If you’ve tried to send me a message on LinkedIn, email me or even if you’re one of my closest friends, you’ll know that I always say I am busy. I know, it sounds like a cop out and I’m sure its frustrating to not be able to get my attention but I guess I like being busy and I get so enthusiastic about stuff I can’t help myself.

In any case, I am busy at the moment because it is our end of financial year (so think rem review and performance appraisals). I also need to deliver my bonus project and I’m leading a process for the business in which a heap of activity will be happening in November. Oh, did I mention I’m going on leave for 4 weeks in November? Yeah so its kinda panic stations to get all that done so that I can get on a plane and have some fun!

So over the long weekend, I totally chilled out. By chance, my work laptop would not connect at home so I pretty much chilled at home playing “Worms- Ultimate Mayhem” on Xbox, watched stupid horror flicks with Joel (think Final Destination), planning my trip and catching up on life admin. It was great. I lived in trackies and hung out with the kittens. Feeling a bit guilty on the Monday about not really doing much work (despite feeling very chillaxed), I was cleaning up my personal laptop and came across this HBR article; “A Practical Plan for When You Feel Overwhelmed” by Peter Bregman.

I reflected thinking how many times recently I’ve thought “I’m so busy at the moment and yet, I can’t explain all the things I need to do”. I really like using Outlook to keep me organised so I try and keep my task list detailed with what I need to do and by when. If I learned anything from David Rock, its that your brain can’t keep hoarding more and more information (so don’t beat yourself up for forgetting things-write it down!).

The biggest payoff of doing this, is not feeling so stressed because I know what I’ve got to do and by when and can break it up into small pieces to achieve the outcome by the due date.

Here’s a few tips from Peter though if you are also feeling like this (and you’ll notice his comments about technology):

First, spend a few minutes writing down everything you have to do on a piece of paper.
Resist the urge to use technology for this task. Why? I’m not sure, but somehow writing on paper—and then crossing things out—creates momentum.

After 35 minutes, take a break for 10 minutes and then start the hour-long process over again, beginning with the 15 minutes of quick actions.

So what works for you?

At the AHRI National Convention this year I had a pretty awesome time because I got to hear Dave and Wendy Ulrich speak. I also got them to sign my book and have a photo with me! Yep, I am a nerd.

Anyways, people have been asking me about what I’ve learned and what I thought was good so I got my butt into gear and started writing up some of my notes to share with you all. First cab off the rank is of course, Dave and Wendy Ulrich.

I’m sure you’ve heard of him before but Dave has been named the number one management educator and guru by Business Week, selected by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative and creative leaders and he is consistently named as the most influential person in HR in publications across the globe. Wendy Ulrich has been a practicing psychologist for 20 years exploring the personal dynamics of corporate complexities. Wendy helps organizations build people’s skills and personal strengths to succeed. Some of the areas she focuses on include communication, relationships, trained creativity resilience and happiness.

The first thing I’ll share is that they make a great team who are actually pretty warm, genuine and funny to listen to. It’s easy to be engaged by them and not notice how much time is passing. Very important to be engaged on day two of an AHRI Conference after the Gala Dinner!

Dave started out by saying that they wanted to talk to us about something a little more personal than how to structure a HR department; they wanted to talk to us about how to create meaning and purpose, not only in our lives but in the lives of the employees where we work. He said “If you create more meaning in a company- good things will happen. It’s simple”.

*MAKE MEANING in the workplace—to bring out the best in everyone.
*CREATE VALUE for your employees, your customers, your company, and yourself.
*BUILD HOPE for the future by building “the abundant organization.”

The Abundant Organization Flower

When we think about what gives us a sense of meaning, we often think about things like having children, travel, our faith or relationships. What do these things have in common? They have nothing to do with work. We don’t necessary find meaning in work. This is a problem because we spend most of our time at work but we aren’t finding same sense of purpose and meaning at work. We are finding it outside of work. It’s a tragedy.

The ultimate source of happiness is not pleasure or engagement; it’s meaning. Are you connected to your deepest values?

