The Google Way of Growing Better Managers

"According to a story in Sunday’s New York Times, the effort was code named Project Oxygen, and Google applied the same sort of rigorous technical evaluation to the project — “analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys, and nominations for top-manager awards….(correlating) phrases, words, praise and complaints” — that they might apply to, say, figuring out how to provide news without involving any human editors.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Google developing an algorithm that could somehow take this very human activity and make it something very different. They found that the “Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers” that they came up with were, as the Times put it, “forehead-slappingly obvious” so much so that “it’s hard to believe that it took the mighty Google so long to figure them out.”

Here's the “Eight Good Behaviors”:

1. Be a good coach:

·         Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.

·         Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to the problems tailored to your   

          employees’ specific strengths.

2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage:

·         Balance giving freedom to your employees, while being available for advice.

·         Make stretch assignments to help the team members tackle big problems.

3. Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being:

·         Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work.

·         Make new members of your team feel welcome and help ease their transition.

4. Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results-oriented:

·         Focus on what the employees want the team to achieve and 

          how they can help achieve it.

·         Help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks.

5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team:

·         Communication is two-way because you both listen and share information.

·         Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and 

          goals of the team. Help the team members to connect the dots.

·         Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issues and concerns of your employees.

6. Help your employees with career development.

7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team:

·         Even in the midst of turmoil, keep the team focused on goals and strategy.

·         Involve the team in setting and evolving the team’s vision and making progress 

          toward it.

8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team:

·         Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the tram, when needed.

·         Understand the specific, especially the unique challenges of the work to be done.

The Power and Pull of Stories

Every now and then you run across an article that is so important, so compelling, and so unique with respect to not only content but also writing style, that you cannot help but reread it many times so that the insights percolates in your mind. This is one of those articles, and I'd like to share it with you. I hope you find it as powerful as I did. Enjoy! 

Human beings are hungry for stories, and ultimately—though they may not know it—for the one true story. Indeed, the deepest convictions of our heart are often formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of a story. 

People from every culture have stories: whether tales of familial history told around the kitchen table, stories of national drama repeated in cultural festivals, or the endless retellings of fables, tragedies, and epic longings in books and movies. Regardless of the vehicle, we as human beings seem to enjoy and thrive on stories. 

One story that captivated people this year was James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar. The film quickly became the top-grossing film of all time, with over $1 billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and the cultural influence of the film was felt immediately. Not too long after the release of Avatar, CNN.com posted a story on fans experiencing “depression and suicidal thoughts” after viewing the film. According to the article, “On the fan forum site ‘Avatar Forums,’ a topic thread entitled ‘Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible,’ has received more than 1,000 posts from people experiencing depression and fans trying to help them cope.” Philippe Bahgdassarian, the moderator of the online forum, offered this interesting insight into the phenomenon: “The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed.” (1)

While there has not been a run on “Avatar Depression Syndrome” diagnoses, there is a critical reminder for the Christian in this story. We need to remember that the deepest convictions of our heart are often formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of a story.

One influential book suggests,

Life is not a list of propositions; it is a series of dramatic scenes. As Eugene Peterson said, ‘We live in a narrative, we live in a story. Existence has a story shape to it. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters.’ Story is the language of the heart. Our souls speak not in the naked facts of mathematics or the abstract propositions of systematic theology; they speak the images and emotions of a story. (2)

In a world of increasing pluralization, the Christian faces many new challenges. What is the best way to reach people with the gospel in such a multicultural context? I believe one way is by understanding and learning to explore the power and pull of stories in our lives. The history of apologetics provides various models that we can learn from as we seek to connect. One model, borne out by such authors as C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, is the use of creative and imaginative storytelling. Indeed, in our postmodern world, narrative may connect in ways that propositional truth statements (which the postmodernist often rejects) sometimes cannot.

“It is this primary importance of the story that originally drew me to the movies,” says screenwriter and Christian Brian Godawa. He continues,

There’s just something about a good story that makes me sit up and listen: the captivation of narrative, the magnetism of drama, the curiosity of interesting characters and the meaning of it all. It’s no wonder Jesus used parables and stories to make his points and explain the unexplainable nature of God’s kingdom to his followers. A story enables us to understand a transcendent reality we may not otherwise have been able  to grasp with mere rational abstraction. Drama brings to life the issues of life. (3)

Consider, for example, the story that naturalism offers to explain our deep love and seeming need for narratives. According to the naturalist’s script, our hunger for the dramatic is merely a social construction to provide meaning as a palliative to an otherwise meaningless existence. Or perhaps we have a “story gene,” which scripts us to simply dramatize the natural and normal happenings of life.

