Coaching

Don’t Underestimate Others’ Willingness to Help

September 6, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The biggest barrier to generosity may not be getting people to give but people’s reluctance to ask for what they need.

Mostly, people enjoy helping (but not so much that they can get burned out by their own goodness.) They want to give and be recognized for their giving.

Reciprocity Rings - Don't Underestimate Others' Willingness to Help

People can’t give when they don’t know what others need

According to the University of Michigan’s Wayne Baker, a solution to the awkwardness of asking for help is the notion of reciprocity rings (or reciprocity bulletin boards.) Boeing, Citigroup, Estee Lauder, General Motors, Google, IBM, Novartis, UPS, and others have implemented informal networking groups to facilitate asking—and giving.

In All You Have to Do Is Ask (2020,) Baker explains that these onetime or recurring networking meetings have individuals explain one by one the specific issues they’re facing. The rest of the group taps their knowledge, resources, wisdom, or networks to help the requestor. In a sense, a reciprocity ring is an expanded version of the “daily stand-up,” “daily huddle,” or “scrum meeting” that many teams use to talk over what they’re each working on and where they need help.

Wharton School’s Adam Grant popularized the concept of reciprocity rings in his book Give and Take (2014.) He argues that reciprocity rings normalize asking and giving. They build trust and relationships by creating new and fast connections where they may not exist otherwise.

A charitable mood sets in—reciprocity rings engender altruism.

Helping others without the expectation to have that help reciprocated is the foundation of altruism. A reciprocity ring cultivates an environment of giving. According to All You Have to Do Is Ask, a reciprocity ring helps people overcome their hesitations and fears about asking for help because everyone’s making a request. Baker cites research that the takers in the groups tend to give three times more than they get. Over time, people tend to make more significant requests.

Idea for Impact: Assemble an informal network and facilitate opportunities to ask for and help one another. It’s an easy and effective way to build connections and strengthen the spirit of the community.

Take a cue from Bay Area career coach Marty Nemko, who organizes his own informal reciprocity ring. Nemko’s “board of advisors” meets for an hour every month, and each person talks about a thorny personal—or professional—problem they’re facing and requests input from others.

Change Must Come from Within

July 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Change Must Come from Within If you want to become the type of person who wants to change, you must become the type of person who embodies that change repeatedly. You must deliberately weave the change into your sense of identity. Seth Godin notes in The Practice (2020,)

If you want to get in shape, it’s not difficult. Spend an hour a day running or at the gym. Do that for six months or a year. Done.

That’s not the difficult part.

The difficult part is becoming the kind of person who goes to the gym every day.

When you use your actions to drive your identity, you’ll naturally become confident in your ability to make fundamental decisions that sustain—and enhance—who you are.

Idea for Impact: Habits stick when they respond to your sense of identity. Change your identity, change how you want to be seen, and you’ll change your life.

Commitment, Not Compliance

July 12, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

For some managers, fear is a dirty little secret … they use it when they are either unwilling or unable to persuade employees to work together to achieve goals.

Stop Leading Through Fear---Gain Commitment, Not Compliance Fear gets results but it does so at a cost. Fear is saps enthusiasm and stifles constructive deliberation.

Step back and work with your employee to determine performance objectives, goals, and priorities. Then, let your employee translate those objectives into tasks and determine how best to perform the task.
Don’t interfere excessively or micromanage. Don’t insist that there’s only “one best way” to do the job. Trust employees to make the right choices to reach the end result.
Don’t be a pushover, either. Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be. Managers can be strong without instilling fear. Be steadfast and unrelenting in your quest for getting results.
Let the employee customize the job to reflect her strengths and weaknesses to the extent possible, without compromising the core contributions expected of her role. Allowing the maximum possible use of your employees’ motivated abilities to achieve targeted results will not only use strengths to the maximum, but also drives intrinsic job satisfaction.
Take the time to get to know each employee’s unique set of talents. Try to dole out the available work to best match your employees’ talents.
Share the glory. Giving others a chance to claim credit is an easy, and effective, way to get results. As Dale Carnegie wrote masterful self-help manual How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936,) be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” Learn to overlook small mistakes, but address problems before they escalate.

Idea for Impact: There is potentially no more powerful motivator than the intrinsic satisfaction that an employee could gain from autonomy under structure, and from using one’s motivated talents. Find ways to entice commitment from your employees. Don’t forcing compliance by virtue of authority.

The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails

July 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Weight Watchers (WW) was born from an unmet personal need, as is true with many businesses. Founder Jean Nidetch had struggled with her weight all her life. In her late 30s, she went to a city-run obesity clinic in New York and finally lost the weight she wanted.

Jean Nidetch, Founder of Weight Watchers (WW) Then, when her resolve to maintain a healthy weight wavered, Nidetch recognized that losing weight is easier if she weren’t doing it by herself. Dieting is more than “calories in, calories out.” Eating the right number of calories and exercising doesn’t always work. It isn’t the occasional overindulgence that creates obesity; it’s the steady over-eating—often in surprisingly small amounts.

