1. Does your team have a shared sense of purpose or common goals? Is each person on your team committed and willing to work toward achieving these common goals?
2. Is everyone on your team trusting of one another, and of you, their leader?
3. Does your team have a clear set of “norms” or operating principles? Are team members willing to respectfully “call” people on norms that other team members are not following?
4. Are your team members resourceful? Do they willingly share their resources with the team depending upon the team goals at the time?
5. Do your team members initiate work tasks without you having to constantly “supervise” or give them task lists to complete?
6. Are your team members good listeners? Do they show sincere interest in what other people are saying, and do they work to clarify what they do not understand?
7. Do your team members freely express their differences of opinion in a way that is supportive and respectful?
8. Do your team members view mistakes as an opportunity to learn (versus an occasion to chastise or punish)? Does your team feel encouraged to take risks and be creative?
9. Is your team willing to address conflict and work through it until it is resolved without reducing the energy and effectiveness of the individuals involved?
10. Are your team members responsive to the changing needs of the team, the business, and to the clients who you serve?

A “no” answer to any of these questions indicates a great opportunity for team development, training, and coaching. Working on any of these areas can dramatically increase your possibilities for success and POWER in your business. Your team is your business engine; constant maintenance and care of your team will take you anywhere you want to go.
(P.S. You can get your complimentary Empowered Team Self Assessment by entering your name in the box at the right of this page or by visiting the YEW home at www.yourempoweredworkplace.com)

How to Be Happy

from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

So happiness – isn’t that the thing that all of us strive to find and keep? Nobody is happy all of the time, but some people are definitely more fulfilled than others. Studies on what makes people happy reveal that it doesn’t have much to do with material goods or high achievement; it seems to whittle down to your outlook on life, and the quality of your relationships with the people around you.

Steps

1. Be optimistic. In the 1970s, researchers followed people who’d won the lottery and found that a year after they’d hit the jackpot, they were no happier than the people who didn’t. They called it hedonic adaptation, which suggests that we each have a baseline level of happiness. No matter what happens, good or bad, the effect on our happiness is only temporary and we tend to rebound to our baseline level. Some people have a higher baseline happiness level than others, and that can be attributed in part to genetics, but it’s also largely influenced by how you think.[1] So while the remainder of this article will help boost your happiness, only improving your attitude towards life will increase your happiness permanently. Here are some excellent starting points for doing that:
   • How to Be Optimistic
   • How to Be Laid Back
   • How to Live in the Moment
2. Follow your gut. In one study, two groups of people were asked to pick out a poster to take home. One group was asked to analyze their decision carefully, weighing the pros and cons, and the other group was told to listen to their gut. Two weeks later, the group that followed their gut was happier with their posters than the group that analyzed their decisions.[2] Now, some of our decisions are more crucial than picking out posters, but by the time you’re poring over your choice, the options you’re weighing are probably very similar, and the difference will only temporarily affect your happiness. So next time you have a decision to make, and you’re down to two or three options, just pick the one that feels right, and go with it.
   • How to Follow Your Intuition
   • How to Stop Hesitating
3. Make enough money to meet your basic needs: food, shelter, and clothing. In the US, that magic number is $40,000 a year. Any money you make beyond that will have negligible effects on your happiness. Remember the lottery winners mentioned earlier? Oodles of money didn’t make them any happier, and it won’t make you any happier. Once you make enough money to support your basic needs, your happiness is not significantly affected by how much money you make, but by your level of optimism.[3]
   • Your comfort may increase with your salary, but comfort isn’t what makes people happy. It makes people bored. That’s why it’s important to push beyond your comfort zone to fuel your growth as a person.
   • Don’t assume you’re the exception, as in “Sure they didn’t use their lottery money wisely, but if I won it, I’m spend it differently, and it’d definitely make me happier.” Part of the reason many people are unhappy is because they don’t think research-based advice about happiness applies to them, and they continue chasing more money and achievement and material goods in vain.[4]
4. Stay close to friends and family. We live in a mobile society, where people follow jobs around the country and sometimes around the world. We do this because we think increases in salary will make us happier, but the fact is that our relationships with our friends and family have a far greater impact on our happiness than our jobs do. So next time you think about relocating, consider that you’d need a salary increase of over $100,000 USD to compensate for the loss of happiness you’d have from moving away from your friends and family.[5] But if your relationships with your family and friends are unhealthy or nonexistent, and you are bent on moving, choose a location where you’ll be making about the same amount of money as everyone else; according to research, people feel more financially secure (and happier) when they’re on similar financial footing as the people around them, regardless of what that footing is.[6]
5. Stop expecting your job to make you happy. Many people expect the right job or the right career to dramatically change their level of happiness, but happiness research makes it clear that your level of optimism and the quality of your relationships eclipse the satisfaction you gain from your job.[7] If you have a positive outlook, you’ll make the best of any job, and if you have good relationships with people, you won’t depend on your job to give your life a greater sense of meaning. You’ll find it in your interactions with the people you care about. Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire towards a job that’ll make you happier; it means you should understand that the capacity of your job to make you happy is quite small in comparison to you outlook on life and your relationships with people.
6. Engage in making the little moments special: Research indicates that when you smile, whether you feel happy or not, your mood will be elevated. When we smile at others, we pass on our mood to to the people we smile at. With this in mind, it is important to consider the implications for happiness that the very act of smiling at another in passing has on not only our psyche, but that of the larger good. More importantly, when we smile at another, it shouldn’t be with the expectation of having a smile in return. Sometimes the people we are smiling at who don’t return the gesture may be the ones who need the smile the most. Just the act of doing something positive — sharing a smile — is enough to send our endorphins in the right direction, regardless of the response.
7. Keep yourself preoccupied with healthy people, healthy places, and healthy activities. Healthy environments include the local gym, the library and book stores, museums and cultural places. Making good decisions for oneself has significant implications for the eventual outcome of happiness.
8. Consider an anti-depressant: If you are seriously ill and have been thinking about taking your own life or have been seriously depressed for some time, an anti-depressant might be beneficial in returning your life to a healthy balance. Anti-depressants could also be taken in conjunction with herbal medicines, although medical advice should be sought in these cases. Saint John’s Wort is a herbal medicine that might help alleviate some symptoms, but should be used cautiously, due to potential adverse impacts. B-100 vitamins are another natural way to elevate the mood, and should be considered as a daily supplement for better overall health.
9. See the best in others: When we strive to look at the best in others, we end up seeing the best in ourselves. Shortcomings in others can be met with compassion and understanding, which removes any resentment or disdain that might otherwise surface. When we look at others with a healthy sense of acceptance, love, and compassion, we find that our moods naturally elevate to a higher level of happiness. Author of “Wealth” Kirby Thibeault suggests that we see what we feel and think. When we see the beauty in all others, the beauty within ourselves becomes more apparent.