Yet, might the power and pull of stories be an intimation of something greater, more profound, something ultimate? This is, in fact, what the biblical narrative suggests; we are part of a grand story that began before we humans even came into existence:

God rescued us from deadend alleys and dark dungeons. He’s set us up in the kingdom of the Son he loves so much, the Son who got us out of the pit we were in, got rid of the sins we were doomed to keep repeating. We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body.

He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end.  

From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross. (4)  

A Captivating Story
Curtis Chang attempted to share the gospel with his fellow students at Harvard. He soon found that the usual methods and approaches he had learned were met with a total lack of resonance or sympathy from his audience. How, he wondered, can we present the truth about Jesus to a postmodern world that views all such claims as merely arbitrary or irrelevant? He was encouraged to discover that the church has wrestled with similar questions for two thousand years, and he examines them in his book, Engaging Unbelief: A Captivating Strategy from Augustine & Aquinas. (5) Chang’s book is an insightful quest for a better way. Drawing upon the biblical injunction to “take every thought captive” (2 Corinthians 10: 5), Chang outlines a rhetorical strategy of sharing the gospel with three main components: first, entering the challenger’s story, second, retelling the story, and third, capturing that retold tale within the gospel story. He uses the works of Augustine and Aquinas to show how they employed this approach in their respective contexts, and by doing so, won a significant hearing for the gospel. (6) So what does this strategy look like? First, by entering the challenger’s story, we initially operate within the challenger’s worldview. Then, having entered this story, we may retell the story from the inside while offering a perspective that may not have been seen. That is, we reinterpret the story within the framework of the challenger’s own terms. This is precisely what Francis Schaeffer did: he encouraged individuals to see the logical conclusion, or tragic flaw, of their own storyline. Schaeffer writes about a meeting at Cambridge University where a young Hindu man suggested that all is one in the universe. Stepping inside the Hindu’s story for a moment, Schaeffer thus asked him, “Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no intrinsic difference between them?” The man agreed. Then Schaeffer picked up a kettle of boiling water, lifted it up above the young man’s head, and said: “There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty.” “Thereupon,” writes Schaeffer, “the Hindu walked out into the night.” (7) (Of course, he used the kettle merely as a dramatic prop and was not commending cruelty.) Finally, once we’ve entered the challenger’s story and retold it, the final stage is to capture the retold tale with the power of the gospel. The goal or aim is not to attempt to explain everything, but to show the power of the gospel to do more fully what the original storyline can do only partially. For an excellent example from Scripture, look at Paul’s discourse before the Aereopagus in Acts 17. 

A Sanctified Imagination
How we need storytellers, writers, and dramatists to offer fresh approaches to connect with reality that are rooted in God’s story. Yet each of us who longs to be faithful to the gospel and effective in connecting with postmodern listeners needs what A.W. Tozer calls a “sanctified imagination.” In his essay “The Value of the Sanctified Imagination,” Tozer observes,

The value of the cleansed imagination in the sphere of religion lies in its power to perceive in natural things shadows of things spiritual. It enables the reverent man to ‘See the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.’

The weakness of the Pharisee in days of old was his lack of imagination or what amounted to the same thing, his refusal to let it enter the field of religion. He saw the text with its carefully guarded theological definition and he saw nothing beyond….

I long to see the imagination released from its prison and given to its proper place among the sons of the new creation. What I am trying to describe here is the sacred gift of seeing, the ability to peer beyond the veil and gaze with astonished wonder upon the beauties and mysteries of things holy and eternal. The stodgy pedestrian mind does no credit to Christianity. (8)

Human beings are hungry for stories, and ultimately—though they may not know it—for the one true story. To reach them we must enter their story, learn how to retell that story, and then capture the retold tale within the gospel narrative. May God grant us his grace and wisdom as we aim to become grace-filled and creative storytellers.

Stuart McAllister is vice-president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.
 

Are You a Servant Leader?

