MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP BULLETIN - JUNE 2021 - YOUR LIBRARY IS KEEPING YOU INFORMED
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KNOWLEDGE &
INFORMATION FAST
TRACK
YOUR LIBRARY IS KEEPING YOU INFORMED
MANAGEMENT
AND
LEADERSHIP
BULLETIN
JUNE 2021
In This Issue...
4 Ways to Manage Your Energy More Effectively
High-Performing Teams Start with a Culture of Shared Values
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Kindness at Work – three
research backed benefits
The Hazards of Being the Boss’s Favourite
How to Ask for Help at Work
When You’re Stuck Working with a Slacker
For more information about this newsletter please contact
Laura Sims, Electronic Services and Outreach Librarian
laura.sims2@nhs.net/ 56688
4 Ways to Manage Your Energy More Effectively
by Elizabeth Grace Saunders on the Harvard Business Review blog
When faced with new goals, it’s easy to jump in with both feet. But
having staying power to sustain this initial energy is difficult. Many
of us may eventually disengage, while others pushing themselves so
hard they burn out. Still others might vacillate between the two.
The key to success isn’t starting strong, it’s staying strong. You need
to self-regulate. First, set upper and lower boundaries for what you
need to do to make progress on a goal in a specified amount of
time, like a day or a week. Second, understand how you tend to
work — if you work hard and fast to the point of exhaustion, work
slowly and find yourself scurrying to the finish line, or somewhere
in between — and make adjustments accordingly. Third, building
time for rest and recovery based on your work tendency. Finally,
create breathing room in your schedule for dedicated work.
High-Performing Teams Start with a Culture of
Shared Values
by Greg Satell and Cathy Windschitl on the Harvard Business Review
blog
Managers will face unprecedented challenges over the next decade.
Not surprisingly, many leaders will choose to focus on the strategic
aspects of change. Just as important, however, is driving a skills-
based transformation that can create teams diverse enough to be
vibrant and innovative, while remaining inclusive and cohesive
enough to be effective. That’s easier said than done.
Decades of research show that diverse teams, while often high
performing, also encounter obstacles and face resistance. Managers
who attempt to reshape their workforce without first
acknowledging the challenges of difference risk getting mired in
conflict and acrimony, which can undermine effectiveness.
What we have found in our work advising some of the world’s most
high-performing firms on how to accelerate transformation and
drive growth is that successful leaders strive to identify shared
values and build change upon common ground. This means that
managers need to not only evaluate technical skills, but also to
clearly communicate their organization’s shared mission and hire
people who will be inspired to dedicate their talents to it. Read the
article for more details.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Kindness at Work
– three research backed benefits
by Ovul Sezer, Kelly Nault, and Nadav Klein on the Harvard Business
Review blog
Practicing kindness by giving compliments and recognition has the
power to transform our remote workplace.
The Benefits of Kindness:
A commitment to be kind can bring many important benefits. First,
and perhaps most obviously, practicing kindness will be immensely
helpful to our colleagues. Being recognized at work helps reduce
employee burnout and absenteeism, and improves employee well-
being, Gallup finds year after year in its surveys of U.S. workers.
Receiving a compliment, words of recognition, and praise can help
individuals feel more fulfilled, boost their self-esteem, improve
their self-evaluations, and trigger positive emotions, decades of
research have shown. These positive downstream consequences of
compliments make intuitive sense: Praise aligns with our naturally
positive view of ourselves, confirming our self-worth.
Second, practicing kindness helps life feel more meaningful. For
example, spending money on others and volunteering our time
improves wellbeing, bringing happiness and a sense of meaning to
life, research finds. Being kind brings a sense of meaning because it
involves investing in something bigger than ourselves. It shapes
both how others perceive us — which improves our reputation —
and how we view ourselves. We draw inferences about who we are
by observing our own behaviour, and our acts of kindness make us
believe that we have what it takes to be a good person. In the
remote workplace, where cultivating moments of joy is difficult,
this may be a particularly important benefit that translates into
long-term job satisfaction.
Third, as we found in a new set of studies, giving compliments can
make us even happier than receiving them. We paired up
participants and asked them to write about themselves and then
talk about themselves with each other. Next, we asked one of them
to give an honest compliment about something they liked or
respected about the other participant after listening to them.
