Understanding Team Dynamics using MBTI. Using-MBTI-to-Build-Team-Chemistry-The-Huddle-May-2012. Effective Team Meetings: Subtracting Bad Behaviors (The Recovering Leader) If you’re like most people at work, you probably wish you spent less time in meetings. I remember as a COO, my colleagues and I used to estimate the cost per minute of the aggregate salaries around the table in “leadership team meetings” and wish we could spend the money on something more worthwhile. Yet search the web for “effective meetings” and you get overkill: 9.4 million helpful ideas, along with everyone’s favorite book or article about it. Based on my experience as an executive and coach, I approach it a bit differently.
I propose there are seven “faces” or patterns of behavior that reduce a meeting’s effectiveness. Subtract those, and you get more productive meetings that people actually want and need to attend. How to do that? Let’s take a look at them: 1. Behavior: Repeating, in the form of restating, glomming or echoing. If someone says, “I have to echo what Barbara said earlier,” and/or restates all or part of it, there’s no value added to the comment. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Meeting Guru. Candidates and feedback: ask the right questions, get the right answers. Make sure you've received constructive feedback before you trash your job application techniques. Photograph: Alamy It can be difficult for candidates to hear – especially when you have put so much effort into job applications – but you have no automatic right to feedback.
Often, when it comes to the final stage of applications, it's rare you get clear-cut reasons for rejection. As such, interviewers give you bland, vaguely troubling explanations, rather than a useful breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of your performance. A great deal of feedback is code for "we just chose someone else". This easily slides into rejection: you don't feel good about it, and you haven't learned anything either.
There is a real danger that candidates immediately alter their interview and application techniques off-the-back of these generalisations, randomly hoping for a different result. But this isn't an effective jobseeking strategy. Here are some examples of useful feedback: How to ask for feedback. Dawn French: 'I decided I'd pretend to be someone very confident' | From the Observer | The Observer. Dawn French: 'I'm a kid in the dressing-up box at heart.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Observer Why are you in Australia? You were supposed to have settled in Cornwall for the rest of your days. For my sins and my guilty pleasure I am a judge on Australia's Got Talent, alongside tiny little bambi Geri Halliwell. It's an honest, open kind of competition and I thought, I'll give it a go.
That is an interesting honeymoon… It is extraordinary. Do you genuinely like reality talent shows? Oh yes. Did you go through anything like that process in your early days? No. What do people think of you in Australia? They love The Vicar of Dibley. Both your novels have been bestsellers. I am a kid in the dressing-up box at heart. The second novel, Oh Dear Silvia, is out now in paperback. I think you earn big laughs in something truthful if it has tragedy also.
A lot of the book is written in accents, which are supposed to be so difficult to write. It's based on people I know or mixtures of people. :: Authentic Happiness :: Using the new Positive Psychology. The theory in Authentic Happiness is that happiness could be analyzed into three different elements that we choose for their own sakes: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. And each of these elements is better defined and more measurable than happiness. The first is positive emotion; what we feel: pleasure, rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, and the like. An entire life led successfully around this element, I call the “pleasant life.” The second element, engagement, is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity. There are no shortcuts to flow. There is yet a third element of happiness, which is meaning. “Your 2002 theory can’t be right, Marty,” said Senia Maymin when we were discussing my previous theory in my Introduction to Positive Psychology for the inaugural class of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology in 2005.
This was the moment I began to rethink happiness. Summary of Well-Being Theory. Unstuck iPad app - How to live better every day – Unstuck. What 5 insights can you learn from the single best book on management? - Barking Up The Wrong Tree. Women in STEM: four steps to a stronger Athena Swan application | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. A change is in the air: Athena Swan, the charter recognising commitment to women's careers in STEM, has become a topic of conversation at meetings in universities up and down the country.
I was at a leukaemia research meeting only the other week and spent most of my coffee break talking about the scheme. Minds have been focused by money. The National Institute for Health Research's BRC/BRU funding will require a minimum silver Athena Swan award, which can only be obtained following a submission to the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU). For this reason, most universities and departments now have their own self-assessment team preparing or planning applications, with over 90 awaiting decisions from the last round. I recently sat on an Athena Swan assessment panel. 1) Write a good letter First impressions matter. 2) Identify your organisation's direction Is the number of female staff increasing or are you becoming more male dominated? 3) Check recruitment at all levels • Thinking about training. Girls' school holds 'blow your own trumpet' week. 28 April 2013Last updated at 22:03 ET By Sean Coughlan BBC News education correspondent Head teacher Heather Hanbury warns of the constant pressures on girls An independent girls' school is holding a "blow your own trumpet" week to help over-pressured, high-achieving pupils who find it difficult to accept that they have been successful.
"Some teenagers will continue to push themselves, never recognising when they've done enough," said Heather Hanbury, head of Wimbledon High School. Last year the school ran a "failure week" to help girls cope with setbacks. Now the London day school says it wants to raise girls' sense of "self-worth". Ms Hanbury said that after last year's innovative "failure week" she had been contacted by fellow head teachers who said pupils could also have problems in coping with their achievements, with some girls unable "to accept success when it finally came".
Self-confidence Continue reading the main story “Start Quote End QuoteHeather HanburyHead, Wimbledon High School. 10 of the most controversial productivity tips that actually work. 4.7K Flares Filament.io 4.7K Flares × We’ve all heard what makes us more productive. To be more productive, get: Better sleep, better food, better work environment, etc. And I think these tips are amazing and a great focus to have. Heck, we even wrote about most of these and the science behind it here on the Buffer blog. And yet, today, I thought of changing it up dramatically. It goes nicely with Tim Ferriss’ moto: “To do the impossible, you need to ignore the popular.” So with this article, I tried to really step aside from the popular and look for the counter-intuitive.