Servant and leader – at its first glance, the juxtaposition of these two seemingly irreconcilable notions leaves many people confused.  Yet, there never has been a time more timely and apt to learn and apply the concepts of servant leadership in our organizations, school, and family bereft of love, authenticity and character. Let me begin with a story that inspired Robert Greenleaf who coined the term servant leadership through his readings of Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East.

“A band of men embarks on a mythical journey. A man named Leo accompanies the party as the servant who does the menial chores, but also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.”

Robert Greenleaf, inspired by Leo, defines servant-leadership with the following questions,

“Do others around the servant leader become wiser, freer, more autonomous, healthier, and better able themselves to become servants? Will the least privileged of the society be benefited or at least not further deprived?” Greenleaf suggest that the servant leader is a servant first, which begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Only once the desire to serve is made through conscious choice that brings one to aspire to lead.

            

I think Greenleaf is right in his conclusion; that is, the cornerstone of servant leadership originates from this desire to serve. But I found myself asking “What if people do not want to serve?,” “Where do these feelings of service come from anyway?,” “Why do people ought to subscribe to these view?” Sooner or later, I had a baggage of unanswered questions lingering me.  

As a Christian, I began to ask myself how the responsible Christian leader approaches leadership. In studying the Scripture, I discovered there is a leadership model that is undergirded as the linchpin of of the body of Christ. This biblical brand of leadership is uniquely expressed through what is called the servant attitude of the leader – the desire to enrich and enhance the lives of those being led through unselfish servanthood.

Jesus Christ understood His own mission and He clearly articulated this as an attitude and value for leadership. Following an argument among his disciplines about greatness in the Kingdom, Jesus turned common assumptions and values of leadership upside down through a revolutionary teaching. After arriving at Capernaum, He questioned them: “What were you arguing about on the road?” He then sat down and called His twelve disciples. He said “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” (Mark 9:33-35)

Jesus Christ intentionally used the term servant (diakonos) to clearly communicate with His disciplines. They knew the word accentuated the service given on behalf of others. The notion also carried the idea of deep devotion. Influenced by the norms of the day, the disciplines were most likely puzzled by his crucial lecture on how to climb the leadership ladder. Others serve leaders, they reasoned, but Jesus literally turned this thinking upside down. Authentic leaders are devoted to service that focuses on the needs, personal growth, and happiness of others. With time, the disciplines would recognize that Kingdom leaders was not about climbing the ladder, but serving at the bottom.

Greenleaf outlined ten characteristics that define a servant-leader:

1.     Listening

2.     Empathy

3.     Healing

4.     Awareness

5.     Persuasion

6.     Conceptualization

7.     Foresight

8.     Stewardship

9.     Commitment to the growth of people

10.  Building Community

Click here for the description of each characteristic of a servant leader. 

Servant leadership works in any context. Leading organizations, Southwest Airlines and Starbucks have adopted servant leadership into their core values and principles. Please see the video below. 


      Southwest Airlines – Colleen Barrett
         President of SouthWest Airlines, Colleen Barrett, speaks about Servant-Leadership at SouthWest while addressing  
         UPenn Wharton. 

Dateline NBC – The Power of Faith

          Dateline NBC presented this piece on a more religion-focused view of Servant-Leadership. It includes an interview 

          with Larry Spears and a section on the success at Starbucks. 

Why Core Values Matter

Let me begin with my story. It was around the beginning of my junior year at UBC (University of British Columbia). You know that if you are a Commerce student, this is arguably the most critical year – a key stepping stone, if you will – in accelerating your professional career. Around junior year, most students come to this realization and start to frenetically attend multiple conferences, network like crazy, and embark on their job hunting journey. I was one of those students trying to find a way in to the corporate world and fight my way up the hills of the Great Recession. I cannot speak for others, though I presume a vast majority of them may share similar sentiments, but the journey I embarked on was difficult and onerous yet highly rewarding.

I simply cannot forget the countless hours spent in preparing for student-club and job-related interviews. It was a strenuous and time-consuming. I think I interviewed around 15 times during my entire university career. I would characterize the first half of my interviews weak and incomplete. As I became more serious about my professional endeavours in Human Resources, it suddenly dawned on to me the utmost importance of interviews. The fact of the matter is your entire image, perception, and future is created in 60-minutes or less.