In HR we want to shift away from measuring from job satisfaction, away from engagement (i.e. does your job give you discretionary energy?) to does my job give me meaning. We want to ask, does my job allow me to find purpose?

Before talking about their new book “The Why of Work” and introducing the 7 things that Leaders can do to become meaning makers, they revealed that the title of the their book actually came from this quote from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s search for Meaning”.

“He who has a WHY to live can bear with almost any HOW” – Nietzsche

Some further resources to check out when you have the time or the inclination!

So what are the 7 things that Leaders can do to become meaning makers (Key Questions for abundant thinking)?

1) Identity- What am I known for? Think Gallop Strength finding attributes. It’s about help people match their personal strengths with the organisation identity (brand/culture).
2) Purpose and Motivation- Where am I going? What are your passions and the passions of your employees? In your development discussions with your employees, do you ask about their passions? Are you able to not impose your passions on them?
3) Relationships and Teamwork- Whom do I travel with? Gallop 12 questions- having a best friend at work produces those kind of outcomes. How do you control/facilitate this?
4) Positive work environment- How do I build a positive work environment?
5) Engagement/Challenge- What challenges interest me? Is there a line of sight between what I love and what I do?
6) Resilience and Learning- How do I learn from setbacks? If it’s worth doing- it’s worth doing badly i.e. failure is important.
7) Civility and Delight-What delights me? Even though they seem small, they can make a difference in how someone feels about their work.

Well these are just my back of the napkin notes but for all the details on this, please visit their website where all seven steps are discussed and explained in detail.

I’m pretty excited about this as it builds upon a lot of stuff I’ve been working on already. Does anyone else think they could incorporate this into their work?

Today’s post comes after a week, where for most of it, I can only describe myself as having been in what my partner and I like to call a “funk”. It’s not a good thing like Parliament Funkadelic, it’s more like when you know you are in a bad mood that you just can’t shake.

I tried to be conscious of it and ‘do the right things’ to pull myself out of it. But in looking back, eating crunchy-nut cornflakes for dinner more than twice in a week in my pj’s really doesn’t seem like I was making that big of an effort.

I came across this article on Harvard Business Review earlier this week. I printed it out and have been carrying it around, to and from work, not having the motivation to get it out and read it.

So today I was on a 6am flight to Melbourne (yeah that means you have to get out of bed reaaaally early). After a short snooze on the plane, I jumped into a cab and thought I might start reading. Wish I’d done so sooner.

The article is called “Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t” by Tony Schwartz. Tony is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything.

Tony talks about how we have two selves- one when we are at our best and another when we are at our worst. When we are at our best we make the good decisions and think forward into the future. When we are at our worst, we make short-sighted and destructive choices.

You know… drinking too much, exercising and sleeping too little and things like eating crunchy nut cornflakes for dinner. Twice.

Tony explains that when we are working at our worst:

In the face of a perceived threat, however, our sympathetic nervous system and amygdala take over and our second self steps up. A flood of stress hormones is released. Our pre-frontal cortex shuts down, we become narrow and more myopic in our vision, and we react more primitively and instinctively.

The physiology of fight or flight mobilizes us to attack, or run like hell. Think of this as the “Survival Zone.” It’s a great place to be if there’s a lion coming at you.

Check out the full article here if you like, however his answers are simple.

1) Become more aware of when your emotions begin to turn negative (I think I had this one sorted)
2) Apply the “Golden Rules of Triggers” – whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t. Compulsions are not choices and they rarely lead to positive outcomes.

BAM! What a snap of wisdom for the day. Something to think about anyway next time your partner asks you what your problem is!

Have a great weekend!

On Tuesday of this week, I attended a breakfast seminar hosted by A.S.K. learning at the Hilton with one of my colleagues from work. I was really looking forward to hearing Annalie Killian speak after following her on twitter and her posts on LinkedIn. In case you haven’t heard of Annalie, she’s the Director of Innovation Culture and Collaboration at AMP. She’s responsible for Amplify Festival of Innovation and Thought Leadership (check it out here). I enjoyed the event because it was a good chance to meet other HR people (Hi there Monica Stroehle!) and I always enjoy picking up a new piece of research of human behaviour.

