Innumerable barriers and setbacks can easily hijack the attainment of a goal. But studies on the effects and processes for achieving goals show that setting intentions in advance and implementing them as steps toward achieving your goals can greatly enhance the ability to attain them.
Importantly, the difference between a goal and an intention is that a goal feels abstract, while an intention is linked more directly with an action. Goals are abstract because they’re rooted in the future, while intentions are focused on the present.
Setting your intentions each day and following through with them ensures that you have clear, purposeful objectives and are motivated to stay on track. Without the process of planning your intentions for the day, your goal can easily become lost amid life’s chaos and clutter.
Intentions provide the seeds of action. They are a way of adhering to a proactive — as opposed to reactive — approach, and they allow you to have firm control over your day and your immediate future.
Plan to carve out 15-20 minutes — either at the beginning of the day or the end of the previous day — to keep track of what you plan to undertake in the day ahead. Also note what you were able to complete from the previous day’s intentions. Making time to set your intentions for the day is an intentional act in itself. It requires being grounded in the moment and allowing yourself time to reflect and prioritize actions that need your attention in order to keep your forward momentum.
Use a spreadsheet, a flow chart, or a day-timer to record and keep track of each day’s intentions. Try breaking your day into segments — 30 minutes, 60 minutes, etc. — and give your brain a rest in between each task. Schedule your more difficult and challenging projects for the time of day when you’re most focused.
Setting intentions can begin with defining high-level values and then assigning task-oriented actions that correspond with them — but all with the intention of helping you progress toward your ultimate goal. Defining high-level intentions for yourself provides a framework for setting your daily intentions. For example, here are six high-level intentions that I set for myself to lay the foundation for overall success:
1. Maintain personal health and contentment. I recognize that I’m responsible for my own destiny, which means making every effort to live to my fullest potential and positively influence others.
2. Act responsibly. I take responsibility for my actions and do what’s necessary to ensure that I remain accountable to myself and to others.
3. Honor those who have influenced me. I remember that others have influenced me and that their influence is a key part of my own success — and how I, in turn, am able to influence others.
4. Approach each day purposefully. I prepare for my day and have a clear understanding of my scheduled responsibilities.
5. Pursue continuous education. I strive to remain educated and relevant in the industries that I influence through my coaching, advising, and consulting.
6. Support my team. I assist my team members by working to understand and address whatever roadblocks or issues they face.
One example of how a high-level intention plays out in my daily tasks involves setting aside time to read trade magazines, blogs, and newsletters to pursue continuous education and stay relevant. Another is setting an intention to slow down and remain present in my interactions with team members in order to give them the support they need.
Strive to make setting daily intentions a habit. In this way, you remain focused on what you need to accomplish to achieve your goals — and reap the rewards of having attained them!
When we’re trying to understand an emotion, thought, or experience, there’s a big difference between learning about it from a reference source such as a website (including Wikipedia), a textbook or even a dictionary, or by talking to someone else who has been there.
The reference source gives us an explanation that’s merely descriptive; hearing from somebody who’s been there gives us helpful insights. But if we don’t have someone to talk to, or if we do but want to add another layer to their input, there’s a whole other source out there that rarely gets the attention it should: well-researched expert quotes, which can help us identify a path forward – similar to having a conversation with an expert or a wise and perceptive friend.
In particular, short descriptive quotes from individuals with considerable personal experience in the emotion we’re trying to understand can be helpful not only in our personal lives, but also, our professional lives where we need to think and process input quickly. This approach can be compared to the essence of helpful and informative reporting – and it may even be described somewhat as basic investigative journalism. Yet ‘quotes from experts’ can add considerable immediate color and depth to our understanding.
Let’s look at ‘Depression’ for example, and assume that we know relatively little about it. Suppose we have a colleague or boss who has confided that they’re suffering from depression. Initially, without much understanding of what, exactly, “depression” entails, we might browse the internet and stumble upon this explanation on Psychiatry.com: “Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.” Or we might consult a standard dictionary definition of Depression and find something along the lines of : ‘A state of enduring sadness, gloom, or pessimism.’ (or similar).
We might consider a Thesaurus and look at antonyms and synonyms, and then move quickly to available search engines to deepen our understanding. We can quickly be overwhelmed (‘like drinking out of a firehose!’) by the hundreds of available websites, books, and viewpoints, and hope to trim down the available data to manageable levels. And almost certainly we ask ourselves where best to turn for the most reliable authors, therapists, and professionals.