Most companies employ behavioural questions since it’s widely known as the most valid and reliable measure of high performance and success in your job. However, I wanted to start with the basics – the foundation. First, I attempted to answer the foundational questions such as:

“What’s your greatest strengths and weaknesses?”
“Why do you want this job?”

“Why should we hire you?”

The most profound question I encountered  was, “What would be written on your epitaph at the end of your life?”

I found myself dumbfounded as I began to dribble nonsense on these ‘simple’ questions…. Consciously thinking and articulating my underlying values and beliefs was something unprecedented. I came to the conclusion that I lacked self-awareness.

When you come to think of it, the notion of an interview is quite simple. It’s about a dialogue between two parties who don’t know each other. It’s about telling your story and connecting it to the other party. Sounds easy, doesn’t it.. Now, who doesn’t dread interviews…The reason there is such fear is the lack of certainty and familiarity of who are we and what we stand for. Sounds crazy, but it’s quite true.

I felt worse and worse as I found myself struggling to answer even these simple questions. As days passed by, I wasn’t feeling any better either. I had to directly confront this situation. So, I began to ask my family, friends, and acquaintances what they thought of me. I began recording their candid thoughts and perceptions on my strengths and weaknesses. I asked deeper and probing questions, and what led them to think and feel in a certain way. This wasn’t an easy process. The hardest part was allowing myself to be vulnerable. I had to completely expose myself I could not argue back. I only listened, listened, and listened.

Next, I compiled and analyzed their comments and began to compare it with my own thoughts. There were some differences and similarities. The more time I spent time in isolation reading the Bible, praying and thinking, I felt better about myself. I had a stronger grasp of what constitutes my identity. Eventually, I discovered a pattern, a common theme, from the results of this undertaking. I decided I was going to write it down and etch it in my heart. This culminated in the five core values. Core values are a series of words or phrases defining who you are and what you stand for. They represent the internal navigation system for your life and the filter through which you process all of life’s decisions. They are the values you would fight for and the attributes you hope others say about you in your absence or after your death. They become key elements of your personal brand and define your character.

So here’s my personal core values:

·      Faith

·      Serving Others

·      Excellence

·      Integrity

·      Continuous Learning

All of this took about a year or so. The journey isn’t over. In fact, it’s a life-long process. I found myself much more confident, renewed, strengthened, now. One way I try to keep myself intact is writing a journal few times a week. This quiet time allows you to meditate and refine your thoughts and worldview.

Your Story:

So, now it’s your turn. What are your core values? Are you certain of who you are, what you stand for and believe? Everyone goes through this process and the earlier, the better. “With your values prioritized, you will see advantages when it comes to making decisions, too. Roy Disney once said, “It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” All jobs entail tradeoffs. Do you crave more prestige, higher pay, a chance to help others, increased job security, more variety, increased risk, and more independence? You may want them all, but the chances are good that you can't have them all. You have to make tradeoffs. The way to do that is by assessing each desire in light of your core values. Your values won't change, but you will decide which ones are more important to you right now in your present circumstances. Ultimately, values provide guidelines for answering the question: “What is most important to me?” When it comes to your career, there is no question more important than that.”

I stumbled upon a blog from a Sauder alumnus and consultant Mike Desjardins who shared his story of core values. He gave a speech at UBC and a core values worksheet with step-by-step instructions. For those who are still in the process of discovering your core values, I highly recommend you to take this seriously and start thinking about your fundamental personal values. This will truly change your life. 

Here it is video: Core Values Video

Here is the worksheet: Core Values Worksheet

If you have previously established a set of core values for your life, would you please take a couple minutes to share the impact your core values have had on your life in the comments sections below this post.

What Race Are You Running?

Preface: 

What is the purpose of life? I believe there is no answer as uplifting, encouraging, and fulfilling than knowing who you are and why you were born into this earth. As I reflect on my earlier days in high school and university, I recall periods in life singularly marked by peace and confidence -- whereas some of my peers were uncertain of their life's future. This lack of understanding and confidence in who I am generated an unsettling effect on every aspect in their lives. All these unanswered baggage of questions begin to boil inside you, such as "Why do I need to study?...Is this to merely earn a good living and live a happy life?...What is a happy life anyways?  What is a successful life and why do I need to part of it? These are some of the difficult questions my friends were struggling with. 