Helping People Change Their Behavior through Support and Motivation

According to Memoir of a Successful Loser: The Story of Weight Watchers (1970,) Nidetch realized that what people struggling to keep a diet program needed was one another. Dieters needed a space to talk openly about their diet struggles and became answerable to one another.

Determined to stay on track, Nidetch started with the diet that the obesity clinic had given her. She mimeographed it and handed it out to a group of six overweight but determined friends that she invited to her apartment in the Queens. At the first meeting, Nidetch confessed to an addiction to cookies. Her friends sympathized and shared their own calorific woes. Everyone had a good time, and the group agreed to meet the following week again.

Nidetch’s pattern of programming and social support spread quickly. Meetings grew in size. When Nidetch ran out of chairs, she shifted the sessions to a formal assembly room. Weight Watchers was thus born.

The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas 'DIY Dieting' Fails

Group Cheerleaders Can Go a Long Way toward Keeping Motivation Alive

Weight Watchers has outlasted many fad diets, and it continues to be a popular program. People go to Weight Watchers because it works. The program makes its members think of the regimen not as a diet but as a different way of living.

Collectively, members feel positively about their desire to lose weight. They offer support and grant forgiveness for failures to lose weight. Members aren’t thinking of restrictions; they’re thinking of flexibility and abundance. If they tend to be foodies, they don’t need to stop enjoying food.

Weight Watchers groups meet weekly. (7,000 coaches run the meetings.) Each member contributes. Everyone feels invested in accomplishments. The group celebrates as one.

The robust process of celebrating and retelling success stories reinforces the shared goal of pushing limits. In addition, the interaction helps with accountability and encourages participants to stick with their goals.

Idea for Impact: Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better.

Shared interests get us, humans, to show up and be present. We need structure, tools, and support to be successful. We need a community because the fellowship of others with a shared empowering purpose gives us the accountability and inspiration that motivates us to lose weight—or bring about any lasting change.

Never Hire a Warm Body

June 17, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Warm Body Syndrome: Never Hire a Warm Body

If you have a position open and you’re having a hard time filling it, don’t compromise and hire a warm body. Certainly not to fill an open spot within a specific time frame so as to not risk losing your team’s headcount.

Alas, many warm-body hires do not last very long. So, until you have a candidate who fully meets the job’s requirements, don’t fill the position.

Rather than jumping at every job seeker to cross your path, be methodical and follow a clear and consistent approach.

Take your time during the hiring process. Needing to fill the position yesterday is not an excuse for shortchanging the process.

Idea for Impact: Don’t hire quickly and, thus, poorly because you need a warm body. You and your team are better off working overtime than cleaning up the messes generated by someone who didn’t meet your requirements fully.

Hire wisely; nothing is more important.

The Difference between Directive and Non-Directive Coaching

May 13, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Difference between Directive and Non-Directive Coaching When coaching, many managers’first impulse is to jump into solution mode and fix problems by recommending solutions. The advice is often framed as, “I’ve seen this condition before, and you should do X. That’s what worked for me when I was working at company Y.”

The Directive Coaching Style is suitable when your employee doesn’t have the time, skills, temperament, or patience to resolve her problem.

The Non-Directive Coaching Style, in contrast, encourages the employee to think through her problem and develop her own solution. This coaching style takes more time but is usually more effective, especially if the situation is complicated.

Suppose the problem presents a skill or competence that the employee can learn. In that case, a good coach nurtures the employee by challenging her to mull over the situation objectively. Merely supplying the right solution is wasted if she doesn’t understand it or internalize it well enough.

The most effective coaches I know tend to dwell less on the “what’s to be done” and more on instilling the “how to think about.”

Idea for Impact: When offering advice, steer the thought process. Don’t dictate the outcome. Employees are more likely to be invested in the solutions they come up with.

Create a Diversity and Inclusion Policy

April 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The moral and business cases for diversity are well known—a diverse and inclusive workplace earns deeper trust and more commitment from their employees.

Create a Diversity and Inclusion Policy Having a diversity and inclusion policy is simply the right thing to do—leaders have to make their values and intentions clear.

As a company, you’re not legally required to have a written diversity and inclusion policy. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to create and actively use one.

Diversity and inclusion are ongoing initiatives—not one-off training. (Sadly, diversity classes are sometimes just a tactic for reducing employee lawsuits.) A policy encourages your employees to treat others equally with civility and decency and helps managers value employees for their strengths.

In many discrimination claims, employers may have a defense if they can show that they took all reasonable steps to deter discrimination. A comprehensive policy and recent appropriate training can help employers distance themselves from liability for acts such as harassment by an individual perpetrator employed by your company.

A policy also demonstrates that your company takes its legal and moral responsibilities towards being a diverse and inclusive employer earnestly.

Idea for Impact: A strong diversity and inclusion policy can help your company embed good practices—not only across your organization but also throughout your supply chains, including the customers and the communities your company serves.

