Right Attitudes

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Lilies and Leeches

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Lilies and Leeches: Surround Yourself with Those Who Elevate You You may have heard of the notion of lilies and leeches. The lilies are the people—and situations—that bring out the best in you. The leeches just grind you down.

Learn to say ‘no’ to relationships or situations that don’t work for you. Life’s too short to waste time on anything that can suck your happiness and energy. Avoid those emotional leeches, productivity leeches, and financial leeches.

Idea for Impact: A little-cited key to a rewarding life: choose to surround yourself with those who elevate you. With those who are caring, supportive, and nonjudgmental, and who make you feel loved, appreciated, and respected.

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Hooked on Feeling Needed?

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Hooked on Feeling Needed: Helicopter Parenting Fosters Failure If, like many people, you just can’t say ‘no,’ consider if you’re hooked on feeling needed.

Take a hard, long look at yourself and examine if you unwittingly encourage—even need—people to come to you for every little thing.

Do you find affirmation in feeling needed? Do you try to do too much for others? Faced with an unpleasant task, do you look to turn our attention elsewhere? Do others’ interruptions offer reasons to do what you needn’t do and excuses to avoid doing what you’re supposed to do?

Idea for Impact: The greatest gift you can give those who need you is carving out time for your own critical tasks so you can be available when they really need you.

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How Not to Handle a Bad Boss

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How Not to Handle a Bad Boss Demanding bosses come in an assortment of guises: idealists, megalomaniacs, overbearing tyrants, windbags, windbags, narcissists, micromanagers, and so on. And you’ll work for some at various stages in your career.

But no matter the boss type, attaching labels like demanding or overbearing can eventually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The moment you label someone as problematic, you’ve made them more challenging to work with because you’ll no longer give this person the benefit of the doubt. You’ll not relate with them on a productive level.

Idea for Impact: Focus instead on recognizing the boss’s specific behaviors. Calibrate yourself to match your boss’s style, and build a strategic liaison founded on expectations for yourself and the relationship.

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Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

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Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth? Take any corporate scandal or the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and you’ll find lower-ranking voices that tried to be heard within these organizations to prevent or minimize the consequences of the excesses or the accidents.

Some leaders are too isolated from reality and establish an “all’s-good” guise whereby anything other than affirmative becomes an undesirable—unwelcome even—answer to a performance-related question. Such leaders foster a “good-news culture,” where any truth-teller or devil’s advocate is quickly dismissed. Queries such as the cursory “Is everything okay?” elicit information-free, non-answers like “yes” and “great!”

When leaders are disconnected from reality, they become incontestably right. Employees know the rule of the game is to say what’s safe to say. To not tell the truth. To tell the leader just what she wants to hear. Employees would instead go with the flow rather than speak truth to power.

Consequently, business pressures often lead to shortcuts that go overlooked. Risk is normalized. Leaders who cannot tap into the truth get blindsided when the problems blow up because they didn’t nip the problems in the bud. Leaders have only themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Idea for Impact: Insightful leadership isn’t about the privilege of position but the privilege of information flowing upwards. Wise leaders dare to seek information they don’t want to hear. They know how to ask the right questions, look for revealing details, and set up a culture of openness that makes it easy for employees to tell the truth.

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Tips for Working for a Type-A Boss

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Type-A bosses tend to accomplish great things, at least short-term. But their high intensity and impatience could make them hard to work for.

Tips for Working for a Type-A Boss If you’re more of a laid-back employee, realize that most of the time, Type-A’s intensity isn’t about you. It’s the way she relates to the world around her. Type-A is what Type-A does.

Here’s how to deal with the overly amped-up style of the Type-A boss:

  • Speak up. Do your homework and anticipate needs/wants. Be proactive and take the initiative on everything. Bring solutions, not problems. If you disagree with something, communicate directly.
  • If nothing you do seems perfect enough for your boss, don’t assume the worst and put your guard up. Be more receptive to evaluation. If you’re constantly being challenged to add “one more thing,” seek specific feedback on how she’d like you to refine your work.
  • Set boundaries on what she can expect from you. Ask for clear performance goals. With Type-As, it’s always about them; you can’t hold yourself accountable for their personality. When it gets tough, try not to take it personally. Ask for what you need, but choose your battles wisely.

Idea for Impact: One of the best ways to handle a Type-A person is to try to be Type-A yourself. You don’t have to morph into an ego-driven jerk, but try to be more organized and keep on top of everything.

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  5. The Good of Working for a Micromanager

Don’t Manage with Fear

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Stop Leading Through Fear---Gain Commitment, Not Compliance The ability to rouse fear has forever been an essential tool of management. Fear can be an effective mobilization tool in the short term. But fear breeds complicity, not commitment.