As I consider the numerous blessings God has bestowed in my life, one of them is the confidence in life. Growing in my faith through reading and studying the lives of prominent Christian thinkers and writers such as C.S Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, William Wilberforce, and Tim Keller became instrumental in forming a biblically sound worldview. 

A new beginning and a new chapter in life... I'm at a crossroads in life. Past 20 years of formal schooling is over. I began to realize different competencies or skill sets are required in different stages of life. I spent the last decade or so being focused on few things: success as a student, cultivating skill sets for future career, and building relationships. Now I think I need to readjust my priorities and begin to unlearn and relearn many of the new skill sets required as a professional. Embracing change is always difficult especially when you see what it is required of you in the future.

Nonetheless, one thing should never change. Our relationship with Jesus Christ. I will be honest. As I've been preoccupied with all my efforts acclimating to the new environment, people, and job, I seem to have neglected the most important thing in life. I felt a sense of shame and embarrassment after reading an article which I'd like to share with all of you. It helped to realign my priorities and rediscover what race I am running. I hope you enjoy it. 

In our book, Lead like Jesus – Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time, Ken Blanchard describes an early morning scenario -- the daily conflict between the task oriented "Human Doing" and the reflective "Human Being" side of our nature. "We all have, in a sense, two selves. We have a task-oriented self that is used to getting the job done and a more reflective side that is very thoughtful. Which of the two selves wakes up quicker in the morning: our external, task-oriented self or our internal and reflective self? Of course, it's our external, task-oriented self. 

What happens in the morning?  The alarm goes off! Have you ever thought about that phrase – alarm clock? What an awful concept! Why isn't it the "Opportunity clock?” Or the "It's going to be a great day clock?” The "alarm" immediately ignites your task- oriented self and you jump out of bed. Pretty soon you're trying to eat breakfast while you washing. You race to the car and immediately pick up the cell phone and rush off to meetings all morning, followed by lunch meetings, and a dinner meeting. Finally you get home at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. and fall into bed exhausted, without any energy to say goodnight to your spouse. What happens the next day? The "alarm "goes off and you’re at it again. Pretty soon your life becomes a rat race. As Lily Tomlin once said, “The problem with a rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”

Not only does life on the run turn into a rat race, but it also turns into an act of just trying to survive the day no matter how noble and worthy the activities may be. When short term survival become the long term pattern of your life and ministry, it is easy to fall into the joy killing mindsets of victim and martyr.  Considering an over busy schedule as a badge of honor or a legitimate rationalization for not taking time to care for your own spiritual health or the mundane needs of  those relationships that make up your private world, is a dangerous act of self deception.

A striking aspect of the life of Jesus was His continuous habit of engaging in times of solitude. Time alone with the Father was an antidote to the ever present pressures of a life filled with people and situations that laid claim to all He had to offer in mind, body, and spirit. As you read Matthew 4:1-11 (a time of temptation), Luke 6:12-13 (a time of decision), Matthew 14:13 (a time of receiving bad news), Matthew 14:23 (a time of success and popularity), and Mark 1-32-38 (a time of choosing the best use of His time), one thing becomes clear -- Jesus always came away from times of solitude with renewed, purpose, energy and perspective to maximize the moment not just survive it. May this be so with you!

Phil Hodges
Phil Hodges, a lifelong friend of Ken Blanchard, served as a human resource and industrial relations manager in corporate America for 36 years with Xerox Corporation and U.S. Steel. In 1997, he served as a Consulting Partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies where he had responsibilities in leadership and customer service programs. In addition to helping leaders of faith walk their talk in the marketplace, Phil developed a passion for bringing effective leadership principles into the church  when he served as member and chairman of his local church elder council for over ten years. Phil finds his great joy in his life-role relationships as husband, father and grandpa. In 1999, Ken and Phil co-founded Lead Like Jesus where he serves as Chief Content Officer. He is the co-author of five books: Lead Like Jesus: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time, The Most Loving Place in Town: A Modern Day Parable for the Church, Leadership Development for Every Day of the Year and The Servant Leader with Ken Blanchard and Leadership by the Book with Ken Blanchard and Bill Hybels. Phil and his wife, Jane Kinnaird Hodges, live in southern California

Are you Emotionally Intelligent?

