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Cuanto más energizados estén tus colaboradores, mejor performance tendrá el equipo
Título original: The More You Energize Your Coworkers, the Better Everyone Performs
Fuente: Harvard Business Review
Autor: Wayne Baker
The More You Energize Your Coworkers, the Better Everyone Performs
How much energy do you have at work? Do you feel invigorated and engaged or down and disengaged? Either way, the reason might be your coworkers: They are infecting you with their energy, positive or negative.
We “catch” energy through our interactions with people – something called “relational energy”— and it affects our performance at work. This is what my colleagues Bradley Owens, Dana Sumpter, Kim Cameron, and I learned in an article we published earlier this year. We were motivated to do this research because energy is a vital personal and organizational resource, but research on the sources of energy have neglected a source that everyone experiences in everyday life — our relationships with others. In a series of four empirical studies, we sought to establish relational energy as a valid scientific construct and evaluate its impact on employee engagement and job performance.
To understand how this works, think of people in your workplace who buoy you up, who lift your spirits. What do they do? What do they say? Some people are energizing because they give off positive vibes. As an employee in a large company told us about his boss, “She energized me because she loved her job and was in general a very happy person. She always came in with a smile on her face which created a positive atmosphere.” Others energize us because they create genuine connections. In conversations, for example, they devote their full attention and listen carefully.
Does Your Boss Give Off Good Energy?
If you have an energizing boss, chances are that you feel engaged at work. Focusing on relational energy between leaders and members of a large health care organization, we found that the experience of relational energy with a leader increases one’s motivation at work, attention to tasks, and absorption in work activities. This translates into higher work performance. Members of this health care company who experienced relational energy with their leaders were more engaged at work, which then led to higher productivity.
Interactions are energizing in several ways, as Rob Cross, Andrew Parker, and I learned in a series of studies of energy in organizations. They include instances when we create a positive vision, when we contribute meaningfully to a conversation, when people are fully present and attentive, and when we have an interaction that gives us a sense of progress and hope.
You are a source of relational energy as well as a recipient. When you generate relational energy in the workplace, your performance goes up. Rob Cross and I discovered this in research we did on energy mapping, using organizational network analysis to reveal the network of energy in the workplace. The more people you energize, the higher your work performance. This occurs because people want to be around you. You attract talent, and people are more likely to devote their discretionary time to your projects. They’ll offer new ideas, information, and opportunities to you first.
The opposite is also true. If you de-energize others, people won’t go out of their way to work with you or to help you. In the worst case, they might even sabotage you at work.
What can you do to increase relational energy in your workplace? Here are four actions you can take personally and as a leader.
Build High-Quality Connections. By definition, high-quality connections generate relational energy. Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy suggest several ways you can grow and improve high-quality connections, such as taking on a challenge at work with a group of like-minded people. In one case, two operational leaders at Kelly Services, a workforce solutions firm, created a Business Resource Group to promote leadership development and increase employee engagement. As Dutton and Heaphy describe, the leaders focused on building high-quality connections and strengthening social capital as ways to improve the leadership pipeline.
Create Energizing Events. Organize and run events with an explicit focus creating energy, not just delivering content, products, or services. Consider how Zingerman’s, a renowned community of food-related businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, infuses energy in their seminars and events. I often bring groups of executives to their restaurant, the Roadhouse. After dinner, CEO and co-founder Ari Weinzweig or one his managing partners will present on a particular topic, such as visioning, open book management, or the natural laws of business. The content and delivery are fantastic and energizing themselves. But energy goes up another level when a panel of frontline staff come into the room and field questions. They can answer any question, but what matters even more is the energy they exude. They are positive, enthusiastic, and clearly love their work and the organization. The executives leave the event abuzz with energy because it’s so contagious.