Tips

• Just because something seems to make other people happy doesn’t mean that it really does. People are very good at pretending they’re happy, especially when they’ve invested so much into the things that are supposed to make them happy; it’s hard to admit that you’ve been placing all your eggs in the wrong basket.
• Sport. It makes you healthy and boosts your self-esteem. It also gives you the endorphins (hormones of happiness)
• Hobby. Have a hobby. This could be from playing a guitar to collecting stamps.
• Self-actualization, goal, meaning. Have goals in life, evolve as a personality, have a purpose.
• Helping someone else is a good way to feel better. It reminds you that things could be worse, and it gives you something to take satisfaction and pride in. Look for opportunities to make someone elses life better, and you end up making your own better at the same time.

Warnings

• Happy people aren’t happy all the time. Everyone has times when they feel sad, frustrated, guilty, angry and so on. Happy people are just better at bouncing back to a state of contentedness. We may all feel negative at some moment in our lives, but try to bounce back and live in the moment, and be content with everything you do.
• Sometimes unhappiness can be caused by malnutrition or sickness. Make sure you’re getting all the essential vitamins and minerals and eating well.
• Large amounts of alcohol can cause sickness, coma, or, in some cases, death. Long term use of alcohol can be detrimental to the liver.

Related wikiHows

• How to Be Optimistic
• How to Cheer Up
• How to Be Laid Back
• How to Live a Simple and Peaceful Life

Sources and Citations

1. ↑ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-lasting-ha&page=1
2. ↑ The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson
3. ↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2004/08/01/you-only-need-40000-to-be-happy/
4. ↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/01/23/test-yourself-to-find-what-you-need-to-be-happier/
5. ↑ http://www.powdthavee.co.uk/resources/valuing_social_relationships_15.04.pdf
6. ↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/05/21/how-to-decide-where-to-live-2/
7. ↑ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/01/16/the-connection-between-a-good-job-and-happiness-is-overrated/

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Be Happy. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

With that in mind, I am very excited to announce the launch of an exciting new resource for couples in business together.  My joint venture business partner, Barbara Hauser (see <www.intentionalbusinesspartnerships.com>) and I have been working for the past several months on developing a project that we have named Couple-Power™ Entrepreneurs — check out our new website: <www.couple-power.com>.

