At some point in our careers, we find ourselves in need of help from others — whether it’s to make a direct connection to a hiring manager, to gather information on a prospective client company, or to get help in learning about a new industry quickly. However, over the years, we often lose touch with people in our network as work, family, and other demands fill our limited time. As if reaching out to ask for help wasn’t hard enough, what do you do when the person whose help you need is someone you haven’t spoken to in over a decade?
As the concept of emotional intelligence has gone global, we’ve watched professionals founder as they try to improve their emotional intelligence (or EI) because they either don’t know where to focus their efforts or they haven’t understood how to improve these skills on a practical level.
In our work consulting with companies and coaching leaders, we have found that if you’re looking to develop particular EI strengths, it helps to consider areas for improvement others have identified along with the goals you want to achieve — and then to actively build habits in those areas rather than simply relying on understanding them conceptually.
To that end, start by asking yourself three questions:
Most leaders assume that they need to foster teamwork among the people whom directly and indirectly report to them. Teaming is now seen as the workplace equivalent of motherhood and apple pie — invariably good. The problem is when leaders try to drive the wrong kind of collaboration on their particular teams. The result: wasted time and unnecessary frustration.
Consider the example of Nicolas, a regional sales vice president at a medical devices company. When promoted to his new role, he inherited a group of district sales managers responsible for selling to hospital systems in their respective geographies. Although his one-on-one meetings with these reports, which involved progress reviews, motivation, and coaching, were highly productive, his monthly team meetings weren’t. While the group liked getting together and engaging in some joint activities — such as goal setting, best-practice sharing, and talent development — people often wondered why they were in the room.
Modern data science emerged in tech, from optimizing Google search rankings and LinkedIn recommendations to influencing the headlines Buzzfeed editors run. But it’s poised to transform all sectors, from retail, telecommunications, and agriculture to health, trucking, and the penal system. Yet the terms “data science” and “data scientist” aren’t always easily understood, and are used to describe a wide range of data-related work.
What, exactly, is it that data scientists do? As the host of the DataCamp podcast DataFramed, I have had the pleasure of speaking with over 30 data scientists across a wide array of industries and academic disciplines. Among other things, I’ve asked them about what their jobs entail.
Back in 2006, McDonald’s saw its growth stall. The fast-food chain decided that the problem was its limited menu, so it tried out a great many new items and ended up doubling the offerings. But sales hardly budged. Finally, in 2016, it took a new tack. It went back to basics, dropped most of those additional items, and instead extended its popular breakfast offerings. Sales finally jumped, with same-store revenue up 6% in 2017, and the stock rose by 40%.
It turns out that what its customers most wanted was not a broad menu, but all-day breakfast. Executives had actually heard this request all along. But they had dismissed it, because it would require the restaurants to upgrade and reorganize their kitchens. The added lunch and dinner items, by contrast, involved relatively few adjustments.
Who wouldn’t want a meaningful career and better balance between work and home? For many of us, it’s finances that keep us from making a career change. Sure, our current job has lost its spark, but it’s stable. Dependable. Reliable. Steady. We worry and wonder: What would a career change do to our bank accounts? To our way of life? To our family? We assume that a major reinvention would involve a gap between paychecks when we’d leave our job and break into a new field. Sometimes we think (or we know) that the career we’d love would fill our days with more meaning but pay us less (significantly less, even).
Despite the $15 billion companies spend annually on managerial and leadership development, bad bosses are common in the American workforce. A study by Life Meets Work found that 56% of American workers claim their boss is mildly or highly toxic. A study by the American Psychological Association found that 75% of Americans say their “boss is the most stressful part of their workday.”
And a recent study by Gallup found that one in two employees have left a job “to get away from their manager at some point in their career.”
Surprisingly, though, another study found that employees end up working longer (two years, on average) for toxic bosses than nontoxic bosses. Why?
Steve Jobs’s vision for Apple was rooted in the belief that the arts and sciences do not live in isolation. They complement and enhance each other. John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar, echoed this sentiment stating, “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.” But even though integrating these areas can be necessary for innovation, too many people confine themselves to only one.
We wanted to understand why some people are more likely to reach across disciplines than others. So we investigated people’s “mindsets” about interest and their impact.
U.S. companies are expected to spend more than $37 billion dollars on social media promotion annually each year by 2020, representing 24% of the economy’s total digital advertising spend. It’s an astounding number, given that the vast majority of social media managers charged with getting customers to click on posts and through to their websites operate with little strategy beyond what we call “spray and pray,” an approach that litters social media with firm generated content in the hopes that one or more of those posts draw in customers.
As an executive coach, I speak regularly at corporate leadership development programs. During discussions, participants often confess the real reason they’re in the room, and it’s rarely “to grow and learn.” Time and again, the reasons include: they are checking a box on their development plan, their manager told them to come, or they’ve been told that their participation will increase the chance of a promotion.
The reality is that most people are not set up to take advantage of development opportunities. Many organizations view learning as something extra, something to fit in on top of the regular work. But to create a culture that encourages employee growth, managers need to make learning an expectation — not an option.
Learning helps people keep a broad perspective. When we feel expert at something, sociologists have shown, the earned dogmatism effect sets in, causing us to be more close-minded and to disregard new ideas and perspectives. For managers, suggesting that team members go to a training or take an online course isn’t enough; for many professionals, that’s just more work on their plates. Instead, managers need to encourage continual learning with supportive behaviors that, in turn, will shape their company culture.
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