I cannot conceal the growing fascination on the subject of leadership. Leadership, at its core, is inherently ambiguous. The beauty of leadership, in fact, originates from ambiguity. The leadership guru Warren Bennis is right when he remarked "Leadership is a lot like beauty; it's hard to define but you know it when you see it." 

For the past few years, I've declared myself as a student of leadership -- one who continuously thinks, learns and applies key leadership principles in my daily life. One of the most positive realizations through this exercise has been a heightened sense of self-awareness - knowing, analyzing, evaluating, and appreciating my God-given talents, strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, I have cultivated a coherent worldview of who I am, what I stand for, and what I live for.

I'd like share a book on Emotional Intelligence that I read last year with a good friend of mine, Bob Wang.  In essence, this book served as an ice-axe that has broken the frozen sea within me. A leading psychologist Daniel Goleman - author of his masterpiece "Primal Leadership." provides a ground-breaking perspective on the subject of leadership. He argues that the fundamental task of leaders is to prime good feelings in those they lead. That is, leaders create resonance - a reservoir of positivity that frees the best in people. Great leaders are more than strategy, vision or powerful ideas. The reality is that much more primal; they work through the emotions. 

Goleman proposes that the four dimensions of EI - self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are the vehicle of primal leadership. Here, I'd like to share a list of EI dimensions and competencies that I found rather intriguing. I hope you this will be a food for thought and provide useful take aways. 

A good exercise on developing Emotional Intelligence is to identify the top two dimensions to which your capability is the highest. Also, write down the top five competencies you consider your strengths. Also, select the top five competencies you'd like to develop throughout the course of your life. Lastly, think of some specific, practical ways to harness and cultivate these competencies. 

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE DOMAINS AND ASSOCIATED COMPETENCIES

PERSONAL COMPETENCE:
SELF-AWARENESS

• Emotional self-awareness:

o Leaders are attuned to their inner signals, recognizing how their feelings affect them and their job performance

o Attuned to their guiding values and can often intuition the best course of action
o Candid and authentic, and speak openly about their emotions or with conviction about vision

• Accurate self-assessment:
o Know their limitations and strengths and exhibit a sense of humor about themselves.
o Exhibit a gracefulness in learning where they need to improve
o Welcome constructive criticism and feedback
o Enables leaders to know when to ask for help and where to focus in cultivating new leadership strengths

• Self-confidence
o Know their abilities with accuracy and allow leaders to play their strengths
o Welcome difficult assignment
o Such leaders often have a sense of presence, a self-assurance that lets them stand out in a group

SELF-MANAGEMENT
• Self-control:
o Find ways to manage their disturbing emotions and impulses and even to channel them in useful ways
o Stay clam and clear-headed under high stress or during a crisis

• Transparency:
o Live their values
o Allow integrity through authentic openness to others about feelings, beliefs, and actions
o Openly admit mistakes or faults, and confront unethical behavior in others rather turn blind eye

• Adaptability:
o Juggle multiple demands without losing their focus or energy
o Comfortable with the inevitable ambiguities of organizational life
o Flexible in adapting to new challenges, nimble in adjusting to fluid change

• Achievement:
o Higher personal standards that drive them to constantly seek performance improvements
o Pragmatic, setting measureable but challenging goals
o Continual learning and teaching ways to do better

• Initiative:
o Seize opportunities or create them rather than simply waiting
o Does not hesitate to cut through red tape, or even bend the rules when necessary to create better possibilities for the future

• Optimism:
o See others positively, expecting the best of them
o Their “glass half-full” outlook leads them to expect that changes in the future will be for the better

SOCIAL COMPETENCE:
SOCIAL AWARENESS

• Empathy:
o Attune to wide range of emotional signals, letting them sense the felt, but unspoken, emotions in a person or group
o Listen attentively and can grasp the other person’s perspective.
o Makes a leader able to get along well with people of diverse backgrounds or from other cultures

• Organizational awareness:
o Politically astute, able to detect crucial social networks and read key power relationships
o Understand the political forces at work in an organization, as well as the guiding values and unspoken rules that operate among people there

• Service:
o Foster an emotional climate so that people directly in touch customer will keep the relationship on the right track
o Monitor customer or client satisfaction carefully to ensure they are getting what they need.
o Make themselves available as needed

RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

• Inspiration:
o Create resonance and move people with a compelling vision or shared mission
o Embody what they ask of others, and are able to articulate a shared mission in a way that inspires others to follow
o Offer a sense of common purpose beyond the day-to-day tasks, making work exciting

• Influence:
o Finding just the right appeal for a given listener to knowing how to build buy-in from key people and a network of support for an initiative.
o Persuasive and engaging when they address a group

• Developing others:
o Show a genuine interest in those they are helping along, understanding their goals, strengths, and weaknesses
o Give timely and constructive feedback and are natural mentors or coaches

• Change catalyst:
o Able to recognize the need for the change, challenge the status quo, and champion the new order.
o Strong advocates for the change eve in the face of opposition, making the argument for it compellingly
o Find practical ways to overcome barriers to change

• Conflict management:
o Able to draw out all parties, understand the differing perspectives,
o Find a common ideal that everyone can endorse
o Surface the conflict acknowledge the feelings and views of all sides, and then redirect the energy toward a shared ideal

• Teamwork and collaboration:
o Generate an atmosphere of friendly collegiality and are themselves models of respective, helpfulness and cooperation
o Draw others into active, enthusiastic commitment to the collective effort, and build spirit and identity.
o Spend time forging and cementing close relationships beyond mere work obligations

P.S. Here's a 10-minute short clip on EI from Dr. Goleman. Enjoy!

Five Golden Rules of Effective Change Efforts: People

Ashley Harshak, Deanne Aguirre, and Anna Brown, leading organizational change experts at Booz & Company, offers five indispensable factors that make the greatest difference in fostering behaviors that are needed for successful transformations.

Underlying these five pointers is a heavy emphasis and importance of people in this equation of reaping the benefits of change efforts. Change is, at the heart of it, a people process, and people are creatures that are hardwired to defy resistance of status quo and adoption of new mind-sets and behaviors. Companies often overlook the people-oriented change process prior to rolling out a change management initiative. It is no wonder why two third of organizations grind to a half because of their failure to produce for hoped-for results. A successful business transformation efforts must capture the hearts and minds of people who need to operate differently to deliver the desired results.

What is Change Management? 
Harshak suggests that change management is both a capability and a set of interventions that deliver the people-oriented side of change effort. The main target of the change efforts are geared toward employees in all level of hierarchy. It helps embed desired behaviors to sustain the longevity  of the success of change efforts.

Five Golden Rules:
1. Understand and spell out the impact of the change on people. 
A clear-eyed assessment of the impact on its various employee groups is a pre-requisite to such a transformation efforts. This means identifying the type and scale of changes affecting each segment of employees. More importantly, this assessment allows team members to define what the change means to them personally.

A well-known global energy firm did exactly that when it produced a change impact analysis with a “heat map” illustrating the intensity of change for each group of employees, and a detailed description of the changes each role would need to deliver. As a result, the leadership team was able to focus and redirect the transformation program to address the challenges facing those in the roles most affected. Moreover, project teams identified areas of potential overlap and conflict in the impact of various initiatives. Finally, the analysis informed the plans and sequencing of the overall transformation program and became the basis for communications with managers. In cascade fashion, managers received the message from their supervisors and then delivered it to their teams.

2. Build an emotional and rational case for change. 

I often noticed already during my first day at work, making a rational case for change is done systematically and with great success. However, only few initiatives appeal to the people's emotional core. In actuality, it is the people's emotions where the strength of the real transformation lies. Therefore, the communication of such changes need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce and allow a two-way medium for interpreting the change. If you ask an employee to follow a creative way of doing work, you need to make a strong emotional case for the change so they become genuinely committed to the transformation. By providing every details of what will change - and what won't into the presentation allows leaders to paint a vivid picture for what the change means for the employees personally, not only why it benefits the business. 

3. Ensure that the entire leadership team is a role model for the change.

Senior leaders must be not only 'on top' of the change program, but also 'in front' of it by modelling the new behaviors they ask asking for their people to adopt and holding one another accountable for the initiative's success. Only by walking the talk, employees will take the new change seriously. 