Let’s assume that after a few more hours’ review we decide to pare down our sources on Depression to something more manageable – say a handful of ‘widely-recognized experts.’ Do we then buy each of their five different 275-page books in order to reliably self-educate? And what if we come to realize that the emotion we really needed to understand better is something closer to ‘Anxiety? Isn’t there a better way to get better-oriented regarding emotions without taking so much time?
I learned from experience that short, memorable expert quotes are exceptionally practical tools. My early teenage daughter had suffered a serious injury that triggered an emotional crisis. When she asked me if I knew what “depression” meant, my journey to understanding it fully began by looking the word up in the dictionary.
Ultimately, it was through quotes and insights that I came to fully grasp not just how depression is defined, but how depression feels. This led me to investigate 180 other emotions, and to curate 2,500 of the greatest short quotes and insights of all time, from 1,000 leading thinkers across nearly 3,000 years of world history. The result was my new book, Emotional Shorthand: 2500 Greatest Self-Help Quotes and Life Insights.
Let’s return to our previous descriptive standard dictionary definition:
Depression: “A state of enduring sadness, gloom, or pessimism” and compare it for sake of both insight and helpfulness to a few short quotes from world-recognized leaders and ‘emotional veterans’ who can help us get generally oriented on the topic of Depression:
J.K. Rowling (Pictured above — former depression sufferer; now the world’s top novelist):
“Depression is that absence of being able to envision that you will ever be cheerful again…It is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced.”
Rollo May (Author and one of America’s leading psychologists in the 1960’s):
“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”
Halley Cornell (Journalist; depression sufferer; Content Strategist for WebMD):
“Depression lies to you. It tells you that you have always felt this way and you always will, but you haven’t and you won’t.”
Albert Ellis, PhD (Known among the top 5 psychologists of the twentieth century):
“You largely constructed your depression. It wasn’t given to you. Therefore you can deconstruct it.”
Depression provides just one example of the benefit of seeking expert insights in addition totechnical descriptions as means of arriving at a better understanding of almost any day-to-day emotion. These deeper gains accrue to both ourselves and to those of people around us, including family and colleagues. Well-researched expert quotes can especially help focus large amounts of data. While qualified professional opinions and advice should always be relied upon in final healthcare decisions, expert quotes can be especially helpful to getting oriented in complex landscapes. By accessing a dozen or more diverse expert quotes, we can quickly expand our perspective, personal clarity, and emotional literacy. Their power to trigger “Aha!” moments can contribute to solving modern problems – both at work and beyond – and can help change lives.
Whoever you are reading this article, I want you to take a moment and think about how you were raised as a child. I don’t want you to think about where, or the events of the era, or even about the quality of your childhood — simply, how your parent/s raised you.
The reason this is important is because how you were raised affects not only how you interact with others, but also how you expect others to respond to you.
To a great degree, we are the product of whatever parenting model was in vogue when we were children. I was raised in the early 60’s at a time when “permissive parenting” was all the rage and Dr. Benjamin Spock’s book “The Common Sense of Baby and Child Care” was the go-to source for young mothers. His approach to raising children was to be nurturing and to encourage their individuality. While this might sound very similar to how children are raised today, in reality, children of the 60’s were taught to be very respectful of and deferential to authority figures. If one thinks in terms of the four predominant parenting styles — authoritarian, permissive, authoritative, and neglectful — Spock’s model would be more authoritarian, although it would seem permissive compared to the previous generation.
Tell-Do Parenting
Most Boomers (my generation) were raised in what I refer to as a “Tell-Do” household. Instructions came from the top in a command-and-control parenting style. The parents were the commanders; the children were the subordinates. As children, Boomers were told by their parents what to do and they listened. When our parents said jump, we asked how high. There wasn’t any debate to be had. Failing to comply would result in unpleasant repercussions. “Wait till your father gets home,” was the most dreaded string of words in the English language.
Suggest-Do Parenting
Gen X kids grew up in a markedly different environment than Boomers. Changing economic and social conditions gave Gen X a much longer leash. More and more women were entering the workplace and taking on full-time employment, which meant that Gen X was raised by busy working parents who couldn’t watch over their children at all hours. Between school dismissal and parents getting home from work, Gen X spent many hours home alone, creating our first latchkey children. Their parents were forced to trust them to make many choices on their own, and because there wasn’t anyone around to issue direct orders, Gen X learned to be independent by necessity.
