Leadership Flagship

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  • HOW TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF WHEN YOU DEEPLY, DEEPLY DON’T WANT TO WORK

    HOW TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF WHEN YOU DEEPLY, DEEPLY DON’T WANT TO WORK

    AUTHOR: JEFF HAVENS

    Jeff Havens is a professional development expert who addresses leadership, generational issues, and other areas of professional development through a unique blend of content and entertainment. Jeff has written for several business and tech publications including Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek, the WSJ, and has been featured on CNBC and Fox Business.

    Allow me to begin by saying that I really don’t want to be writing this.

    It’s gorgeous outside today – and considering that I live in northern Michigan, which is gray for 13 months a year and a frigid snowy wasteland for the other 11 – I really should be taking advantage of every sunny day I get. I could be riding my motorcycle right now, or sitting by a lake, or painting a picture of a motorcycle parked beside a lake. Lots of options. Not to mention that I don’t have a boss, so it would be so easy for me to skip out on this. But instead I’m writing this stupid thing, because it has to get done.

    I think it’s fitting that I’ve chosen this topic for August, because this is one of the months where it seems harder than ever to get anything constructive done. The whole of Europe basically goes on vacation for this entire month, and you’re probably getting more ‘out of office’ replies to your email than you normally do. With such lovely weather – and so many other people taking advantage of it – you’d be forgiven for having trouble motivating yourself to be productive.

    But in all honesty, I’m just using the ‘beautiful weather outside’ thing as an excuse for my disinterest in working. It happens all the time – not literally all the time obviously, or I wouldn’t have a job. But it can happen anytime. I’ve had days where I wake up and am already less than enthusiastic about working before I’ve finished breakfast, and I have other days where I’m on fire in the morning and then hit a wall around 2pm (or noon, or 3:45, or whenever) and simply can’t figure out how to want to keep going. My guess is that you have as well.

    Now the obvious solution to this problem is to be independently wealthy. I’m still working on figuring out how to make that happen, and when I do find the secret I’ll share it with you. (I made a mistake and chose not to marry a rich heiress, but that’s on me. Plus there weren’t any available.) So in the meantime, here are some things you can do to push yourself forward when everything inside of you would rather be doing anything else.

    SWITCH TO A DIFFERENT TASK

    Part of the problem might be that you don’t want to do whatever it is you’re currently working on. That doesn’t mean you can simply avoid doing it, but it often means that you can get it done in smaller, less odious chunks. One of the less glamorous parts of my job, for example, involves data entry – inputting names and contact information into my list of potential speaking clients. Sometimes, after a particularly large conference, I’ll have a few hundred business cards I’ll need to deal with. It has to get done, but I would go crazy if I did them all at once. So I break it up into chunks of 10 or 25, and in between I work on things I enjoy doing more than copying phone numbers and email addresses. For uninspiring work that can afford to be dealt with at a slow to medium pace, this can be a great approach. If you’re lucky, you can sometimes get everything done without ever actually fully realizing that you’re doing it.

    CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

    I love my office. It’s very comfortable, and everything is right where I want it to be. But I still sometimes find it a bit oppressive. So when I need to, I leave. For example, I started this article sitting at my desk, but right now I’m writing it outside, where I can enjoy some of the beautiful weather that is making me not want to work in the first place. We’re more influenced by our physical environment than we sometimes believe, and so changing where you are can often be the catalyst you need to find an extra couple hours of productivity.

    GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK

    It might seem counterintuitive to stop working in order to find an extra boost of motivation, but sometimes that’s exactly what we need. Our brains function exactly like our bodies do (which is one of the reasons we keep our brains inside our bodies instead of in a jar on the shelf). You can only push your body so far before you need to rest, and after you’re rested you can push your body again. The same is true with our brains. If you can’t bear the thought of staring at your computer for another second, then staring at it a little longer isn’t going to give you the motivation you need. So instead, go for a walk. Talk to someone. Eat a salad, solve a crime – I don’t care. Just go do something else. By the time you come back (hopefully a few minutes later), you’ll usually find that you can move forward where a few minutes ago you were getting nowhere at all.

    With any luck, this article has provided you with just enough distraction from the thing you’re supposed to be doing (and which I’m assuming you don’t want to be doing, or else why would you be reading this?), and now you can get back to it with a little more enthusiasm than you had before. If so, yay! Mission accomplished!

    As for me, I’m going to take my own advice. Because I have another article I need to write today, and I don’t want to write it anymore than I wanted to write this one. So I’m going to go outside and stand in the sun until my painfully white body says, “Please, stop hurting me!” Then I’ll go back inside and get it finished. Sunburn, here I come!

  • WHY “DOING NOTHING” SHOULD BE A PART OF YOUR WORKDAY

    WHY “DOING NOTHING” SHOULD BE A PART OF YOUR WORKDAY

    AUTHOR: JEFF HAVENS

    Warren Buffett.