We are very excited to offer some free resources and invite you to either join our blog feed or forward this info to any friends you might have that would benefit from this kind of resource.

In addition to free tips and a Couple-Power™ e-course, we also provide business coaching programs for couples just starting their business, AND for those already in business who are trying to resolve dynamics that result from working with both your business and bedroom partner.  Let us know what you think – we would love to hear from you.

–Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Two little articles in recent news sources caught my eye.  The first appeared in the New York Times (July 28, 2009, p. B1): “Learning the Power of Teamwork in a Netflix Race for $1 Million.”  According to this story, Netflix recently created a contest offering $1 million to anyone who could come up with an innovative way to improve its movie recommendation system.  There are no official winners yet, BUT two of the top competing teams have reported on some important lessons learned so far – the number one lesson being the power of collaboration (my italics).  The “…formula for success was to bring together people with complementary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving.”  It is teamwork that is taking these competitors to the $1 million finish line – not individuals working in isolation.

The second gem I ran into was today (August 8, 2009) from an MSN newsflash on their website, referring to a recent article in Discover Magazine.  The article, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About…Genius:  How do the Nobel Prize Winners Get so Smart?” (by Rebecca Coffey) includes the following fact:

“In the 1990’s Bell Labs found that its most valued and productive electrical engineers were not those endowed with genius, but those who excelled in rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion, and the ability to build consensus.”  (My italics again.)

Individual genius is not the sole factor in most business success, but rather it is the combination of good ideas with good old-fashioned teamwork that calls upon individuals to move beyond “me” and “I” toward the greater good created by teamwork.

There are countless other examples of amazing success created through team work, including the legendary Skunkworks projects that have developed a large number of famous aircraft designs used all over the world.  In most cases, where you see success, you see an amazing, high-performing, high-functioning team.  If you are a business owner and/or workplace leader, you probably know only too well how the performance of your team defines the performance of your business.

How well is your team working for you and with you?  What are their strengths?  What are some opportunities for growth and change in your team?

#1 – Energy Leadership: Transforming Your Workplace and Your life from the Core by Bruce D. Schneider (2008, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) – see my review of this book in my archived newsletters (Vol. I, March 2009, www.yourempoweredworkplace.com.)

#2 – The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (2003, Free Press).  “…a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job.”

#3 – Less:  Accomplishing More by Doing Less by Marc Lesser (2009, New World Library) – see my review of this book in my archived newsletters ((Vol. 3, June 2009, www.yourempoweredworkplace.com)

#4 – The Hamster Revolution: Stop Info-Glut, Reclaim Your Life! By Mike Song, et. al (2007, Berret-Koehler Publishers).  “How to manage your email before it manages you.”

#5 – Do Less, Achieve More by Chin-Ning Chu (1998, Harper Collins).”…the most successful people do not necessarily work harder…success comes to those who find a balance between effort and ease.”

#6 – And of course, if you have not read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, then that is a must-read.  And even a must re-read several times over.

Please feel free to contact me with any ideas, suggestions, or questions at Christy@yourempoweredworkplace.com. I would love to hear you from you!

Energetically yours,

Christy

Article I: The Power of Teamwork

“Not finance.  Not strategy.  Not technology.  It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
–Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

“In the 1990’s Bell Labs found that its most valued and productive electrical engineers were not those endowed with genius, but those who excelled in rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion, and the ability to build consensus.”  (My italics again.)

1. Does your team have a shared sense of purpose or common goals?  Is each person on your team committed and willing to work toward achieving these common goals?
2. Is everyone on your team trusting of one another, and of you, their leader?
3. Does your team have a clear set of “norms” or operating principles?  Are team members willing to respectfully “call” people on norms that other team members are not following?
4. Are your team members resourceful? Do they willingly share their resources with the team depending upon the team goals at the time?
5. Do your team members initiate work tasks without you having to constantly “supervise” or give them task lists to complete?
6. Are your team members good listeners?  Do they show sincere interest in what other people are saying, and do they work to clarify what they do not understand?
7. Do your team members freely express their differences of opinion in a way that is supportive and respectful?
8. Do your team members view mistakes as an opportunity to learn (versus an occasion to chastise or punish)?  Does your team feel encouraged to take risks and be creative?
9. Is your team willing to address conflict and work through it until it is resolved without reducing the energy and effectiveness of the individuals involved?
10. Are your team members responsive to the changing needs of the team, the business, and to the clients who you serve?