Use Tools that Promote a “Giver” Culture. The act of helping someone at work creates energy in the form of positive emotions — the “warm glow” of helping. Receiving help creates energy in the form of gratitude. Gratitude for help received encourages paying it forward and helping others, as Nat Bulkley and I documented in a large-scale study. The Reciprocity Ring, a group-level exercise involving giving and getting help that my spouse Cheryl Baker, CEO of Humax, created, elevates giver behaviors — and energy. In a pilot study Adam Grant and I conducted, we found that participation in the Reciprocity Ring increases positive emotions and decreases negative emotions.
Try Mapping Relational Energy. Organizational network surveys map the invisible network behind the organizational chart—the real way people interact. Some years ago, Rob Cross and I started adding an energy question to the usual set of network questions we asked in our organizational research and consulting. Presenting each respondent with a list of names of others in the organization, we asked, “When you interact with each person, how does it affect your energy?” Responses could range from “very energizing” to “neutral” to “very de-energizing”. The resulting data enabled us to draw relational energy maps of an organization. The results are quite revealing. In a large petro-chemical company, for example, we found a lot of de-energizing relationships — and most of them emanated from the leaders. With this objective map, they could identify where they needed to make positive improvements. Energy maps help you target where to focus on building high-quality connections, creating energizing events, and using tools that create an energizing giver culture.
So if you feel like you have an energy crisis in your organization, the good news is that you can do something about it by focusing on relational energy — the energy we get and give in our daily interactions. Every action and word, no matter how small, matters in boosting productivity and performance.
El balance entre la vida y el trabajo funciona mejor cuando el jefe entiende cómo analizar la performance
Título original: Work-Life Balance Is Easier When Your Manager Knows How to Assess Performance
Fuente: Harvard Business Review
Autor: Scott Behson
Work-Life Balance Is Easier When Your Manager Knows How to Assess Performance
Not long ago, a manager asked me to name the most important work-life benefit for employees. I answered that the most important benefit isn’t a benefit at all. Of course, child care, flexible scheduling, and family leave policies are important, but in my experience the best thing we can do to support working parents (and all employees) is to get better at one of the most basic and poorly executed functions of managers: performance appraisals.
He groaned and admitted that he dreaded doing performance evaluations, and his employees hated them too. He ticked off the usual complaints — how long they take to complete, their subjective nature, the infrequent timing, and so on.
Moreover, he told me that considering the knowledge work his employees performed, it was relatively hard to know how well his people were performing, yet it was relatively easy to observe the quantity of work and of work hours in the office. As a result, “chair time” and “face time” became considerations, even when he knew these shouldn’t be treated as paramount. But because he did not feel confident in identifying performance, he resorted to the easier course of action.
I have to give him credit for his honesty. Too many managers resort to measuring face time instead of actual work performance, but they rarely admit it.
And that’s why the best thing managers can do for all their employees — and especially those facing work-family conflicts — is to do the hard work of actually evaluating performance, not chair time or face time.
When managers do so, they free employees to arrange their work lives so that they can be the most effective. Surprise, surprise: When you focus on measuring face time, you get…face time. But when you actually focus on performance, you get superior performance.
For example, Ryan, LLC has been lauded far and wide (and rightly so) for how they transformed its successful but overly time-intensive workplace into an even more successful firm that now couples its high-performance culture with respect for time flexibility.
It accomplished this transformation with a constellation of changes over a decade, but the central intervention was its new performance evaluation system. Instead of infrequent, subjective evaluations based largely on “time on task,” Ryan now has managers, employees, and teams develop a set of agreed-upon performance metrics that are consistently tracked. As long as these metrics are met and customers and coworkers are happy with their access to employees, managers at Ryan generally do not track office hours. Once Ryan made the change, some employees who had been receiving high ratings by working 70 hours weeks were revealed to have been less productive than many who worked fewer but more efficient hours. Turnover plummeted; satisfaction, engagement, and financial performance soared.
When I laid out all of this for my manager friend, he was interested but daunted. He’s right that not every company can transform the way Ryan did, certainly not in the short run. But some of the changes required don’t require a full-scale overhaul of your company’s performance management system. They’re relatively small changes that many managers can make on their own.
