Rate yourself and four friends on emotional stability, generosity, intelligence, creativity and assertiveness. Then ask your spouse and friends to rate you on the same traits. What you discover may surprise you.Find out which traits are you better off getting feedback from others. Are there some traits you know about yourself better than others? Read this to find out.
People advise you to spend time understanding the key challenges of the role. What they forget to tell you is how important it is to first build a rapport with the team that you will lead. This becomes all the more important when you’re managing a team you haven’t worked with before. How do you break the ice and get the relationship going? Here are some ideas ...
Robots can do many things better. But they lack soft skills. Leadership skills, communication, collaboration and skills that are role specific are the most important ones to develop among the employees. That has to be where talent development professionals and people managers wish to focus. Leaders must make sure that they invest in strengthening the leadership development function in the organization. Their future competitiveness depends on how current and skilled this team is.In my experience as a consultant, I have often found the L&D teams missing on the skills that would make them relevant. Most L&D teams still ask the business to choose which training program they wish to attend. That model of customer orientation may work in a restaurant, but not for skill building. Building the relevant skills can move the L&D teams from being transactional to being strategic. The leaders must invest in making the L&D world class.
While most people will elbow each other out to get more airtime, the one who listens to others, evaluates what they say carefully, and then speaks is often the one chosen for a follow-up interview.Here are four tips on how listening can benefit you in a group discussion:
Governments, criminals, entrepreneurs, movie stars, singers and even the President of Ecuador are guilty of buying fake followers on social media accounts (YouTube, SoundCloud, Instagram etc). If you are a musician, your musical track could notch up millions of likes on Sound Cloud or get you a roaring set of followers on YouTube. And as a YouTube star you could earn a living. Because the difference between a million views and ten million views is a lot of money that you could make. That is what is driving people to buy followers.
In 2016 I made resolutions that would help me improve my storytelling skills. Innovations that get implemented and go viral are the ones that have stories that capture our imagination. Ideas travel faster when they ride on the wings of stories. Here’s what I resolved to do:a) Take notes when innovators and entrepreneurs tell their storiesb) Improve my visual storytelling skills by drawing something every dayc) Listen to podcasts of storytellers & screen writersThis year I turned to Arianna Huffington's philosophy of how to thrive. I am going to adopt some of them.
Designers need to design with empathy. That means giving up one’s prior knowledge of the subject and looking at it with the eyes of a novice to understand the feelings of a user. This is easier said than done. Observing people in their natural surroundings is a good starting point. But don’t do it like a tourist. Instead immerse yourself in that world.
The New York Times ran a study on the jobs we are most likely to inherit from the mother or father. In their study they found that males are 2.7 times likely to share dad’s profession. Males are two times likely to share their mother’s profession. Daughters are 1.8 times likely to follow dad and 1.7 times likely to follow their mother. Parents certainly shape our view of work. It is no surprise that the children of parents who were unemployed are more likely to be unsure of the profession they would choose.