    I’m beginning this way because starting this article off with his name will probably help me in web search rankings, and I’m a slave to Internet algorithms. I also did it because he’s crazy rich and yet somehow people don’t hate him for it, which is a pretty impressive feat. And I also also did because he’s lazy – so lazy, in fact, that he actually schedules time in his weekly calendar for doing absolutely nothing. No meetings, no conference calls, no stock research, no investor reports – nothing. It’s shameful.

    Even worse, Bill Gates does the same thing. And Richard Branson. Google’s founders even codified lazytime into their 2004 IPO when they encouraged their employees to spend 20% of their workday sitting around and thinking up their own projects to work on, so long as they might somehow maybe someday benefit Google. That’s one full day a week of paying people to stare blankly out the window. What are all these people thinking?!

    The most obvious answer to that question is that they’re all rich, so they can do whatever they want. But what’s really interesting is that all of these people credit this behavior with helping them get rich. Basically, they argue that all this laziness led to their success, and not the other way around.

    Can this possibly be true?

    I’d like to argue that it’s almost certainly true. Sitting around and doing nothing is the best way to get rich, make a breakthrough, or solve a seemingly impossible problem, and it should absolutely be a part of your everyday habits.

    The reason for that is fairly simple. When you’re engaged in any working behavior, you’re working on something that already exists. You have a project to complete, and so you work on it; your boss told you what to do, and so you go do it. That’s what we spend most of our time doing, and it requires us to know what we’re working toward.

    But when we’re sitting around “doing nothing,” we’re actually working on things that either might exist or need to exist but currently don’t. Your project has hit a snag and you don’t know how to fix it, or your boss wants you to figure out how to break into the Chinese market but didn’t give you any guidance as to how that might happen. In these moments, we don’t know what we need to do, and so we need to spend some time thinking about how to get where we want to go. There’s no other way to do it; no amount of doing is going to get us anywhere, because in these moments there’s simply nothing to do.

    Which means Warren Buffett can’t know what his next investment is going to be until he sits down and thinks about it for a while. Google can’t know which ideas to pursue until someone conjures up a few ideas to consider.

    To be completely fair, sometimes our “doing nothing” is exactly that – we are glassy-eyed, dull, and effectively brain dead. But scheduling some downtime to allow our brains to pick away at problems and opportunities will, in many cases, take us farther than all the busywork in the world.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go for a walk and stare at some trees. Because I have a lot more writing I need to do, and I have no idea what I want to say. Yet.

  • HOW TO BECOME MORE PRODUCTIVE BY DOING LESS WORK

    HOW TO BECOME MORE PRODUCTIVE BY DOING LESS WORK

    You’d be forgiven for thinking I chose the title for this article specifically to trick you into reading. People do that all the time now, like “Lose Twenty Pounds With This 2-Minute Exercise Miracle!” or “Six Easy Steps To Make a Million Dollars!” Unfortunately, most of those articles don’t deliver what they’ve promised, although I will say that it is fairly easy to make a million dollars if you can convince 10 people to give you $100,000 each. (Or 20 people to give you $50,000, or twenty million people to each give you a nickel.)

    However, it turns out that accomplishing more by doing less isn’t just wishful thinking. I’ve spent the last few months researching the way we work, and a growing body of research suggests that “work smarter, not harder” isn’t just a cutesy little phrase. In fact, the way we work is just as important as the work that we do, and those people who understand that tend to be more productive – and less exhausted – than those of us who are constantly driving blindly forward.

    This makes more sense if we remember that our brains are a part of our bodies, and they have limits just like every other part of us. For example, Olympic athletes generally don’t practice for more than 4-5 hours a day because our muscles can only operate at their peak physical level for so long before they begin to tire and perform more poorly. Athletes appreciate the importance of rest in order to perform at their best when it really counts, and it would do the rest of us a lot of good to realize that our brains function in exactly the same way.

    And to show that I’m not making this up, here are some of the statistics I’ve come across in the last few months:

    • With a $3.4 trillion GDP, Germany has an economy roughly 300% the size of South Korea ($1.13 trillion). However, Germany is only 60% larger than South Korea (80 million vs. 50 million), and its citizens work an average of 800 hours less every year than South Koreans do (1,371 hours vs. 2.412 hours).
    • Einstein slept more than 10 hours a day and took frequent naps, decades before research revealed that a 20-30 minute mid-day nap is more effective at boosting brain activity than a cup of coffee.
    • Our waking brains appear to operate in two distinct modes which can most easily be described as ‘focused’ and ‘unfocused.’ Although it is not entirely clear what happens during ‘unfocused’ activity, it is increasingly clear that our brains are at their best when they cycle between these two modes, instead of operating entirely in one or the other.
    • A longitudinal study of workplace behaviors in multiple industries found that the most productive people work an average of 52 minutes following by a 17-minute break.
    • A different study found that the average worker is interrupted 87 times a day, making it virtually impossible to concentrate on any one activity for a long period of time. Because of this, it has been suggested that most of us only do about 3 hours of actual, concentrated work in a typical 8-hour workday.

    So if our brains require unfocused time (dare I call it daydreaming?) in order to work at their peak efficiency, if taking breaks leads to more productivity than working non-stop, and if a bunch of lazy Germans can outperform a bunch of overworked South Koreans, why is it so difficult to convince people that the best way to speed up is to actually slow down?

