You Stressed? Take Control! [with Download]
Leaders, Has stress become your way of life? Do you need pressure to perform and feel motivated to do your best? Guess what – when you constantly run in emergency mode, your mind and body will pay the price. Stress is a normal physical reply. It is the body’s protective reaction to any change that requires adjustment or response. Stress generally helps you stay focused, energetic, and alert. In emergency situations, stress can save your life. A stress response also helps you rise to meet challenges. Beyond a certain point, however, stress starts causing major damage to your health, your mood, your productivity, your relationships, and your quality of life. How do you recognize when your stress levels are out of control? Stress can easily creep up on you, and you just get used to it. You don’t notice how much stress is affecting you, even as it takes a [...]
Startup: Developing a Start-Up Team
Leaders, When you started your venture, what were the initial stumbling blocks that you encountered? Do you remember? Were they market-related, such as a value proposition that’s not compelling enough or the market wasn’t ready for your product, and your timing too early or the market was not large enough? Or was there a glitch in your business model, such as the cost of acquiring a customer outraging the lifetime value of your customer or a lack of scalable ways to acquire customers? Or were you in danger of running out of cash? Or your products did not quite meet market needs because of a strategic market-product gap or poor execution? Often times, it is a weak management team that causes start-ups to fail and that does not adequately manage the aforementioned stumbling blocks. For almost a year now, I have had the honor and pleasure of working with a [...]
Plans that Really Work
Leaders, Have you ever wondered about the short lifecycle of New Year’s resolutions and their tendency to fail? Implementing your intentions requires answers to the ‘Why’, ‘What’ and ‘How’ of what it is that you want to transform in your business or life. Everyone enjoys the feeling of achievement, pride, strengths and confidence after successfully executing an intended plan, like e.g. exercising more regularly, losing weight, having more time for friends and family, getting the promotion or restructuring a business unit. Here are the ingredients that you need to orchestrate to make your plans really work: Focus on your goal and be as specific as you can. Vague strategies can lead to surrendering to the temptation of giving up or declaring victory early because you got tired, discouraged or bored. Take your time to think about your goal from various angles. What is the desired outcome that you would like [...]
What’s your Leadership Response to the VUCA World?
Leaders, What drivers will impact economic activity for the long-term? It’s probably the interplay and intensity of the usual suspects: Technological advancement, volatile consumer interests, increasing customer demands, versatile competitors, disintegrated markets, natural disasters, as well as massive socio-political and socio-economic shifts. These drivers create an environment that can be characterized by the speed and significance of change, the lack of predictability and prospect of surprise, and the lack of just one right course of action. VUCA has become a popular executive acronym for this new environment, coined by the US Army War College, used to describe the rapidly transforming global business landscape. The VUCA environment calls for new tactics and methods for dealing with changing conditions, thus, challenging traditional leadership approaches and abilities. What is VUCA? V is for volatility. It stands for the nature, speed, volume, magnitude and dynamics of change. U is for uncertainty. It is the [...]
Lifelong Learning is a Key Competitive Factor for Organizations Today
Leaders, Our society and economy changes worldwide through digitalization. That is not new and has been an ongoing process in our changing world. The effects are faster production processes and the need for rapid innovation. Although the effects are well known and described, what is about you and your team? How can you adapt to these processes and leverage them? One key factor is education and besides the formal education, the ongoing development of skills and knowledge in the context of lifelong or career-long and informal learning. Let me tell you why: The ongoing qualification of practitioners is usually subsumed under the concept of lifelong learning. After its first mention in 1967, it has become one of the main international educational guidelines in the mid 90s (Óhidy, 2011). Lifelong learning is in particular important because of structural changes in our society, the increasing acceleration of innovations and the associated change [...]
Dealing with hardship and stress: Are you resilient or tough enough?
Leaders, Did you know that 1% of the world population is psychopaths? This percentage increases amongst senior leaders up to 14.5%. Well, this article is not at all suggesting for you to develop psychopathic traits* and lose sight of your empathy in order to manage extremely stressful situations. It is rather about mental health and strengthening your “resilience muscle”. The question is how you and your organization can increase the ability to bounce back after adversity in a socially acceptable and sustainable way. Resilience is that indescribable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life (e.g. the death of a loved one, job loss, health or relationship problems, workplace or financial stressors) and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their willpower, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Even after a misfortune, resilient people choose their attitude, review [...]