Overtraining: How Much is Too Much?

February 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The amount of practice on an instrument is the most significant contributor to musical performance success. However, an obsessive orientation toward practice can burn you out and make you stiff.

Rather than carving out more time in the day for practice, celebrated musicians (not unlike specialist athletes and chess masters) tend to excel by making modest levels of practice more productive.

Itzhak Perlman on why practicing too much is bad Like all great teachers, virtuoso violinist Itzhak Perlman preaches not too much practice:

When kids ask me for an autograph, I always sign my name and then write, ‘Practise slowly!’ That’s my message to them. If you practise slowly, you forget slowly. If you practise very quickly, maybe it will work for a day or two and then it will go away, because it has not been absorbed by your brain. It’s like putting a sponge in the water. If you let it stay there it retains a lot of water.

There are a lot of people who believe that the more you practise the greater the improvement, but I don’t believe that. Again I cite the sponge example. When you put a sponge in the water, after a while it reaches saturation point. Keeping it in there for any longer won’t help, as it’s absorbed as much as it can.

Choosing to focus on quality over quantity of practice helps musicians free up time for score study, concentrated listening, and other learning activities away from their instruments. All these ultimately make practice more effective.

Idea for Impact: Mindless repetition is ineffective. To reach the highest levels of expertise, focus on the quality of practice. Skill formation relies on consistency and deliberate practice. Under a mentor’s guidance, a consistent and intentional practice can bring about clarity and make you observe yourself and open for feedback.

How to Own Your Future

January 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Self Directed Learning: How to Own Your Future Work seems to be shifting faster than ever. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman provides a particularly emblematic example of the profound changes in the way people work and the way organizations design jobs and work environments:

Work is being disconnected from jobs, and jobs and work are being disconnected from companies, which are increasingly becoming platforms. A great example of this is what’s ha ppening in the cab business. Traditional local cab companies own cars and have employees who have a job; they drive those cars. But, now they’re competing with Uber, which owns no cars, has no employees, and just provides a platform of work that brings together ride-needers and ride-providers.

Adaptivity via Self-Directed Learning

Dramatic economic, social, and technological changes necessitate professionals at all levels to be almost continuously trained and re-trained just to keep abreast of all facets of working life.

The career implication of this continuous transformation is the increasing need for ongoing learning. You’ll have to equip yourself to stay ahead of changes. In other words, you’ll need a growth mindset to learn, apply, reorient, and keep learning.

More Will Be Now on You

You’ll need to be self-directed. You’ll need to take the initiative and responsibility for the learning process. You’ll need to recognize training needs and choose how you’ll meet these needs rather than rely on your organization to tell you what to learn and how to do it. The smarter organizations out there are enabling and promoting individual choice and self-directed and self-determined learning.

What will set successful professionals apart in the future is that they take responsibility for their continuous learning. They proactively explore what they may be interested in and what the future will demand instead of indifferently waiting for options to present themselves.

Idea for Impact: Own Your Learning

Set your sights on a long career with multiple stages, each involving ongoing training and re-skilling. If you want to achieve career greatness, you will likely find your current skill sets obsolete in less than five years without self-directed learning.

Develop a growth mindset that’ll help you grow, expand, evolve, and change.

How to Manage Overqualified Employees

September 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Manage Overqualified Employees Some employees are overeducated and overqualified—or think they are—for the jobs they are doing.

Such employees will find their roles not demanding enough to keep them occupied. They may not feel fully engaged in those tasks and responsibilities that they judge “beneath” them.

Toffee-nosed employees can create team tension. They can develop negative attitudes, such as a sense of entitlement about their skills (remember the FedEx “Even an MBA Can Do It” advert?) or resentment through boredom. That frustration and disillusion can ripple out and bring everyone else in the team down.

Here are two guidelines for managing overqualified employees:

To keep overqualified employees engaged, allow more autonomy, and assign them more creative assignments. Delegate longer-term projects or have them collaborate with other teams within the company. Though, be mindful that this may create even more resentment in the team towards the perceived overqualified employees. Discuss with the team why some people have been chosen for those special assignments.
Work together with the human resources staff and help the overqualified employees chart out individualized paths for climbing the corporate ladder and reach their potential. Find ways to help them acquire new skills and get exposure to other parts of the organization. Coach them to apply for roles that possibly do not yet warrant their experience and expertise. Expand their leadership capacity by assigning training and mentoring responsibilities.

Idea for Impact: Nurturing and keeping overqualified employees can create a strong foundation for tomorrow’s management team.

Coaching

People can’t give when they don’t know what others need

A charitable mood sets in—reciprocity rings engender altruism.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Helping People Change Their Behavior through Support and Motivation

Group Cheerleaders Can Go a Long Way toward Keeping Motivation Alive

Idea for Impact: Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Adaptivity via Self-Directed Learning

More Will Be Now on You

Idea for Impact: Own Your Learning

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?