ENCORE! 2.5 INSIGHTS

Article by Steven K. Haught, MBA If you know everything there is to know, then you can take a pass on this article and move on to something more to your liking. Or… maybe your curiosity will get the best of you and you will stick around and read.  After that, who knows what might happen to you. Let's talk about the underlying attributes of genuine effective leadership. What causes a company to experience success?  Is it the leader's brilliance, or the leader's impact on the people that surround him or her?  Impact can of course be interrupted many ways. Quite often startup cultures, particularly tech companies, gets caught up in the bravado of “crushing”, “disrupting”, “paradigm-shifting”, or “becoming the next unicorn.”  Success is a heady business.  Anyone who has experienced this kind of adrenaline knows what I am talking about.   Very quickly and almost without awareness on the part of the leaders, especially the founder, the company quickly rises t

Real leadership means creating the future, but who has the time? Senior management has to manage the business for profit, yet decision-making for day-to-day stability can stifle new ideas and development.  Many companies, particularly in professional services, have deep expertise beyond the management group, but these staff are often excluded from innovation teams and become more accustomed to taking orders than breaking molds.  Creativity and job enthusiasm suffer, and a critical need goes unaddressed. How to disrupt the stagnation and tap into this huge capacity? The common solution is to rely on strategic planning. This is essential, but only goes so far, setting out an overall road map but not filling in the detail of how to get there. It gives management a chance to feel they are leading the charge and will discuss with the teams so they have a “voice.” But it often has a top-down feel, which for staff can mean a requirement rather than an opportunity. Cascadi

By Steven K. Haught, MBA Worrying is a huge distraction. It may pretend to be helpful in organizing, prioritizing and getting things done, but in truth it distracts us from helping others.  Worry saps our joy and does nothing to fix a situation – we can solve problems more energetically and effectively with a light mind of patience.  After months of fear, isolation, soaring unemployment and uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the U.S. Census Bureau estimates one-third of Americans are anxious about the future. Worry produces stress and uncertainty about things beyond our vision, and together they overwhelm us with anxiety. COVID-19 has produced not only a health epidemic, but also an anxiety epidemic: Once we thought we were invincible; now we feel fatigue as we ponder our own future Once we sprang out of bed because we had things that needed to be done; now we crawl to our home office with a sense of resignatio

Article by The Hechinger Report With a degree no longer enough, job candidates are told to prove their skills in tests Instead of relying on credentials, more employers want applicants to show their stuff Among the many frustrations ahead for millions of Americans thrown out of work by the pandemic is one that may surprise them: To get a new job, it’s increasingly likely they will have to take a test. As the number of candidates balloons while health risks make it hard for hiring managers to meet with them in person, a trend toward “pre-hiring assessments” — already under way before Covid-19 — is getting a huge new push. With so many applicants, “you need filters,” said Richard Price, a research fellow at the Christensen Institute, which studies innovation. “You’re creating a quasi-audition for jobs.” The recession and health crisis is speeding momentum for job tests that, before the pandemic, was being driven by more than just logistical considerations.

By Steven K. Haught, MBA One of the major struggles that employers  are experiencing with their workforce is poor morale or declining attitudes. This is a growing challenge for leaders as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause high levels of employee stress about the future. Part of an employee’s attitude is shaped by environmental factors such as work conditions, external pressures, and corporate culture. But what seems more significant are psychological factors, particularly the employee’s general outlook on life. If someone is an optimist, they are more likely to have a better attitude about their work than a pessimist, and they are likely more productive.  Unfortunately, employers rarely think to train their workforce on how to be more optimistic.  It is not impossible to train a team to be generally more optimistic and experts in behavioral science tell us how it can be done. So rather than complaining about your team’s morale or attitude, why not give them t