Consistently, we found that giving compliments actually made
people happier than receiving them. Surprisingly, though, people
were largely unaware of the hedonic benefits of being kind.
Why does giving compliments boost our happiness to such a
degree? A key ingredient of well-being that we’ve sorely lacked
during the pandemic plays a role: social connection. In our studies,
we found that giving compliments engendered a stronger social
connection than receiving compliments because giving them
encouraged people to focus on the other person. Sure, receiving a
compliment feels great, but making a thoughtful, genuine
compliment requires us to think about someone else — their
mental state, behaviour, personality, thoughts, and feelings.
Thinking about other people is often a precondition to feeling
connected to them. In this way, compliments can become a social
glue, enhancing connections and positivity in relationships, and
making us happier.
Nonetheless, people are often
hesitant to give compliments. Why?
The idea of approaching someone
and saying something nice can trigger
social anxiety and discomfort, recent
research by Erica Boothby and
Vanesa Bohns shows. For this reason,
we assume people will feel
uncomfortable and be bothered by
receiving a compliment, when the
opposite is true.In addition to these psychological barriers, working remotely has
added more structural barriers to random acts of kindness,
compliments, and recognition. Before the pandemic, organizations
often recognized employees through formal programs, while
serendipitous encounters could easily generate a simple thank you
or words of praise. By contrast, today’s Zoom meetings tend to
follow strict agendas that leave no room for any other topic, let
alone compliments.
Organizations benefit from actively fostering kindness. In
workplaces where acts of kindness become the norm, the spill over
effects can multiply fast. When people receive an act of kindness,
they pay it back, research shows — and not just to the same person,
but often to someone entirely new. This leads to a culture of
generosity in an organization. In a landmark study analysing more
than 3,500 business units with more than 50,000 individuals,
researchers found that acts of courtesy, helping, and praise were
related to core goals of organizations. Higher rates of these
behaviours were predictive of productivity, efficiency, and lower
turnover rates. When leaders and employees act kindly towards
each other, they facilitate a culture of collaboration and innovation.
To read the full article click HERE.
The Hazards of Being the Boss’s
Favourite
by Rebecca Knight on Harvard Business
Review blog
There are clear benefits to being your
boss’s favourite — you get choice
assignments, extra attention, and inside
information on what’s happening with the
organization. But...that special treatment comes at a cost!
Your peers may resent you, and it’s not good for team morale. So, as
the star employee, you must strive to help your boss see the value
and contributions of your fellow colleagues. You might, for
instance, send an email to your boss detailing a specific colleague’s
work on a big presentation (and CC that colleague, of course).
Privately, you might also ask your boss to recognize a particular
employee in the next team meeting and thank that person for all
their recent hard work. Your goal: to encourage your boss to spread
the love and allow your team members to see that you’re using
your status to shine a spotlight on others.
To read the full article click HERE.
How to Ask for Help at Work
by Gorick Ng on the Harvard Business
Review blog
Putting in a bit of extra legwork when
asking for help can make a big difference
in your productivity, not to mention your
reputation. To make the best impression
possible, first confirm that your question
is worth asking. Once you have a
question that makes sense to ask, the
next step is to identify the least
disruptive — and therefore most
effective — way to approach other
people. When it comes to asking your
question, style can be as important as
substance. Don’t just ask your question;
share all the hard work you’ve done to
help yourself before involving other
people.When You’re Stuck Working with a Slacker
by Rebecca Knight on the Harvard Business Review blog
Having a colleague who makes mistakes, misses deadlines, or just
plain slacks off is more than just a workaday frustration; it can also
negatively affect your job — and even your career.
How can you keep your colleague’s underperformance from
dragging you down? Focus on your protecting your professional
reputation. If you and this colleague are collectively responsible for
producing elements of a project, make sure expectations and roles
are clearly defined. A paper trail increases accountability. (It also
ensures you get credit for your results.) Bringing your boss into
these conversations ought to motivate and incentivize the
weak link to do better.
In addition, look for ways to reduce your interdependence on this
particular person. Ask your manager for individual assignments and
challenges to take on. Your goal is to demonstrate your competence
and give your boss another way to evaluate you.You can also read
