Success Starts Only After A Brutally Honest Look In The Mirror. About two years ago, my company, Axcess Worldwide, was preparing to broker a major agreement between two publicaly traded companies that were the leaders in their respective industries. In the end, we succeeded. But going in, we didn’t know if the never-before-attempted concept we’d proposed would survive the hard negotiations on a definitive agreement. We just knew that it had the potential to be an important agreement for the two titans and a big deal for our company. One of the fundamental strategic decisions we had to make was on personnel: Who was the best person from our company to sit at the table day after day for weeks on end, patiently helping the two sides work through issues huge and small? For a deal this important, it was either the company’s chairman and CEO, Kirk Posmatur, or me, its president.
Kirk is older and more experienced; I interned with him when I was a Cornell undergrad, and he’s been my mentor and “adopted older brother” ever since. Eric C. Why you should treat your company like family. What’s the best measurement for success? Happiness. Make It a Habit to Give Thanks - Ron Ashkenas. By Ron Ashkenas | 12:00 PM November 20, 2012 While Thanksgiving in the U.S. is celebrated with sports events, family dinners, and time off from work, its real purpose is to reflect on everything that we have to be thankful for — such as health, family, material possessions, and general success. It’s also a good reminder that “thankfulness” and “appreciation” are important managerial behaviors in effective organizations — behaviors that need to be fostered throughout the year, not just when there’s a holiday.
There are actually two kinds of appreciative behaviors that managers need to develop, interpersonal and organizational. Interpersonal appreciation is the day-to-day ability to genuinely and graciously thank other people for what they do. This may sound like Etiquette 101, and we assume it’s the basis for most of our interactions in organizations.
The reality is that all of us need affirmation and positive feedback, at least occasionally. Awkward Silences: 4 Seconds Is All It Takes to Feel Rejected. It’s the pause that doesn’t refresh, the awkward moment that you relive over and over and over after you’ve realized that once again, you’ve put your foot in it. New research from Holland suggests that good conversational flow has a powerful effect on people’s feelings of self-esteem and belonging, and that even brief — just four seconds long — silences during a conversation are enough to, as Tom Jacobs puts it in Miller-McCune: …elicit primal fears, activating anxiety-provoking feelings of incompatibility and exclusion. “Conversational flow is associated with positive emotions, and a heightened sense of belonging, self-esteem, social validation and consensus,” a research team led by psychologist Namkje Koudenburg writes in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“Disrupting the flow by a brief silence produces feelings of rejection and negative emotions.” For the study, researchers performed two experiments in which they studied participants’ responses to awkward silences. The Real Point of Gift-Giving - Peter Bregman. By Peter Bregman | 1:18 PM December 15, 2010 A few weeks ago was my birthday.
I turned 43. 43 doesn’t mark a new decade. It’s not one of those birthdays people usually celebrate in a grand way, and mine was no exception. And yet as I emerge from this birthday, I can’t imagine feeling any more appreciated, respected, and loved. As we enter this holiday season, it makes sense to pause for a moment and think about gifts. On a basic level, we give gifts because we’re supposed to. Underlying that custom is an important purpose: appreciation. But here’s a common misconception: the bigger, more valuable the gift, the more it expresses our appreciation. Because gifts don’t express appreciation, people do. The gifts I received that meant so much to me on my forty-third birthday?
Just as he is. And yet we almost never do this. Think of our corporate end of the year rituals: performance reviews, holiday parties, and, sometimes, if we’re lucky, bonuses. Not for what they do for you. That’s OK.