And changing the way we evaluate goes to the very core of good management. Think about how much more competitive your whole organization would be if managers:
- Defined performance in terms of customer satisfaction, core activities, or project completion.
- Regularly held goal-setting and feedback sessions with employees, and used goal attainment as the core of performance evaluation.
- Understood which aspects of employees’ jobs lend themselves to flexible work and which need to be performed at set times in the office.
- Allowed more flexibility in how, when, and where work gets done, while ensuring that enough time is spent at the office to promote communication, collaboration and innovation.
- Gradually allowed more freedom and flexibility employees who perform well and earn trust.
- Recognized that we can maintain or even increase performance standards in professional environments while letting go of exactly how work gets done.
A fitness wristband can track how long you sit in your desk chair. It takes a leader to understand how the work really gets done, and by whom. By implementing some of these changes, we allow all employees to construct schedules that work best for their success at work and at home. This obviously benefits working parents, but all employees also gain — and so will their companies, in terms of engagement and performance.
Si el Midnfulness te hace sentir incómodo, significa que está funcionando
Título original: If Mindfulness Makes You Uncomfortable, It’s Working
Fuente: Harvard Business Review
Autor: Amy Jen Su
If Mindfulness Makes You Uncomfortable, It’s Working
I recently had a conversation with a client named Claire, who shared that her company had been touting the benefits of mindfulness, and she was giving mindfulness a try with a meditation app. But she was frustrated that it wasn’t helping her feel more relaxed — instead, she was actually a bit more agitated of late. While the situation was clearly a source of consternation for Claire, it didn’t mean the meditation app wasn’t working.
Now that mindfulness has hit the mainstream, it’s been defined in a variety of ways: moment-to-moment awareness, being in the here and now, relaxing fully into the present. And somewhere along the way we’ve come to equate mindfulness with “good feeling” emotions such as joy, relaxation, and happiness.
While mindfulness can lead us to experience the good things in life more fully, this only tells half of the mindfulness story. In fact, becoming truly mindful and aware means that we are also able to see, name, and more fully experience things when we are angry, sad, jealous, anxious, vulnerable, or lonely — this, too, is mindfulness.
Therefore, we have to redefine mindfulness as more than feeling good, and instead see it as having an increased capacity to sit with the full spectrum of being human, experiencing it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and learning to be less reactive so that we can make better choices each day.
I told Claire two stories about leaders as a better way of understanding mindfulness and leadership choices.
The first is about a leader named Randy, who is working on elevating himself as a leader. Over the course of the last year, he hired good people and helped them get up to speed. Now he wants to take time to be more strategic in his role and build more visibility for himself and his team, but he admits that he hasn’t made much progress. Sometimes, he says, it just feels like he “can’t help himself,” and he dives into the details instead of delegating or empowering his team.
Then there’s Natalie, who is working on becoming a more patient leader. Over the course of the past year, she received feedback that her hard-changing style rubs others the wrong way. The tone of the feedback suggested that if she didn’t make some measurable changes, she could derail her career. Sometimes, she says, it feels like she “just can’t help herself,” and she lashes out with a negative tone and body language.
For both Randy and Natalie, cultivating mindfulness means being able to see the patterns at play, become less reactive, and make clearer leadership choices. Each took the following steps:
1. “Witness” and track the pattern. Over a period of time, Randy and Natalie observed themselves in action, like a witness without judgment, and logged their observations in more concrete terms.
- What was the trigger when you had an “I just can’t help myself” moment?
- What body sensations did you experience?
- What was the “voice-track” in your mind?
- What was the underlying emotion you experienced?
- What did you do?
For Randy, he began to notice that he felt a pit in his stomach when he wasn’t in his comfort zone of “doing.” He found the corresponding voice-track really tempting: “Randy, wouldn’t it feel good to take care of email or head into the detail here?” Randy discovered that underneath it all was an underlying feeling of vulnerability and a fear of letting go of things he was really good at.