This independence resulted in some leveling of the top-down authority model. The Tell-Do model of parenting gave way to more of a Suggest-Do model. Rather than issuing orders for and about everything, parents would often suggest what their children should do.
While they might sometimes be strong suggestions that might eventually result in repercussions if not heeded, children knew that their parents had a more limited ability to enforce the rules when they weren’t around. It was also easier for busy parents to simply allow their children to manage the small details of their own lives. This dynamic instilled Gen X with a spirit of self-sufficiency. Considering again the parenting styles, this would be more likened to the permissive style and at its worst, the neglectful.
Engage-Discuss Parenting
While Gen X was raised to be more independent, Millennials were brought up under a whole new paradigm of “Engage-Discuss” in which parenting became more facilitative than it had ever been before. So far, this trend has largely continued into Gen Z, as they grow up and come of age.
While the Engage-Discuss dialogue-based model does not call for an abolishment of hierarchy, this interaction involves open communication between the authority figure (i.e. parent) and the subordinate (i.e. child). Rather than harnessing punishment and guilt to change behavior, the authority figure enters into an open dialogue with the subordinate and discusses corrective behavior. This model hinges on a mutually established understanding that can only be achieved when the authority figure eschews coercion for open dialogue. This parenting style would likely fall under the auspices of the authoritative model.
The data suggest there is tremendous benefit in adopting the “Engage-Discuss” model in the workplace. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Millennials Rising, published in 2000, Millennials have experienced a decrease in crime rates, alcohol, and drug abuse, and exhibit a greater sense of responsibility to others and the environment, as compared to previous generational cohorts. It appears that this model of parenting works and makes great citizens of children.
Gen Z is now entering the workplace and they, too, have been raised on a variation of the Engage-Discuss” parenting model. Again, relating this to one of the parenting styles, this would likely be some combination of authoritative, with a bias toward the permissive. Time will tell, as they enter the workplace in ever larger numbers, if they will interact differently than their Millennial brethren.
When in Doubt, Have a Conversation
We now have a workplace with multiple generations who, as a consequence of how they were raised, are likely to have different expectations and habits in terms of interacting with colleagues. Boomer and Gen X managers need to recognize that younger workers may respond differently than they themselves would have at their age. Moreover, they must be willing to embrace, rather than attempt to stifle, these differences.
By choice or necessity, each successive generation has been raised somewhat differently than their parents. We just need to accept that having conversations, which worked so well in the home, can and does function in the workplace.
These two words aren’t often used in the same sentence. Many might argue that it’s not even plausible to use emotive words such as ‘intimacy’ in a business context. My contention is that it’s highly performance-enhancing to develop such a degree of closeness with your business because it enables you to intervene in a far more nuanced and accurate way. To illustrate this, every so often I am going to share a story about a business that has honed its success formula to an unusually intimate degree. This week, Trader Joe’s is my example.
For those of you who might not be familiar with this business, Trader Joe’s is a stand-out American retail operation. Not only are they very successful (their sales per square meter performance is 2x that of any of their competitors) but they are also highly unique in their approach. In fact, they defy norms and often do things that might seem counter-intuitive to other businesses.
As an illustration of this, consider their core values:
We are a product-driven company
We create WOW customer experiences every day
No bureaucracy
KAIZEN!
The store is the brand
Integrity
We are a national chain of neighborhood grocery stores
What impresses me is less about the content, but more about the clarity with which Trader Joe’s knows what it is – and isn’t. And it’s written down, codified, honed over time, and publicly known. The challenge for you, the CEO, is to get to a similar place of intimacy with your success formula.
Specifically:
Have you ‘officially’ codified your business and interrogated that thinking to a point of high accuracy?
Have you written it down in order to create an artifact that can live within the business, known by many?
Have you made it public, understood, and well-known within your business?
The value of doing so is broad:
The more people who understand this codification, the better they can execute it.
The better your success formula is known, so better choices and decisions can be made that honor it.
The better you, the CEO, understand your business and what makes it ‘tick’ the more accurately you can lead the business.
I am fascinated by this codification process as it’s truly a higher-order form of CEOship that has profound implications across your business. At the same time, I recognize that the higher-order nature of this thinking can feel nebulous or a nice-to-have (which I’m utterly convinced it’s not).
Not dealing with emotions hurts us, our people, and our organizations. Worse, it holds us back from creating remarkable cultures and achieving incredible business results.