An aligned and committed leadership team is the foundation for any major corporate undertaking. When executives lead by example, the impact can be profound. One senior director found that it was only after he introduced ongoing performance discussions with his direct reports that his team started to hold similar sessions with their own direct reports. This requires consistent attention, but that level of engagement will make the difference between success and failure.

4. Mobilize your people to 'own' and accelerate the change. 

The fact of the matter is most change efforts are done "to" employees, not implemented "with" them or "by" them. Although a formal structure and system is in place to pushing behavior change from the top, an informal culture left isolated may dig in its heels. Jon Katzenbach, calls the informal organization - the network of peer-to-peer interactions - vital for encouraging and motivating such desired change in behaviors. A delicate balance between the formal organization and informal organization must be in order. 

5. Embed the change in the fabric of the organization. 

Most change initiatives' sponsors declare victory prematurely, diverting leadership, commitment, and focus from the ongoing effort. To embed the changes, there should moments of discussion acknowledging the lessons learned. Also by investigating into how to engage and involve employees over the long term and how to institutionalize best practices to capture the full benefit of this change .


For full article, please click here.

Think on These Things

The following article is one that I've referred back to many times over the last several years, especially when I embark on a new year. I assure you that it's worth 3 minutes you will invest in reading this-- I can promise you that. 

One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life--a life that thinks, a life thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts after Him. A person sitting at his or her desk staring out the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree, or Archimedes in his bathtub, bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensees, or “Thoughts,” a work that has inspired millions, would have never been penned.

What is even more destructive is the assumption that silence is inimical to life. The radio in the car, Muzak in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining callers "on hold" all add up as grave impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness. Aldous Huxley’s indictment, “Most of one’s life... is one prolonged effort to prevent thinking,” seems frightfully true. Moreover, the price paid for this scenario has been devastating. As T.S. Eliot questioned:

Where is the life we have lost in the living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries

bring us farther from God and nearer to dust.

Is there a remedy? May I make some suggestions for personal and corporate benefit? Nothing ranks higher for mental discipline than a planned and systematic study of God’s Word, from whence life’s parameters and values are planted in the mind. Paul, who loved his books and parchments, affirmed the priority of Scripture: “Do not go beyond what is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6). And Psalm 119 promises that God’s statutes keep us from being double-minded.

The church as a whole and the pulpit in particular must challenge the mind of this generation. The average young person today actually surrenders the intellect to the world, presuming Christianity to be bereft of intelligence. Many a pulpit has succumbed to the lie that anything intellectual cannot be spiritual or exciting.

Thankfully there are exceptions. When living in England, our family attended a church where preaching was taken quite seriously and one-hour sermons to packed auditoriums were the norm. Cambridge, being rife with skepticism, demanded a meticulous defense of each sermon text. I mention this to say one thing. When we were leaving Cambridge, our youngest child, who was nine years old, declared the preaching of this church to be one of his fondest memories. Even as a little boy he had learned that when the mind is rightly approached, it filters down to the heart. The matter I share here has far-reaching implications. We do a disservice to our youth by not crediting them with the capacity to think. We cannot leave this uncorrected.

The Bible places supreme value on the thought-life as that which shapes all of life. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote. Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay at the level of the idea itself, not just the act. Paul admonished the church at Philippi to have the mind of Christ, and to the same people he wrote: “[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). The follower of Christ must demonstrate to the world what it means not just to think, but to think justly. That is, in the words of aging David to his son Solomon, to “acknowledge the God of your father, and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever" (1 Chronicles 28:9).

Let us serve the God of creation with both hearts and minds. After all, it is not that I think, therefore, I am, but rather, the great I Am has asked us to think, and therefore, we must.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and president of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. He has arguably best followed the footsteps of C.S.Lewis. He is a spiritual role-model in the 21st century. Unlike most theologians, his rare talent of capturing the essence of the Bible through interweaving the various disciplines (philosophy, science, and history) and speaking with such eloquence and genuineness lends not intellectual credibility as an ambassador for Christ. 


I often visit his website(RZIM) to listen to the free podcasts. Listening to his sermons are like finding an oasis in the lost desert. I assure you that you'll find it likewise.


Please do check out the following lecture. It'll be worth it -- trust me. It's one of my favorite ones:

• Apologetics and Worldviews (Part 1 of 2)
• Apologetics and Worldviews (Part 2 of 2)