Natalie began to notice that she felt her jaw tighten and her blood pressure rise most acutely when someone on her team didn’t perform. The voice-track was a harsh critic that screamed, “This person is so incompetent! How dare she risk how others perceive me?” As Natalie shared, “What I came to realize was how much I dislike the feeling of being embarrassed. It’s been a big turning point for me to understand why I react the way I do in these situations.”
2. Notice, name, and pause. As Randy and Natalie became more skilled at noticing and naming their body sensations, voice-track, and emotions, they were able to hit the pause button more often. My fellow Paravis managing partner, Pam Krulitz, describes this step in these terms: “In cultivating mindfulness, we learn to not scratch the itch right away.” One of my clients described it as “noticing the initial feeling of discomfort, becoming aware of it, and taking a deep breath to bring things back to the frontal lobe.” And Chade-Meng Tan, author of the book Search Inside Yourself, calls this the moment of “sacred pause.”
When we experience the “sacred pause,” we become less compelled by what simply makes us feel better (e.g., diving into the details, e-mail, that afternoon candy bar), and we feel less compelled to attack, run away, or give in to what makes us feel bad.
This is the “so what” behind having a more regular mindfulness practice. Whether we are deep breathing, sitting in meditation, or just moving mindfully through our day, we are in effect building our capacity to witness our body sensations, voice-tracks, and emotions without reacting. There’s a range of practices — from the informal to the formal — that can help us strengthen this ability:
Less formal things you can do on your own:
- Take one deep breath in between meetings
- Check in with your body
- Commit to doing one activity per day more mindfully
- Meditate for two minutes
More formal practices to try:
- Body-scan meditation (bringing your attention and awareness to different regions of your body, where you experience the sensations in the body without trying to change or react to anything)
- Sitting meditation
- Walking meditation
- Regular body work (e.g., massage, rolfing, etc.)
- Yoga
- Martial arts
For Randy, whenever he noticed the body sensation of having a pit in his stomach, he was less reactive to the corresponding voice-track trying to tempt him. Instead, he used it as a cue to step away from the keyboard and ask himself, “Should I really be doing this task?” For Natalie, whenever she noticed her jaw clenching, she was less reactive to the screaming inner critic voice. She would take a deep breath and say the mantra “peace” to bring herself out of a heated reaction.
3. See more clearly, choose more clearly. It’s when we can see and experience the situation or moment with less reaction — even if we are experiencing anxiety, fear, anger, or sadness — that a more constructive set of choices emerges: Can I reframe this situation? Is there someone I can reach out to for support? Is there a request I need to make here? What is the right thing to do here that preserves my overall integrity, vision, or values, even if it’s the harder choice to make?
For Randy, he realized that he needed to be less hard on himself and build a sound plan of transitioning items to his team while ramping into a more elevated role. Natalie realized that a lot of her interactions were driven by a pattern of needing to prove herself, even though she had the respect and confidence of others in her expertise.
And Claire, who was not feeling relaxed after using her meditation app, discovered that her meditation was bringing forth a set of emotions that she was repressing, thus leaving her feeling agitated. The irony, said Claire, was that she had started using the meditation app in the hope of escaping those feelings.
As Claire became more of an objective witness, she began to see more clearly that she had outgrown her role at work, even though that realization was uncomfortable. She was avoiding dealing with this, and her mindfulness practice was now bringing her closer to the truth.
Instead of running, Claire saw that she now sat at a much more honest, authentic juncture in the road, where choice became more possible: Was it time to have a difficult conversation about her next career steps with the organization? Was it time to create and articulate a vision and game plan for what would come next? What did she want to do, and would she have the courage to lean into it?
Mindfulness is not all gloom and doom, nor is it all sunshine and flowers. With mindfulness, we are just a little less tossed around by running away from or crushing what feels bad. We’re less compelled to indulge in our desires and excesses for what gives us a temporary high. Instead, we see with greater clarity just how blue the sky is on a beautiful day and we see and feel the depths of our hearts being pierced when we’ve experienced a meaningful loss. And somewhere in that fuller human experience, we connect and tap into a deeper source of motivation and choice that is more aligned with our integrity, our values and ethics, and our authentic essence.