If you want to grow and scale your business, you must learn to develop your Emotional Intelligence. You need to learn how to feel comfortable with emotions. Your emotions, and those of others, are not the enemy, but, in fact, are the basis of your strengths.
The six-step process below is backed by leading science and grounded in decades of in-the-field experience. Learn to identify the specific emotional skills that most impact your career, uncover barriers to growth, set goals, and tap into the motivation to change. This framework addresses five distinct areas of EI – self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision-making, and stress management – along with the individual competencies associated with each.
1. Connect With Yourself
Take a hard look in the mirror to create an inventory of your existing EI strengths and areas for development. Ask yourself questions that probe all five areas of EI, such as: Am I aware of how I am feeling at any given moment? Do I stand up for myself? Am I able to put myself in other people’s shoes?
2. Consult With Others
People’s self-perception is not always accurate. Therefore, it’s critical to interview others to learn how they are seen and then circle back to compare these results with their own perceptions. Ask questions like: “Does it seem that I care too much about what others think of me? Do I adequately manage my stress? Do you think that I control my impulses?”
3. Clarify Focus
Once you’ve collected this information about your level of emotional intelligence, you’ll more likely change if you understand the why behind the EI gaps, and what these gaps are costing you. Look at your highest and lowest EI competencies, and then ask yourself: “Where does this development opportunity come from? Childhood? Life experience? How does it hold me back in the workplace?”
4. Consider Possibilities and Barriers
This step helps you figure out how to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be. First, brainstorm as many options as possible for reaching your EI goal, and then they think about what might get in the way of realizing each option.
5. Craft an Action Plan
Develop an action plan broken down into bite-size chunks with target dates for completion, create a “relapse prevention” strategy for handling hiccups along the way. This includes asking yourself: “What triggers do I anticipate experiencing as I attempt to reach my goal? What can I do to avoid these triggers?”
6. Confirm Commitment and Close the Conversation
Establish accountability for your goals. Identify a “Competency Advisor” for support during your EI development process. When you check in with your advisor, they will be asked such questions as: “What strategies have you tried to achieve your goal? How did it go? What are you learning about yourself? What is one thing you will do differently next time?”
Instead of spending time and money on dealing with the inappropriate behaviors and disrespectful communications stemming from emotional issues in the workplace, you can get to the heart of those issues and deal with your feelings, and the feelings of your people, head-on. Leaders need to embrace emotion and turn it into unparalleled strengths.
It has long been clear that an effective educational leader needs to bring many and varied skills to the task at hand, not the least of which are the ability to communicate effectively, to organize, to collaborate, to unify and to promote growth.
But as we have learned during the pandemic, one of the most important skills is agility – the ability to adapt on the fly to ever-changing circumstances. Educator Pino Buffone summarized the challenge as follows in a January 2021 examination of agility:
So much has changed in regard to everyday life on Earth over the past year and a half. In society broadly, and the education sector specifically, the nature of the landscape has definitely shifted. With respect to leadership in schools and systems—provincially, nationally, and internationally—the organizational terrain has evolved because of the extraordinary experiences of the pandemic period and is not likely to return to the well-worn physical features of the past. Moreover, it is conceivable that changes to the features of institutions of public education have only just begun because of the impact of COVID-19 on children and school systems.
Buffone went on to cite several works showing how times like these demand adaptability and redefinition. One of those was the 2017 book “The Wonder Wall,” by former educator and administrator Peter Gamwell and communications strategist Jane Daly. While the book predated the pandemic, the authors labeled unsettled times like this one as a period of “inbetweenity,” when one era is nearing a conclusion and the next has not yet completely emerged. During such times it is abundantly clear that leaders have to adopt new approaches, lest they find themselves hopelessly lost amid the turbulence.
It is important to understand that throughout history there are examples of calamity leading to innovation, in all fields. As an example, consider the manner in which public sanitation was improved in the wake of the Black Death, or the way the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic in 1918 resulted in changes to patient care. COVID-19 has led to similar disruption, in such areas as vaccine development, social distancing and working conditions.
All of that has, of course, impacted education. Just as those in certain occupations have had to resort to remote work, those in education have adopted remote and hybrid models. As Buffone writes, there has been “a seismic shift” in long-accepted methods, which threatened to “widen existing inequities, but also make qualitative and quantitative comparisons—already a challenge—much more difficult.”
