How to remove distractors from your workday

When people transition their attention away from an unfinished task to attend to a distraction, they lose time, and their subsequent task performance suffers. For example, if you interrupt writing an email to reply to a text message, you will need to refocus when you turn your attention back to finishing your email. That little bit of time of adjusting your focus compounds throughout the day. As we fragment our attention, fatigue and stress increases, which negatively affects performance.

So, not surprisingly, the first component of this “do it” step is to remove distractors.

Do you know what your values are?

We noted in a recent post how important our values are in helping us to make decisions. As leaders, we have many opportunities each day to choose between possible actions and reactions. Oftentimes, we tap into our core set of principles to make those selections. Though the choices that we make are typically not of the life-altering variety, we can use the example set by Sousa Mendes to decide how we will align ourselves in the event of conflict. Such selections may include:

Preserving character and integrity over the company’s bottom line.
Prioritizing the needs of an individual employee above company policy.
Maintaining a collaborative approach despite our personal agenda.

6 R's of Summer School

While school administrators are typically not “off” from school to the same extent as teachers (there is still plenty of planning, ordering, interviewing and the like that occurs over the summer months,) the relaxed days of June, July and August present school leaders with a special opportunity that is unique to this time of year. I like to think of them as a principal’s own set of summertime “R’s.”

8 Qualities of Strong Mentors

Mentorship is a relationship that is created between an experienced professional and a less experienced mentee or protege. Its primary purpose is to build a support system that allows for the natural exchange of ideas, a forum for constructive advice, and a recipe for success.

Superior mentors possess most if not all of the following qualities:

Skilled and knowledgeable. Good mentors possess current and relevant knowledge, expertise, and/or skills.
Trust builder. The mentor establishes a high level of trust. He/she indicates that their relationship is about building capacity and offering support, not “zapping” the mentee for poor decisions or performances.
Active listener. A strong mentor knows how to listen. This includes using eyes and body posture to convey interest and attention. More about strong listening skills can be found here.

How to Coach Your Team to Success

One of the biggest challenges for leaders is to create and maintain the proper conditions for worker engagement and productivity. We know that if we are to maintain high levels of workplace output and morale we need to ensure that our employees feel valued and challenged. We also recognize that if we want to be able to respond to, if not stay in front of, marketplace change we need to develop workers who are comfortable thinking independently and contributing to the collective brain trust.

Too many leaders and managers, however, fail to achieve this because they do not understand how to motivate today’s workers or how to empower them to think and act independently and more positively.

In generations past people would be told what they needed to do from their earliest years. Parents would instruct children on how to behave at home and teachers would demand student compliance in school. Failure to obey would result in corporal punishment or other heavy handed responses. In the workplace, employees would be given orders and were required to dutifully implement them if they wanted to hold their positions for any meaningful duration.

But times have changed. As younger workers make their way into the workplace, they expect to play by a different set of rules. They want to be given the freedom to experiment, a voice with which to weigh in at staff meetings and the ability to pursue what they view as meaningful, engaging work. Anything less they view as limiting, which spells dissatisfaction and, for the most part, underperformance (if not outside job seeking).

Why and how leaders can monitor and review

As each project is unfolding, stay on top of things and correct or redirect when necessary. This motivates colleagues (who don’t feel abandoned) and helps you catch problems early on. Recognize key milestones, such as completed steps and sub-components, along the way. Obviously, inexperienced colleagues will need more direction, tighter controls and oversight than seasoned ones.

Blazing Your Own Path to Success

Did you ever look around in amazement at people around you that don’t appear to be all that extraordinary yet have achieved extraordinary things? These are people who have greatly succeeded in business, in politics, in the arts, in sports, or in some other space, but in many respects seem pretty much on par with you (or even inferior to you) in terms of their core abilities and talents. How is it, you wonder, that they “made it” in such a robust manner while you continue to middle along in relative obscurity, earning a pedestrian income and feeling somewhat unfulfilled?

Build a Leadership Character

In contemporary contexts we have increasingly come to think of leaders as well-positioned people with strong connections. These men and women are in ample possession of intellect, charisma, power, and wealth. More often than not, we judge them (and, consequently, they judge themselves,) by what they have, or what they have been able to achieve in advancing their institution’s bottom line.

Be Prepared to Delegate

Delegation offers many benefits to managers, direct reports and organizations. And yet it remains one of the most misunderstood and underutilized techniques in leadership practice.

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