Annalie started off her talk by saying that she is normally introduced as the “Catalyst for Magic” because that’s the title she created for herself in 2000 (she even put it on her business card!). People ask her how she got away with this in a business like AMP and she advised that the first secret is to not ask permission (I must admit, it’s a strategy that has worked well for me in the past also). Today the Chairman proudly introduces her as the catalyst for Magic and she thinks it’s great that she can be quirky enough to get away with that sort of thing.

When she first joined amp in 2000 she was hired to look after communication. The CIO who she reported into then asked her if she would look after innovation, the intranet and then knowledge management. So she thought this is ridiculous, how will I fit all of that into a business title. She considered it carefully and came to the conclusion that it was all about “catalysing the magic that’s in other people” and that her role is “to be the agent for releasing that creativity”. She made up the title- tongue in cheek- and waited for the corporate machine to kick in and it never did.

Annalie is also now well known for being the curator of the Amplify Festival of Innovation and Thought leadership. It started out as an internal learning event at AMP and she describes it as like a TED for business. Over the years, a number of people now want to apply to attend because they bring out such an amazing array of international speakers to Australia including top business innovators from around the world.

When Annalie talks about Amplify, she said it created an incredible learning and creative opportunity for her. In 2009 she describes listening to BJ Fogg as a serious ‘ah ha’ moment; saying it was like discovering the secrets to the universe. This is the piece of research I wanted to share on human behaviour.

BJ Fogg is the founder of Persuasive Technologies Lab at the Stamford University and he graduated with a PHD in specialising in behavioural change.

Basically he told the audience that if you analyse and compare everything back in terms of motivational theory; human behaviour can be reduced to three core motivators which have two sides and these emotional states drive most of actions and behaviours.

1) Motivator One-pain or pleasure
2) Motivator Two- hope and fear
3) Motivator Three- social acceptance or social rejection

She mentions this because it is really important in the context of creativity, innovation and transformational change.

Fogg goes onto say in his research to articulate a new model for understanding human behaviour. In his model, behaviour is a product of three factors: motivation, ability and triggers (each of which has subcomponents as shown above with the motivators). The model asserts that for a person to perform a target behaviour they must be sufficiently motivated, have the ability to perform the behaviour and be triggered to perform the behaviour. The three factors must occur at the same moment, or else the behaviour will not happen.

I thought this might be worthy of sharing because in HR we often talk about getting people to live our values and demonstrate key behaviours. This model may influence the way you think about transformational organisational change or even the performance management of individuals in your business.

Here’s a clip of him explaining his model using Facebook as an example:

Waaay back when I first joined twitter, I made friends with a guy who worked in HR in Boston, MA. Lovely guy to connect with and also hassle about when he’s coming back to Australia! Chris Ferdinandi writes at RenegadeHR.net, tweets at @ChrisFerdinandi and has written a few ebooks you may be interested in. “Culture Convo” is one for those interested in employer branding with social media.

For the second year running however, Chris has also produced “Do Amazing Things”, which is a collection of short, actionable ideas – things you can do in 2011 to become a better HR professional. This year I am proud to be featured in the book, so if you’d like to check it out grab your copy here.

Often working in HR we see the very best and the very worst of things. We see people being rewarded for excellent achievement and also experience tremendous setbacks, stress and burnout. At the moment, you can’t escape from the tragedy that is happening around in the world. You will have been across the floods in Queensland and now other parts of Australia, but the floods in Brazil have now claimed more than 500 lives. So much devastation. How do you rebuild and even move on from these experiences?

According to Diane Coutu in her article “How resilience works” featured in the Harvard Business Review, resilient people possess three defining characteristics.

1) They coolly accept the harsh realities facing them
2) They find meaning in terrible times
3) They have an uncanny ability to improvise, making do with whatever’s at hand.

Sounds a lot like our Queenslanders at the moment doesn’t it?

I found this article interesting because not only is resilience important in times of crisis, but it’s an important tool that will help us get through life. It’s an important skill that you want your people (particularly your leaders to have) and the good news is that it can be learned.