Instead of fear-based tactics, try soft power. Build trust and gain influence using these methods.

  1. Develop an inspiring vision. Work hard to follow through on implementing that vision and celebrate even little accomplishments along the way.
  2. Communicate expectations. Ask, “How can I help you do your job better?” Follow up. No need to keep everything too close to the vest. You needn’t tell everything you know, but what you say and do has to be true.
  3. Solve problems quickly. Push for results. Set aside some time for review and create options or actions that are apt for your team’s situation. Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be.

Idea for Impact: Don’t take the fear approach with employees. With motivation, fear works—up to a point. Understand how your people view your leadership style and ensure your behavior doesn’t cross the line between pushing them hard and pushing them away.

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  3. Listen and Involve
  4. To Micromanage or Not?
  5. Avoid Control Talk

How are You: Always Have to Say ‘Good’

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Don't ask 'How are you?' if you're not going to listen with genuine respect and interest

“How are you?” is usually meant less as an actual question and more a greeting-on-autopilot—a casual call-and-response.

The unwritten rule of conversation is that you’re expected to reply with nothing more than a declaration of utter satisfaction with life.

People aren’t usually interested in hearing the real answer. Responding with a “Well, to be honest, I’ve been kind of down today. Had a bad day at work” could be a faux pas. You aren’t supposed to burden every interlocutor with your situation, particularly with people who aren’t close.

So “how are you?” isn’t a bad thing to say at all—most of the time. But, there’re occasions, readable with empathic awareness, when you shouldn’t ask someone how their day is going unless you’re going to listen to their response with genuine respect and interest.

Idea for Impact: Showing that you care about people can do wonders, but if you don’t care, don’t feign that you do—people can see through it.

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What to Do When Your Friend Becomes Your Boss

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What to Do When Your Friend Becomes Your Boss Sure, there’re many examples of the double-dynamic working sufficiently well. But the friend-and-boss/employee relationship implies a power structure that complicates every aspect of your friend’s jurisdiction over you—answerability, promotions, raises and bonuses, vacations, desirable assignments and implied favors, and managerial feedback.

The boss-employee relationship comes with complications and tensions that hitherto didn’t exist. The perimeters of professional associations are more pronounced than between friends. When things don’t go how you expect, you’ll sense the subordination and betrayal.

When a close friend becomes your boss, avoid the complications, awkwardness, and potential for the relationship to sour. Choose which mutually exclusive relationship element is more significant to you—friendship or your job. Have a candid conversation with your boss and clear the air regarding your choice. Delineation will beget immense relief.

Idea for Impact: Friendship and managerial relationships simply don’t mix.

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What Most People Get Wrong About Focus

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'Choose Wonder Over Worry' by Amber Rae (ISBN 0385491743) In Choose Wonder Over Worry (2018) self-help author Amber Rae recalls novelist Elizabeth Gilbert’s interaction with a wise older lady who was helping Gilbert with her struggles as a writer:

Lady: “What are you willing to give up in order to have the life you keep saying you want?”

Gilbert: “You’re right—I need to start saying no to things I don’t want to do.”

Lady: “No, it’s much harder than that. You need to learn to start saying no to things you _do_ want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life, and you don’t have time and energy for everything.”

This anecdote is such a powerful illustration of how saying ‘no’ is so much easier when you’re clear about your priorities.

Saying 'no' is so much easier when you're clear about your priorities That’s what focus really is—saying ‘no’ to things you’d like to do so that you can free up your time to focus on the pursuits that truly matter—even tasks you have to do, even if they don’t energize and excite you.

Idea for Impact: Setting boundaries isn’t always easy, but it’s essential to establish an overall sense of well-being. Every ‘no’ is a ‘yes’ to something else.

  • Don’t find any excuse to say ‘yes’ to what shouldn’t be done.
  • Don’t find any reason to say ‘no’ to what should be done.

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Learning from Bad Managers

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Learning from Bad Managers It’s always nice to have great bosses who’ll teach you many things the easy way. However, you’ll have a boss who’s bad for you at some stage in your career. Bad bosses come in all forms: tyrants, abrasive, unprincipled, insensitive, indecisive, inconsistent, unfair, uncaring, arrogant, insensitive, quick-tempered, manipulative, apathetic, and so on.

If you’re perceptive, you can learn more from these bad examples than you’ll from the great bosses you’ll work for. Remember the axiom: “No one is totally worthless; you can always serve as a bad example.”

When you have a bad boss, ask yourself, what things about this boss will you commit to never doing? Make a list and refer to it occasionally. Avoiding doing these things will help you be a better boss—and be a positive role model for others.

Idea for Impact: Bad bosses can become useful teachers precisely because they provide some of the best lessons in what not to do that you’ll ever be offered. Take it upon yourself to never be like your bad boss.

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