Leaders as a result have had to adopt an innovative, inventive mindset, understanding and supporting the needs of students as well as educators, in order to create the best possible learning environment. Now those same administrators must continue to navigate the “inbetweenity,” understanding what approaches might work best as the coronavirus abates, and what might be applied if and when future public health crises arise. How can they best prepare their teachers and students for such an eventuality? How can they ensure that the best systems and procedures are in place?
Again, it is a matter of being alert and aware. It is a matter of surveying the landscape, and seeing where problems might arise. And it is a matter of commiserating with others throughout the profession – comparing notes and seeing what might work best for one’s own school or district, then adapting accordingly.
As Buffone writes, proactivity and ingenuity are central to adaptability. So too are building relationships and partnerships, and cultivating the correct systems and processes. Moreover, administrators must be quick to pivot as the situation changes, and that has been the case the last several months, as schools have slowly reopened.
Janelle Duray, Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President at Jobs for America’s Graduates (JAG), writes that it is imperative for school systems to ”reconnect and re-engage students, especially those from vulnerable homes and communities.” And, she adds, it must be done quickly – that among other things, technology must be embraced if school systems are truly going to move forward in this tenuous time.
When I served as superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), I collaborated with our team in 2019 to put into place an initiative called Imagine PPS, which built upon our Expect Great Things foundation, enacted when I came aboard three years earlier. And indeed, we sought to leverage technology to our full advantage. We sought to address inequities within the district. And when COVID-19 reared its ugly head, the mission was unchanged, even if the delivery model was. We wanted to engage students, even if it was from afar.
Now administrators are making another adjustment, another pivot. Now it’s a matter of learning lessons from the recent past, while continuing to understand that further midcourse corrections might be required. It’s a matter of keeping your head up, being light on your feet and understanding that the educational world, like the world at large, is a complicated place and forever evolving. As Buffone writes, “Vision matters most when clarity is missing.” That being the case, a leader must always have eyes wide open.
Startups usually don’t have a lot—of money, resources, time—really much of anything. Most of the time, the founder has a great idea and a couple of friends or associates to help figure out how to move that idea toward reality.
The “team” consists of whomever the founder has nearby: a ragtag bunch that can be trusted to at least try and figure things out. Since there’s usually not much money, whatever problems arise, whatever needs to get done, you and your team have to figure it out on a shoestring. You have no choice.
When your startup gains traction and looks like it might make it, it’s usually the direct result of the heroic efforts of these early team members. With few exceptions, there’s usually a tireless jack-(or jill)-of-all-trades who knows a little about everything. But more importantly, they’ve got a figure-it-out mentality and they’re willing to learn and scrap and claw to get it done.
Meet Bounce-Around Betty. She’s been there since day one, she’s an amazing person, and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get things done. You need someone to tackle creating your startup’s logo and your first set of business cards? She’s on it. There’s a problem with the supply chain? Betty will be on the first flight out tomorrow morning. Need to figure out the witchcraft that is Google Analytics or advertising on Facebook? She’ll dive in and learn the digital marketing basics to get you started. Whenever you need something challenging done, Betty jumps right in, headfirst, without knowing whether she’ll sink or swim.
In most cases, Betty can still be a great employee for your growing company, assuming she doesn’t lose that drive, that eagerness to learn, and that willingness to do whatever it takes that made her your go-to employee early on. But problems occur when we either promote Betty beyond her capacity or her role is so ambiguous as the company grows, that it causes confusion and problems with the rest of the team.
Having a Betty on your team is a critical part of your early success . . . until it isn’t. There’s no hard-and-fast rule that says, “Two years in, you need to replace your generalists with specialists!” or “Once you’ve hit $1 million in revenue, bring in a COO!” It all depends on your company, your growth, and your vision—as well as your Betty’s skill set, emotional intelligence, and career goals. There’s a lot of moving parts here, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Definitely more art than science!
Adding experience gives you the opportunity to start professionalizing your team, putting pieces in place for future growth. You’re confident that Bounce-Around Betty will always figure things out—but what if your team didn’t have to “figure it out” and already knew what to do? Betty was great on the phone with early customers, but she’s not the right person to design and build the customer service engine, including processes, tools, and the team you need for future growth.
In most cases, Betty’s a good employee who doesn’t need to leave just because you need more specialists. She’s a valuable member of the team and can continue adding value if she’s in the right role. Much of what happens with Betty will depend on how you approach the situation. As usual, it also depends on the personalities, expectations, and egos involved. If you demote Betty to assistant to the new VP of Sales without giving her a heads-up—yeah, that’ll piss her off. But do it right, and you can put Betty AND your company in a great position to succeed.