Why is resilience so important?

Dean Becker (President and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems) says that “More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.”

Facing down reality

When we talk about resilience or mention things like positive psychology in the business, expect to hear audible groans from people thinking “great, I’m wasting my time with this think positive crap when I’ve got a tonne of work to do”. They may have come across positive affirmations and believe that being resilient is about being an optimist.
Optimism is great, but it can be highly ineffective if it’s blind optimism- and that’s why facing down reality is key. There’s no point in saying that you are something you aren’t and or that something is going to happen when there is no chance. A down-to-earth view of reality is needed.
For instance, when an Admiral who was held prisoner and tortured by the Vietcong for eight years was asked “Who didn’t make it out of the camps?”; the Admiral replied “Oh, that’s easy. It was the optimists. They were the ones who said we were going to be out by Christmas. And then they said we’d be out by Easter and then out by Fourth of July and out by Thanksgiving, and then it was Christmas again…You know, I think they all died of broken hearts.’”

The search for meaning

This is about resisting the victim mentality, and making meaning of the experience. Only then will the lessons emerge. In finding meaning, people are able to move on from the present struggle and look to the future. It also makes the present situation become less overwhelming.
For instance Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor describes feeling “disgusted by just how trivial and meaningless his life had become” as he worried day to day about how he was going to work with the sadistic foreman and whether he should trade his last cigarette for a bowl of soup. He sought to find meaning and purpose in order to survive. He set himself a goal to use these experiences in the future and imagined himself giving a lecture after the war on the psychology of the concentration camp, to help outsiders understand what he had been through despite not knowing if he would survive.

Ritualized Ingenuity

Psychologists follow the lead of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in calling this skill bricolage. In the modern sense bricolage can be thought of as a kind of inventiveness, an ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper or obvious tools of materials.

You may have heard stories about UPS which tells its employees to “get the job done. If that means they need to improvise, they improvise”. For example, UPS was able to start delivering parcels just one day after Hurricane Andrew devastated southeast Florida causing billions of damage.

People were living in their cars after homes were destroyed, yet UPS drivers and managers sorted packages at a diversion site and made deliveries to people no matter where they were. This gave people a sense of purpose or meaning amid the chaos.

In summary Coutu says that “resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air”.

Are you launching a resilience program in 2011 or do you look to recruit resilient people in your business?

The other day I read a blog post called “When your credibility takes a hit” on Women of HR, which was written by Jennifer Miller. It was hugely refreshing to read and a timely reminder that we aren’t all perfect.

Jennifer talks about being in a position where she blew it professionally; how humbling the experience was and also how instructive it can be as well. I recommend you have a read of her story here, but she explains an important message she learned through the experience that “your reputation is only as strong as your most recent performance”.

The day after I read the post, I was playing with my ipad and looking for some entertaining apps to download. I came across the Dr Seuss app for “Oh, the Places you’ll go” and downloaded it.

It’s entertaining and uplifting but there are some important messages in there as well that I think are important reminders.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed.
You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

And when you’re in a Slump,
you’re not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

Sometimes life just doesn’t go the way we plan it to. We stuff up because we are human. But there is a way to recover and move on to achieve better things. I promise.

You’ll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never foget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.

So…
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea,
You’re off the Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!

Recently at a People and Culture Conference, I was given a copy of the ‘Eight steps to happiness; the science of getting happy and how it can work for you’. Obviously being the nerd that I am, I was pretty excited as I had seen a few episodes of the TV show and was keen to read more.

If you haven’t seen the show, it’s called Making Australia Happy, and essentially they took eight volunteers from Marrickville and with an expert coaching team, the aim was to improve their happiness. The reason why Marrickville was chosen was because according to a National survey, residents of Marrickville have the lowest well-being in Australia.

Happiness sounds a little fluffy and intangible to some; however this book has a strong emphasis on referring everything they do to a proven science or quality research (particularly from the field of Positive Psychology).