    I think the key lies in the fact that we are primarily visual creatures. Let’s assume that the research is correct and that our brains operate in two modes – focused and unfocused. Only one of those looks like work. Answering the phone, writing an email, having a meeting, taking notes, building a presentation, meeting with customers, re-engineering an assembly line – that all looks productive. Sitting and thinking, getting a coffee, taking a walk around the office, turning off the Internet to avoid constant email interruptions – that all looks like you’re being lazy. This despite the fact that sitting and thinking is really the only way to come up with great new ideas, and taking breaks is the only way to give your brain the rest it needs in order to operate at peak efficiency for days or weeks or months at a time.

    I’m not encouraging you to slack off. Rather, I’m encouraging you to recognize that doing things that look like work all the time probably isn’t the best way for you to get ahead.

    Oh, and one last thing. A recent survey suggests that most bosses can’t tell the difference between an employee who works 80 hours a week and one who pretends to work 80 hours a week. So if you happen to be stuck in a working environment where you feel compelled to spend absurd hours at the office because that’s what expected of you, don’t beat yourself up too much if you take a few breaks now and then. In fact, that might be exactly what you should do, even if your hard-driving boss doesn’t agree.

  • DELIGHTFUL WAYS TO DESTROY THE MORALE OF YOUR SALESPEOPLE

    DELIGHTFUL WAYS TO DESTROY THE MORALE OF YOUR SALESPEOPLE

    AUTHOR: JEFF HAVENS

    Jeff Havens is a professional development expert who addresses leadership, generational issues, and other areas of professional development through a unique blend of content and entertainment. Jeff has written for several business and tech publications including Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek, the WSJ, and has been featured on CNBC and Fox Business.

     

    You know, I like to think of myself as a creative person. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I made quite the impressive collection of pinch pots when I was in elementary school; one of them was so incredible, in fact, that I should really refer to it as a pinch jug. So I’d like to sit here and tell you that the techniques I’m about to share with you are the product of my own amazingly fertile mind.

    Unfortunately, I can’t. Everything in today’s article has been pulled directly from the experience of a salesperson I know. And honestly, since I can’t think of any better ways to drain all the enthusiasm out of your sales team, I guess today I’ll just play parrot.

    Are you sick of your sales force caring about their jobs? Then here you go!

    JUDGE YOUR SALES FORCE ON METRICS FOR WHICH THEY ARE NOT INCENTIVIZED!

    Sales people thrive on meeting their goals. Part of it is because salespeople are generally driven, goal-oriented people, and part of it is because they get money and prizes and free vacations and other perks for meeting their goals. So if you can start holding them accountable for things that provide them with no reward, you’ll be taking away at least half of their motivation for working.

    HOLD YOUR SALES FORCE ACCOUNTABLE FOR NOT MEETING YOUR UNSTATED GOALS!

    Many sales managers have two sets of goals – acceptable sales numbers, and ideal sales numbers. In some cases, those two figures are presented for everyone to see, so that the sales force can simultaneously be satisfied at meeting their initial quota and strive to exceed their ideal quota. But where’s the fun in that? Far more effective to provide your team with one goal, and then expect them to read your mind and shoot for a different goal that you’ve never shared with them. And the beauty of this is, you can always revise your ideal numbers up so that nobody is ever good enough to reach them, which will ensure that you always have something to be unhappy about. Huzzah for being impossible to please!

    VALUE CURRENT SUCCESS LESS THAN FUTURE POTENTIAL FAILURE!

    This is my favorite, and it’s so ridiculous that I’m certain I would never have thought of it myself. Thankfully I have some sales friends to share their stories with me. Here’s a hypothetical conversation.

    SALESPERSON: “Hey, boss, I’ve been regularly meeting or exceeding my sales goals. Aren’t you proud of me?”

    MANAGER: “No. Because it’s possible that you won’t meet your goals six months from now. I’m disappointed in the salesperson you might be turning into at some indeterminate point in the future. You should be ashamed of yourself. Work harder.”

    SALESPERSON: “Thanks, boss! You’ve just completely crushed my spirit!”

    MANAGER: “Something I should have done long ago. Sorry it took me so long.”

    I’m sure there are more things you can do here, but like I told you, I’m a parrot today. I can only write what others have told me. I’m sure I’ll find my brain again sometime soon. Maybe I should make another pinch jug. Or a pinch dish. Ooh, or a pinch couch! So many shapes I can pinch things into. I’m going to need to get a lot of clay…

  • How To Explain Why You Left A Toxic Workplace

    How To Explain Why You Left A Toxic Workplace

    Liz Ryan ,  

    FORBES CONTRIBUTOR

    I write about bringing life to work and bringing work to life.

    Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

     Dear Liz,

    I don’t know whether I would  have quit my job in a soul-sucking, toxic workplace if I hadn’t found your columns, but that’s what happened. I guess everything happens for a reason…

    …My boss was in over way over his head and floundering, our company’s division President was incompetent and very unpopular with the staff, and I was being asked to work almost around the clock for no recognition and very little compensation…

    (more…)