Bold Enterprises Presents Working Matters

When acceptable performance becomes a problem, are we jumping too quickly to blame and punishment? Could there be aspects of your corporate structure, culture, or your own leadership methods that might be setting the stage for poor performance?

Fact: People are growing, developing, changing beings. Are you afraid of losing your best workers if you promote them? Fighting their development will only result in losing them to a competitor.

Are our talent search methods serving us well? Could it be that our standardized job descriptions, computerized key word searches, and the use of unformatted text-only resumes are eliminating valuable candidates before we even have a chance to meet them?

What lens do you use when addressing employee problems? Employees are an expense to minimize or an asset to maximize? The lens you choose will have a radical impact on how you deal with four common employee problems.

Both our physical desktop and our computer desktop can get cluttered quickly. One of the issues in whether you can find what you need. The other issue is whether the cluttered desktops are making it difficult to focus and be productive.

Choosing to communicate via phone, text, email, or social network is not only a matter of personal preference, but must take into account the recipients preferences as well. How do you sort through who responds best to a text message and who responds best a personal call?

Where is that conversation thread? On my phone, my tablet, my laptop, or my desktop computer? Surrounded by fantastic, ever-changing tools, when do the options propel us forward and when do they confuse, distract or paralyze us?

Who ever thought we'd experience such a thing as "friend clutter"? News, pictures, and invitations (to name just a few categories) both from people we want to hear from and also from many we don't want to know so much about. What's one to do?

Welcome to a fresh discussion on clutter. Instead of declaring war on clutter as the enemy of effectiveness, listen in as Jorge Rosas and Karl Edwards think out loud about how to figure out what works best for you. The possibilities for creating clutter seem to be growing logarithmically, and in order to stay effective we need to adjust quickly. It's an open question: is clutter your friend or your foe?

Certain decision are coming. We know they are on the way, but we don't have enough information to make the decision yet. We cannot afford, though, to ignore, forget about, or minimize their importance in the mean time. What do we do?

If we are working to capacity all of the time, where are we going to get the time and resources to seize unexpected opportunities or problems? We need to build in slack.

For some issues our aggressive goal may be to NOT go backwards. We need to be intentional about where we don't want to give up ground as much as we need to about where we want to grow.

Not every idea is a good idea. The good ideas from yesterday may not be the good ideas we need for tomorrow. We need to decide what to stop doing and what we need to say "No!" to.

How we do strategic planning needs a serious rethink. Instead of creating a one-time plan, we need to develop processes where we revisit and adjust along the way.

As long as failure is a bad thing involving shame, punishment, and other negative responses, we will become increasingly cautious, politically correct, and refuse to make bold decisions. Failure needs to be reframed as learning. If we learned something from every mistake, we would be making needed adjustments sooner and more often.

We've become overly risk-averse in response to the devastating near-miss our economy experienced. We are sitting on our wallets, postponing investments, not hiring, etc. We need to find ways to take the initiative and create opportunities where none may yet exist.

Companies are culling large job applicant pools with misleading "key words", arbitrary experience requirements, and other impersonal and inhuman criteria. We need to build teams not fill positions.

Instead of waiting until it is safe to go back to doing things the way that we used to, we need to get out of the box in our thinking. We need new perspectives, new frames of reference, and new approaches.

Everyone seems to be waiting for someone else to get the economy going before making important decisions. What sorts of New Year's Resolutions might help us break out of this fear-based passivity?

You have more years experience being you than you do being anyone else. Your best bet for successful networking is being you.