The book takes you through each of the eight steps to happiness and while some may seem quite straight forward, the reality is that people don’t put this into practice. We all know that things like smoking, eating junk food and not exercising is bad for us, but even mentally- we deep down know that there are certain things that we do all the time, that are detrimental to our mental health. Or alternatively, things that we could be doing to make ourselves feel a lot better.

If you are into quizzes, reports or measures for these things. The Happy 100 index is a good way to check in and see how you are travelling. It may also be a good tool for someone who is not very self-aware of their own moods and hence how they may affect others in the workplace.

The eight steps are:

1. Goals and values
2. Random acts of kindness
3. Mindfulness
4. Strengths and solutions
5. Gratitude
6. Forgiveness
7. Social Networks
8. Reflect, review, renew

Things I am fan of:
 

• This book is easy to read and understand- you don’t need to be a scientist, psychologist or professional anything to read it
• Uses a simple tool to measure happiness and keep track of progress (Happy 100 index)
• Random acts of kindness- explains a way that you can do nice things for other people, feel great about it, and then not have any negative after shocks like anger or resentment if the recipient is not grateful. Plus it makes other people happy!
• Mindfulness- we should really slow down and take the time (regularly) to look at what is around us rather than constantly being on autopilot
• Mindfulness also presents another option for those from a traditional CBT perspective who find it difficult to dispute or get rid of negative thoughts- this methodology teaches individuals to change their relationship with those thoughts instead
• Understanding character strengths- go to www.viacharacter.org to identify your top strengths so that you can start using them in daily life (Mine were kindness and generosity; humour and playfulness; gratitude; hope, optimism and future-mindedness; and zest, enthusiasm and energy).
• Learning how to adapt a solutions-focused mindset and using ‘possibility language’
• Gratitude- write down three good things that went well during the course of the day and why it happened. Watch this clip from Martin Seligman for more info. There’s also an app for that.
• The book really goes into the science behind the program and every bit of research mentioned is fully referenced- meaning that you can find the exact paper and delve deeper into any areas that interest you.

I recommend grabbing a copy of the book if you are interested or checking out the abc website http://makingaustraliahappy.abc.net.au/

Goffee and Jones say that the main body of literature on Leadership talks about the characteristics of leaders and that is gives it a strong psychological bias. I’m sure we can all think of a few, and we may have also been witness to discussions on whether a person can learn to be a leader or whether they are simply born a leader.

However, have you ever considered Leadership to be a relationship?

The underlying assumption is that leadership is something we do to other people. But in our view, leadership should be seen as something we do with other people. Leadership must always be viewed as a relationship between the leader and the led.

The point? There is no magic recipe or list of characteristic that can make someone an effective leader. It’s not one way. It’s about the relationship between the leader and their followers. After all, a leader is nothing without followers.

It’s been pretty busy in life lately. New job, new house and it is almost Christmas. This year has flown! I have also been spending my free time reading an excellent book called “Why should anyone be led by you?” by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones. My organisation is going to be doing a lot of cool things in the Authentic Leadership space next year so I thought I would get a jump start and read it. As per usual, sharing is caring- so anything interesting I plan to blog about here and hopefully you might find something useful in it.

The first chapter is called “Be Yourself- More- with Skill”.

It starts out with an awesome little gem about the structure of an organisation.

It seems every organisation whether it’s the local cricket club, the not-for-profit or the big company- wants to see leadership. When answering the questions of why effective leadership is in such short supply, Goffee and Jones say that some organisations are structured in such a way that means they are ‘machines for the destruction of leadership’.

“They encourage either conformists or role players with an impoverished sense of who they are and what they stand for. Neither makes for effective leaders. And of course, this gives rise to the legions of disenchanted followers, producing the deepest organizational malaise of modern times: cynicism”.

Whether it be an experience in a public sector organisation, one that’s highly beaurcratic, or ancient in its operations; I think we may have all experienced this at some point. You know, a place where doing things the way it’s always been done is a thousand times easier than coming up with something new and getting it approved. I’m also willing to bet that there are others of you who have worked in professionals services organisations for example, which micromanages and controls employees to the point of which their brains disintegrate and they become lemmings!

How do you want your structure to make people feel? Is this articulated in your EVP?