Article II: Workplace Empowerment Book Review

Book Reviewed: The Five Dysfunctions of a TEAM: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

• Inattention to results
• Avoidance of accountability
• Lack of commitment
• Fear of conflict
• Absence of trust

After some serious hard work and crucial conversations, the company executives learn effective teaming skills that enable them to commit to shared goals, work in collaboration, address and grow from conflict, and embrace accountability.  And of course, they are then well on their way to leading their company toward amazing results.

This is an inspiring story with practical ideas that will motivate leaders who want to increase their profitability, improve their workplace culture, and create breakthrough success for their business.  While this book does not give many specific steps and how-to’s to achieve this kind of team transformation, the story itself presents a “case study” from which anyone could glean some excellent ideas.

Article III: Your Empowered Workplace Programs and Events

• Leadership, Visioning, Strategic Planning, Dynamic Communication, Building Collaborative Teams, Time and Energy Management, Goal-Setting, Effective Meeting Facilitation, Managing Problems and Resolving Conflict, and Customer Service.
• For more information go to: www.yourempoweredworkplace.com and click on “Leadership Products and Programs.”

Missed any issues of Empower Your Workplace Newsletter?  Go to www.yourempoweredworkplace.com for access to our archives.  Last month’s topics included “Productivity in a Climate of Fear” and a book review of Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less by Marc Lesser.

Do you ever feel like email is taking over your life?  Do you get overwhelmed on Mondays just thinking about all the emails that will be in your in-box for you to plow through?  Email and the tasks that usually go with them can easily drain your energy.  According to workplace experts, email is the #1 threat to workplace productivity and engagement.  Getting control of your email is a huge step in sourcing more energy and creating more time.

Schedule specific times during the day to look at email – I recommend 2 to 4 times per day maximum.  Set a time-limit for your email sessions, such as 20 minutes or less.  Stick to your time limit. What you don’t get to can wait until your next email session.  (Of course, you will need to have some rules for “exceptions”). This simple strategy can significantly increase your productive energy each day, not to mention free up more time.

If you want to really overhaul your email management system (or lack thereof!), I highly recommend reading the book, The Hamster Revolution by Mike Song, et. al.  The strategies in this book totally transformed the way I approach my email; it gave me a very practical structure for organizing and prioritizing the way I write and respond to emails.  I literally created at least two extra hours in my day by using this system. Systems have the power to energize you, freeing you to do more of what you love to do.

Your level of energy is directly related to how you experience time during your day.  Without the right quantity, quality, focus and force of energy, we easily find ourselves drained of the energy we need to feel successful and satisfied with our lives.  When you gain control and source your energy, you will quickly find that you are no longer a slave to time.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in the ground-breaking book, The Power of Full Engagement introduce the idea of the “corporate athlete.”  Based on years of research on both successful athletes and corporate leaders, the authors found that these two groups share similar strategies for sustaining their energy.  One key strategy is the idea of creating “highly specific, positive, energy management rituals.” Taking little breaks throughout the day is one such ritual.  This could be a 5-minute time out listening to music or the birds, or just your breath.  It could be an energizing snack of fruit or nuts.  It could be a walk outside of the office.  By taking regular “time-outs” you will find that you actually increase your time because you increase your energy.

What is it about your work and life that really excites, inspires and energizes you?  And what are those things you procrastinate about, and keep copying over onto your next to-do list only to write them again on your next to-do list?

Here are some really important questions:

1) What difference would it make in your life, business, and well-being to increase those activities that energize you?

AND

2) What would it take to eliminate or decrease those activities that drain your energy?

And maybe most importantly,

3) What is the ultimate cost to you and your business if you continue doing all those things that drain your energy?

Will you have time to do the things you want to do?  Heck no!  You will be too exhausted! Delegate your energy draining tasks to others who enjoy and are willing to do them.  Focus on your brilliance and energy sources.  Time management will then be a non-issue.

Energy and Time Management Success Strategy #1:  Make planning and goal-setting a top priority!

What we think about, we bring about.  What gets focus, gets done.  All highly successful leaders and business owners know the power of planning and setting goals. Without intentional goals and keeping the end in mind, you will end up reacting, solving problems, and putting out fires all day, just making it up as you go along.  This is very draining to your energy!

Create a weekly plan each Friday or Sunday evening.  AND each day have a daily plan with only 2 or 3 top-priority-high-leverage tasks. Stephen Covey (time management guru and author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) refers to these actions as your daily “big rocks.”  Do these no matter what.  Make sure they align to your values, mission and goals – energy is stimulated when we engage in activities that connect to our greater purpose and vision.

Stay tuned for Success Strategy #2 in my next blog post!