Identify the role that plays best to Betty’s strengths and allows her to grow professionally, but also fuels the company’s growth goals. That’s easier said than done and may require some soul-searching and tough conversations.
If your relationship with Betty has a foundation of trust and open communication, you should be able to approach her and discuss the situation. Be honest with her. Her knack for figuring things out has been a great asset, but a different skill set is needed now. You need leaders who have skins on the wall. Sure, you want to help develop her skills so she can grow professionally — AND you need her to help position the company to achieve its goals.
If you find yourself struggling with situations like this, consider bringing in another set of eyes. Have your mentor or coach assess your Betty situation and give you their perspective. This helps to remove your personal feelings from the equation.
Remember, your goal isn’t to promote Betty until she fails miserably. You want to do what’s best for the company and ideally find the right spot for her to grow. This balance can be tricky, but with the right approach and the right Betty, it can be done!
Toxic behavior, including bullying, is rampant in the workplace—with nearly 20 percent of U.S. workers experiencing it and 19 % witnessing it.1 It’s also a major force behind the ongoing Great Resignation.2 A survey by FlexJobs found that people who have resigned over the past six month cited “toxic company culture” as their number one reason for leaving.3
I, too, have experienced toxicity, including downright bullying. After spending 17 years as a marketing exec at Procter & Gamble, where I helped spearhead some of the world’s most iconic marketing campaigns including Always #LikeAGirl thanks to the wonderfully supportive environment, I was confronted with a toxic environment in my next job. My boss was rude, belittling and treated my team and myself as if we did not know how to do our jobs. Nothing we did was ever good enough. He regularly made humiliating, sarcastic comments. When I teared up in a meeting one day, he gave me a tissue box with a sticker that read “Dalia’s tissue box” and later said to my team: “You think Dalia is such a tough cookie, an Israeli ex-platoon commander? Did you know she has a tissue box in my office with her name on it?”
Eventually, after three years of trying to find ways to end the abuse, I decided to leave. I took up a master’s in organizational psychology at INSEAD business school and dedicated my thesis to issues around handling a toxic environment.
The lessons from this research, combined with my experience in both a toxic environment and at a company with sound policies in place to prevent toxicity (P&G) led me to conclude that the only answer to workplace toxicity and bullying is zero tolerance. This applies on the company side as well as on the employee side.
On the company side, there are three steps I have identified that can—and must—be taken:
1. Enforce the use of leadership assessment tools (LATs).
The only people who can determine if a leader is good are their direct reports, so give them a voice by relying heavily on these tools. They provide valuable input on how a leader’s direct reports view them and what qualities they show up with. Make LATs a top priority.
2. Assess and promote leaders as much for their people skills as for their business skills.
If you want good leaders, reward good leadership! During talent reviews at P&G, leaders would receive a score for their people skills, based on criteria including assessments by direct reports and a score for their business skills based on things such as KPIs. They were only promoted if they were top rated in both areas, and the tactic worked very well.
3. Invest in leadership training.
Many managers want to be good, supportive leaders but simply don’t have the know-how or skills. It’s not their fault: leadership skills such as identifying people’s strengths and coaching your team must be learned. But too often, as managers move up to leadership positions, companies assume they are prepared and have the skills. These skills are not innate, but even the more nuanced skills such as emotional intelligence and creating a psychologically safe environment are teachable. That’s why every company should invest in leadership training.
As for employees dealing directly with toxicity, my advice is simple: walk out and complain. Your company and / or HR department should have policies in place to support this approach. Some of the successful policies I advocate for are having an anonymous ethics line, where calls trigger investigations. Anonymity is key, as is having a neutral, well-qualified HR person in place to help mitigate toxic situations.
To be a successful CEO, Founder or manager, you must prioritize defining your people philosophy and leadership strategies. These key skills, unfortunately, are rarely taught in business school, and must be mastered by anyone managing a team or in a consulting role.
Looking back on my MBA program during this graduation season, there were only two courses that really helped my business career – Accounting 101 and Organization Behavior 101. I’ve largely forgotten all other classes, and learned essential leadership skills on the job. Why were these two classes helpful? Mastering accounting is essential. You must understand the flow of money to manage even a small department. Mastering organization behavior, how to manage people, is equally, if not more, important. That’s because while accounting is a science, organization behavior is an art. If you are unable to get people behind a mission and plan, nothing good ever happens. While accounting may show you where you’re losing money, it takes problem solving and leadership to get people to fix it.
