish true leadership.

 

By Ilya Pozin

Founder, Pluto.TV

Let's get something straight: manager and leader are not synonymous terms.

Manage implies maintaining the status quo. It's a manager's job to ensure that things go as planned and that the team meets expectations. Leading, on the other hand, has an inherent forward progression. Leaders encourage change and take us someplace new.

Now those semantic differences don't mean that being a manager and being a leader are mutually exclusive. But finding a great manager who is also leader, that's like finding a flying unicorn. The trick to being a master of both skill sets is understanding the nuances that distinguish true leadership.

These are the three things that separate a business leader from a manager:

1. You're paid for managerial duties, not leadership ones.
It's common to say that someone has been promoted to a "leadership role," but in reality they just become a manager. After all, their job title becomes "Senior Sales Manager" not "Sales Leader."

The sad truth is that, while leadership may be rewarded with occasional bonuses or just a pat on the back, very few people in the business world are paid to be leaders. A good manager makes sure their team has the tools they need, is there to answer questions, and fairly evaluates performance. Because that's what they're paid to do.

A manager who is also a leader goes further that. They focus on taking their team beyond what's expected of them and empowering them to be successful at whatever it is they're best at. And none of it for their own personal glory, but all for the good of the team and the organization. It's ideas and possibilities that motivate a leader every day, not a paycheck.

2. Leaders focus on and respect individual strengths.
The 2015 Gallup State of the American Manager report found some key differences in effective managerial leadership. One of the big ones was whether a manager focused on improving employees' weaknesses or on building their strengths. Comparing engaged and disengaged employees, 67 percent of employees who said their managers focused on strengths were engaged. Only 31 percent of employees whose managers focused on weaknesses were engaged.

A great leader knows that their team's strengths are their biggest advantage and they strive to let each employee make the most out of their skills. This means giving employees some autonomy when it comes to picking their own roles in different projects. It's then up to the leader to provide coaching and guidance for employees so they naturally pick up the tasks that are best suited for their strengths.

Take the company I founded, Coplex, for example. Every member of that team has a broad range of hard skills, soft skills, experiences and interests. These will even change and grow over time. We recently had a customer that joined us to build a yoga e-commerce app. One of our UX designers on the team has been a yoga junkie for years and was a big advocate of their brand. Naturally, she selected to join that product team. This allowed her to leverage her interests and brand history but also her hard skills and the work output has been incredible.

Leaders don't just view their employees within the confines of their job descriptions. They know and understand what each individual can offer on a deeper level and use that knowledge to set their team up for success.

3. Leadership requires accountability.
Many people shy away from accountability. They equate being held accountable for their actions as being punished for their mistakes. But a real leader knows that's not true. In fact, effective leadership relies on accountability.

There is no quicker way to lose the trust of your employees than passing the buck onto them. Aside from the ethical implications of blaming someone else, not holding yourself accountable sends the message that mistakes are unacceptable; that they're bad. On the contrary, mistakes can become great opportunities.

Leaders not only own up to their screw-ups but explore what went wrong and how to do better. If done effectively, this will trickle down to those you oversee. Employees will not only openly talk about their mistakes, but use them as a discussion that can help the entire team improve.

It might seem like it's a thin line between manager and business leader, but in reality it takes a lot to grow from one to the other. Becoming a leader means rethinking the way we conduct day-to-day business, as well as what we have to offer our employees. Being a leader means you're prepared to take your team forward.