Motivación en el trabajo: el sentido de lo que hacemos, nuestra evolución y el reconocimiento
Fuente: La Nación
Autor: Martina Rua
Estamos acostumbrados a ligar instantáneamente la idea del reconocimiento en el trabajo al dinero, pero si miramos más de cerca todo el universo que implica el trabajo en la vida de las personas, por lo general hay bastante más puesto en juego que la búsqueda del reconocimiento económico. Dan Ariely, economista especializado en comportamiento humano, llevó a cabo diversos estudios para probar cómo los desafíos, el sentido, la identidad y el orgullo tienen una importancia protagónica en lo que nos motiva. Algunos de sus hallazgos:
Ver los frutos de nuestro trabajo nos hace más productivos. Para su estudio El hombre buscando sentido, el caso de Legos, Ariely le pidió a dos grupos que crearan una serie de personajes usando Legos. En ambos casos los participaron recibieron dinero decreciente por cada muñequito que armaban. Por el primero, 3 dólares, por el segundo 2,7, y así. Pero mientras que las creaciones del primer grupo se guardaban debajo de la mesa para ser desarmadas al final del juego, las del segundo se desarmaban a medida que las terminaban frente a los ojos de los participantes. Los resultados fueron que el primer grupo hizo en promedio once muñequitos por persona, mientras que en el segundo llegaron a los siete antes de abandonar. Aunque el primer grupo sabía que su trabajo sería desarmado eventualmente, ver su producción alcanzó para marcar una diferencia en su performance.
Cuanto menos sentimos que se aprecia nuestro trabajo, más dinero queremos por él. En otro estudio, el economista trabajó con tres grupos de estudiantes del MIT. A todos se les dio sobres llenos de letras y se les pidió que encontraran pares de letras idénticas. En cada ronda se les ofrecía menos dinero que en la ronda previa por hacerlo. Las personas del primer grupo debían escribir sus nombres en el sobre con las letras y dárselo al investigador que las controlaba y aprobaba con palabras o gestos y las ponía en una pila de papeles. Las personas del segundo grupo no tuvieron que colocar sus nombres y el investigador aceptaba sus sobres y los colocaba en la pila sin mirarlos ni controlarlos. Al tercer grupo, apenas entregaba su sobre con las letras se les tachaba y desaprobaba el trabajo que se colocaba en la pila. ¿Los resultados? El grupo al que se le tachaba su trabajo necesitó el doble de dinero que los del primer grupo para seguir adelante con la tarea. El segundo grupo, cuyo nombre y trabajo fue ignorado, también reclamó el doble de dinero. Ignorar la performance de las personas demostró ser casi tan negativo como anular sus esfuerzos en frente de sus ojos.
En línea con estos resultados, el libro Drive, la sorprendente verdad sobre qué nos motiva, del escritor Daniel Pink, conferencista TED sobre temas relacionados al mundo del trabajo, asegura que el secreto para incrementar la productividad y satisfacción en el mundo de hoy es la honda necesidad que tenemos de ser directores de nuestras vidas, de aprender y crear cosas nuevas y de ser cada vez mejores y hacer cosas que impacten en el mundo que nos rodea. Pink expone la dicotomía entre lo que se sabe científicamente y cómo se comportan las empresas. Desde su mirada, la idea de la zanahoria que hay que alcanzar en la punta de un palo funcionó para las necesidades del siglo XX, pero es el camino errado para motivar gente para los desafíos de hoy.
Son tres los principales elementos que derivan en una verdadera y sostenible motivación. Autonomía, entendida como el deseo de dirigir nuestras propias vidas; la maestría, como la urgencia de ser cada vez mejores sobre algo que realmente importe, y el propósito, que se refiere al anhelo de hacer lo que hacemos en servicio de una causa mayor a nosotros mismos. Entonces, ¿qué nos motiva realmente en el trabajo?
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