In my book, “One Hit Wonder”, I share lessons learned inside and outside of the business world, based on managing customers, vendors and employees, that worked great at our software startup. These lessons taught me about what motivated people, how they prefer to behave situationally. From these business lessons, I developed a philosophy and strategy to address that fickle, but relatively predictable, thing we call… human nature.
Motivation and Preferences
In my Organizational Behavior class, we studied a book titled, “The Ropes to Skip and The Ropes to Know” by R. Richard Ritti and Steve Levy. You can still order this book online. The premise was simple. There are a few essential things to know about people management, master these, and you can forget the rest. The goal of the class was to help young MBA students get a real sense of organization politics, leadership and human behavior. I loved that class. The two concepts and tools that resonated with me the most were – McClelland’s Needs Theory and the DiSC Personality Profile.
The DiSC Profile evaluates four main personality profiles, including: (D)ominance, (I)nfluence, (S)teadiness, and (C)onscientiousness. Dominants prefer urgency of action, Influencers prefer innovative action and place an emphasis on people, Steadies prefer harmony of action, and C personalities prefer efficiency in action. These preferences also impact situational behavior.
Understanding your primary personality preferences, as well as those of others, can help you understand HOW people do what they do at work. Taken together, these tools provide the how and why of human nature and can help anyone “predict” situational behaviors. These are very useful tools that every leader should learn. To be an effective manager, you want to develop your own leadership philosophy and strategies for day-to-day communications… or what I call “your rules” (a la Leroy Jethro Gibbs in NCIS).
Define Rules and Strategies
In my leadership book, “One Hit Wonder”, I outline rules that I used with consulting clients and to scale Aspire Software that was fully sold in 2021. The philosophy was based on my experience with human nature and situational communications that worked best.
People aren’t the same in every situation. Specifically, as risk increases people act differently… call it pressure. This volatility means that it’s not as important to determine if people are good or bad, but instead, you want to know whether your employees are brave and/or selfless. Good or bad behavior are the situational manifestations of bravery and selflessness under pressure. Based on 30 years of consulting and building a successful startup, I found those traits are relatively rare.
The following “realities” about human nature are not intended to be dark or negative. It is intended to be realistic, and take into account the fact that human nature is somewhat predicable. (Again, this is my philosophy… and I am a positive person…)
Common sense is not common
No good deed goes rewarded
Many think the world revolves around them
There is such thing as thoughtless
There are lots of Kool-Aid drinkers
There are heroes
From this I developed, often through failure and hard lessons, some rules and strategies that have worked well as a business leader.
Talk less, listen more
Develop a thick skin and short memory
Avoid self-important people
You have to take one for the team on occasion
Failure is to be expected
The world does not revolve around you
Showing up is 90% of the battle
What goes around comes around
Take the high road
Be loyal and trustworthy – mean what you say, and say what you mean.
Nothing is simple with people and organizations. But by having a leadership philosophy and rules, it can simplify situational decision-making, and improve your success in working with all kinds of people. And because this skill is something that they just don’t teach enough, you will have to learn most of it on-the-job.
There are three key components to teaching Principled Entrepreneurship.
1. Discover who you are, create a vision for who you want to be, and develop a plan to get there
Creativity is highly correlated with self-knowledge, and passion with purpose. If we want to help students prepare for their lives as Principled Entrepreneurs, we have to move from trying to tell them what to do to helping them find their identity, values, desires, and passion, and then help them figure out a way to create new value from those that generate an economic return. Only then will the work we do on a daily basis no longer be just a way to make a living, but become a way of life. A vocation. A path to human excellence and happiness. In the foundational course we call “Vocation of Business,” we help each student explore their personality, dreams, and identity.
Through various exercises, they create a list of the top values they have and describe how they intend to manifest these in life. Each student learns about mission statements and creates their very own after careful research and deliberation. They determine what virtues they need to cultivate to best support this mission. They go through what’s called the exercise to find out what their core motivations are and how that applies to their work. They are encouraged to explore and find their personal learning style. What many students don’t initially understand is that virtues manifest themselves and are trained in even the smallest everyday acts.
