learning

5 Drivers of Human effort

I was lucky enough to attend a session with Professor Beverley Alimo-Metcalfe and wanted to share some of my notes.
5 Drivers of Human Effort

1. Meaning – work life must have purpose, managers need to help their employees understand the why in what they do.

2. Autonomy – Managers need to allow their employees the discretion to make decisions without having to gain their managers permission.

3. Mastery – competence builds confidence and research has shown that confident employees will be more ambitious in what they can achieve. This should be nurtured by effect reviews and support from their managers.

4. Appreciation – how often do managers geniuinely thank their employees for the effort they put in?

5. Social Support – managers need to build a culture where it is ok to say ‘I am not coping…I have messed up’ this needs to be followed up with support e.g. Talking through the stages of a task to identify where things went wrong so it becomes a learning experienced.
What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.

The definition of Hell for MBTI Types

Re blogged from The Definition Of Hell For Each Myers-Briggs PersonalityType – Heidi Priebe


They say that one man’s heaven is another man’s hell and that couldn’t be truer when it comes to the sixteen Myers-Briggs Personality Types. Each one is inspired, enraged and absolutely tortured by something slightly different. Here’s the destiny that would psychologically destroy each Myers-Briggs Personality type.


ESTJ – An incredibly impractical person is put in charge of all of your major life decisions. You have to do whatever they say and are powerless to argue or reason with them.

INFP – Your deepest thoughts and feelings are exposed to a large audience and everyone thinks that you’re pathetic and unoriginal.

INTJ – Every time you open your mouth to say something intelligent, something entirely idiotic comes out instead.

ESFJ – Someone you love is in dire need of practical help and you can’t give it to them. Worse yet, they think you’re refusing to help them out of pettiness and they’re mad at you.

ESFP – You are stuck in a room by yourself for the rest of eternity.

ISTP – The Zombie apocalypse happens but you’re suddenly the world’s weakest fighter and must depend solely on your loved ones to keep you alive.

ENFP – Every minute of the rest of your life has been scheduled for you – and it’s a long series of arbitrary, solitary tasks.

ISFP – You have to listen to rude people criticizing your personal choices, your appearance and your art form all day long. Nobody cares that they’re hurting your feelings.

ENFJ – Your loved ones are in dire need of guidance but every piece of advice you gives them inadvertently makes things worse for them.

ISFJ – Everyone you love is yelling at each other and it’s all your fault.

ISTJ – You are expected to complete a highly esteemed project with absolutely no guidance as to what’s expected of you.

INFJ – You are eternally damned to working for a morally corrupt company that aims to exploit the weak and generally degrade conditions for all of society.

ESTP – You are completely paralyzed, lacking even the ability to speak.

ENTP – Freedom of speech is revoked from the constitution. Voicing your opinion in any way is now illegal.

INTP – You are eternally condemned to researching an extremely vapid topic using wildly inaccurate methods, mostly involving interviewing people who have no idea what they’re talking about.

ENTJ – Somebody is wrong, and they’re directing a large group of people! You can’t do anything about it and will have to obey whatever inefficient policies they decide to implement.

Star Wars -MBTI

As a life long fan of Star Wars and MBTI step 2 qualified Practitioner this gave me a chuckle

I always wanted to be Hans Solo turns out I am more Luke Skywalker!

The highly unscientific and invalid test is here. May the force be with you.

http://www.playbuzz.com/jackoneil10/what-is-your-star-wars-personality-type?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=prom-hotstuff&utm_campaign=what-is-your-star-wars-personality-type&utm_term=fb_interests-star_wars&smff=fb

When a negative makes a positive!

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I recently read about Wendy Joungs study around whether it is more effective to train people using examples where people succeeded or where they made errors. The results were surprising!

Joung and her colleagues found that firefighters who underwent the error-based training showed improved judgment and were able to think more adaptively than those who underwent the error-free training.“

Part of of the reason is it is easier to fight the inclination to make excuses about the errors if they were made by somebody else. The participants avoid the bruised ego so are more likely to learn from the experience.

So if you are thinking about designing training or mentoring someone it might be worthwhile having some examples of when things went wrong as well as the usual best practice examples.

Interested to hear your comments

3 Factor – Employee Engagement

engagement

3 Factor – Employee Engagement

I recently attended a talk by Sir Harry Burns the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland around his study around early intervention with young people in order to empower them to turn their lives into something more positive. He is a fantastic presenter and the evidence he has collected around brain development and what can positively or negatively affect it is fascinating and made me think about how leaders could adopt this to enrich the life’s of their employees.

I love simplifying things and what I took away was 3 things that help empower people are

Control – having a real sense of control over their working lives, the how, what, when etc

Sense of Purpose – knowing that you are making a difference or heading towards a worthwhile goal

Community– seeing that you are part of the team, company,organisation etc

So how do you do this, well you can hold back on  the fancy questionnaires and start having conversations with your staff around these 3 pillars and really listening to them and empowering them. As Sir Harry Burns talked about, this is not about doing things to people it’s about enabling them to do it for themselves.

Here’s a crazy idea, you could do it in 30 days. Here’s a Ted talk about just that

Let me know what you think about employee engagement in the comments section below and if you would like to read more about how to build the 3 factors into your working life.

VAMOS!

We are all looking for ways to be more efficient in the workplace and unfortunately it seems to be about rationalising or cuts however what if you get an extra 23 % productivity with out cuts?

Interested?

Well there was a study by Bath university around discretionary effort of 700 people and they realised through the study that 3 things would help this Ability, Motivation and opportunity. However I have recently noticed in organisations going through change that employees need more that these 3.

VAMOS the Spanish for to go

V= vision and I am not taking about the interchangeable, sometimes unmemorable cliches that I have seen, what I am talking about is what the manager sees as the future of the team,department etc. Talking about what they picture as a positive future, in turbulent working environment employee need to know that their boss is guiding them to a better place.

A = ability when asking employees to do more, due to changes in the workplace, have you as there manager talked to them about development or a skills gap and empowering them to get the development they need.

M= motivation… There are many theories on this and I have blogged about a few, however, the easiest way to find out what motivates them is ask them, many managers make assumptions about their employees, this can have the opposite of the desired effect.

O= opportunity; whether it is outdated processes, systems, IT or employees getting dragged into other duties that distract them from doing what they are employed to do. It’s your duty as a leader to cut through these distractions to allow the employee to do what they do best.

S= Specific outcomes. Setting expectations / targets whatever you want to call them mean that employee know exactly what they have to do to be a success. Sounds simple however you would be amazed the amount of employees I meet that find it difficult articulate what a good day looks like or their boss changes the goal posts so often that they don’t know what good looks like.

Hope you had a great weekend

Martin