Training in virtue is akin to going to the gym. It takes the constant exercise of our will. Virtues are like a section of a workout routine. They start out as an aspirational activity, like wishing we could get out of bed when the alarm rings the first time. We won’t succeed right away; it’s one step forward and two back. Unless we apply our free will, we would give into our lower desires and give up. But as we stick with it, forgive ourselves for past failures, recommit, and never give up, the activity slowly becomes a habit.
We eventually do it without even thinking about it. Once we achieve that, we can focus on the next such activity, the next virtue to pursue. I ask each student to choose three virtues to which they aspire and practice them on a daily basis for an entire semester. Their reflection write-ups after this period of “training” always amaze and inspire me.
Virtues are so easily acquired, and become so powerful when we possess them. The students often point out that they found it remarkable how these habits come about through small but consistent effort, yet how amazed they are at how far they’ve come in just three months. Altogether, the virtues we possess add up to our character. As people, we are creatures of habit. How we see, how we think, how we act—even how we feel. All of these areas are opportunities for intentionality, for applying our will, for training in virtue and development of firm character.
What this means for Principled Entrepreneurs is that we live in a hopeful reality. Every human being has the ability to grow in their perfection, in their excellence, and it’s easier than most people think. Principled Entrepreneurs believe in humanity. Principled Entrepreneurs always see the human person—and that starts with ourselves—as the solution, the opportunity, the hope. Never the problem. I believe it is absolutely imperative to teach this to aspiring entrepreneurs, to add this to their arsenal of virtues. Discovering our personal vocation is actually the toughest thing for any one of us to figure out. It requires faith, insight, wisdom, experimentation, and determination. It is a very difficult process—much more difficult and complicated than memorizing facts and completing processes step-by-step. As a matter of fact, it is so difficult to do that I suspect a majority of people don’t do it and never find out what their actual vocation is.
They never put the core of their energy into envisioning and becoming the best version of themselves. They go through life without knowing who they really are. You can’t be a Principled Entrepreneur without first discovering who you want to be.
2. Discover and develop your aptitudes, creativity, and strengths
When was the last time you lost track of time when you worked on something? The kind of experience we call “being in the zone.”
It happens when we are so fully absorbed in an activity, so enthralled, that we have such a high level of energized focus and fulfillment that it transcends time. Was your experience related to what you do for work? Most people I meet don’t experience flow in work, and I think any college or university curriculum should find a way not only to teach students about flow, but create situations for them to experience and replicate it and help them discover ways to find a career that allows them to experience flow on a regular basis.
At the Ciocca Center, we go about helping our students find their “zone” by having them try out a lot of different things. Through the various courses we offer the student, we ask them to do a wide range of business-related activities that they have never done before. The “first business” experience of the “Vocation of Business” class taps into creative and online activities and the definition of customer-centered value propositions.
The Small Business Lab requires that students get hands-on experience in a variety of businesses, both established ones as well as startups that we work with. They’re taught to quickly study the competitive landscape, analyze the opportunities, manage the financial aspects of the business, develop strategies, and engage in team work to sell the new vision both inside and outside of the company. The theory courses combine research, presentations, and debates. The Principled Entrepreneurship course has a heavy focus on creativity, innovation, and communication.
The guided studies and internship programs give the students more practical experience in a variety of industry sectors and growth stages. Altogether, the students’ education is designed to expose them to all aspects of business and give them plenty of extended hands-on experience. Throughout this process, students are guided to think about their experience and analyze it from a perspective of growth in personal excellence and service: What value can I add? That context helps them to notice when they experience flow and gives them the support and confidence to make career decisions consistent with their true vocation.
3. Discover and develop how to apply the previous two points to create value for others, and learn to put failure in the service of the pursuit of excellence.
At Catholic University’s Busch School of Business, our freshmen business students’ first assignment in the Vocation of Business course is to start their own company. Specifically, students are asked to start a special interest social media account. By exploring what they have to offer others in terms of their unique interest or expertise, they create a social media effort that explains and explores this topic and recommends various products along the way. Through this three-month-long exercise, students internalize the most rudimentary but essential question of business: “How may I help you?” They are at once customer-centered and self-aware.
These blogs are then monetized in part through strategies such as affiliate marketing. As an affiliate of websites like Amazon, the student earns a bonus each time someone buys through one of their links. Thus, each student creates their own “small business” during the first semester of their freshman year. The hurdle I have to overcome with them is the same every year: fear of failure, especially in the context of a class. I have come to believe that students and aspiring entrepreneurs need to have permission to make mistakes.