Let’s dig and find out some of the most controversial things you could do today to boost your creativity, happiness and productivity: 1.) Often, if you are anything like myself, we are in an endless quest for “feeling productive” and for “getting motivated” to do great work. Most of our biggest achievements get done, even without being motivated or inspired, so he describes: 2.) So go ahead, procrastinate, it’s ok! 3.) 4.) 10 things I wish I knew before I started uni. 1. Make time to waste time Or rather, don't forget that you need to procrastinate – researching, planning and writing are only half of what goes into an assignment.
Start things early, at least three weeks before the deadline, and for one of those weeks do nothing but brainstorm and scroll, scroll, scroll through Twitter. It's better to make time for procrastination than for it to creep up on you. 2. Referencing is like a minefield: unpleasant and hard to navigate (but mercifully non-fatal). 3. All the compulsory stuff at least. 4. Three years later and I'm still quite bad at this. 5. Some lecturers still believe that a quickly scrawled remark and the occasional tick is a good return on thousands of pounds of tuition fees. 6. Scholar is likely to be faster, simpler and more fruitful than the clunky academic search engine provided by your university. At the beginning of the term there's usually a "how to research" session given by a university librarian. 7. 8. 9. 10. 'Just a Theory': 7 Misused Science Words. Hypothesis.
Theory. Law. These scientific words get bandied about regularly, yet the general public usually gets their meaning wrong. Now, one scientist is arguing that people should do away with these misunderstood words altogether and replace them with the word "model. " But those aren't the only science words that cause trouble, and simply replacing the words with others will just lead to new, widely misunderstood terms, several other scientists said.
"A word like 'theory' is a technical scientific term," said Michael Fayer, a chemist at Stanford University. "The fact that many people understand its scientific meaning incorrectly does not mean we should stop using it. From "theory" to "significant," here are seven scientific words that are often misused. 1. The general public so widely misuses the words hypothesis, theory and law that scientists should stop using these terms, writes physicist Rhett Allain of Southeastern Louisiana University, in a blog post on Wired Science. 2. 3. 4. Get me a project manager, stat! 19 March 2013 by Tseen Khoo Keystone (Photo by Jonathan O’Donnell) A while back, one of our Twitter followers asked whether The Research Whisperer had any posts about project management. At the time, I could only think of @jod999’s megastar post about what a Gantt chart is, and mine on whether you can fix a broken Gantt chart.
While Jonathan’s post was about planning and putting in place a feasible and ideal timeline, mine talked about the common mistakes and remedies for timelines that don’t behave. Research projects are very much about project management, and that tweet nudged me in the direction of this post. Project management skills are elements that many sectors require, and this means that there is a weighty bunch of pixels already dedicated to the topic. Rather than rehearse what many others have already said (better than I could), I want to focus on someone you should consider requesting as part of a major research grant: Get yourself a project officer or a project manager.
Like this: 5 time management ideas… from part time PhD students. Last week @lanceb147 contacted me on Twitter looking for advice on doing a PhD part time. There’s not much published advice considering there’s a surprising number of students doing their PhD part time. At RMIT where I used to work 50% of research students were enrolled part time and this institutional profile is not unusual in Australia. Some are self funded students from the beginning; others have been forced to take up part time study after their scholarship rans out.
Many academics have the impression that part time students are troublesome and take ages to finish, but a study by Pearson et al (see reference below) showed that students who study part time for their whole degree finish sooner and have better results than full time students. Clearly they are doing something right! I did my research masters over three years part time and worked for 2 days a week for all but 6 months of my PhD. Brief your stakeholders What can full timers learn from this? Spread yourself around References: Science for all. Whether female scientists will want to celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March may depend on how far they look back in time. Things have changed, and if you talk in terms of decades, there are considerable victories to cheer about.
But despite those victories, progress now seems to have stalled. That is clear from the package of articles in this week’s Nature (see nature.com/women) that exposes the dismaying extent to which sexism still exists in science. In the United States and Europe, around half of those who gain doctoral degrees in science and engineering are female — but barely one-fifth of full professors are women. Women are not invited in significant numbers to sit on the scientific advisory boards of start-up companies. Why has progress stalled? Politics The fate of women in science can be influenced for good and bad by political systems. The worrying gender bias in mature democracies won’t be resolved by the flick of a master switch.
Profile raising. Behavioural Attributes: Human Resources Division: University of Cambridge. The framework developed by the University of Cambridge contains 8 behavioural attributes. The framework has been developed from the following two sources: The Educational Competencies Consortium (ECC) has developed a job evaluation scheme (HERA) specifically for Higher Education Institutions. This scheme focuses on all aspects of a role and enables analysis of roles based on fourteen discrete elements, only some of which can be described as behavioral attributes (competencies).The Judge Business School interviewed some 20 senior leaders across the University with a view to building the leadership capability of the University at the most senior levels. This work has had the most significant effect on the development of the framework.Behavioural Attributes The eight attributes in the University of Cambridge Behavioural Attributes Framework are: There are 4 levels for each attribute levels A, B, C and D; level A is the highest level for each attribute.
Urbanity ... history: Academia's working hours culture. It’s the time of the head when myself and colleagues are doing or annual performance reviews so work-life balance has been the subject of discussion quite a lot – helped, I think, because my school recently had an equalities and diversity study carried out. I’ve blogged about the subject before. If you get a load of academics chatting about work-life balance it quickly turns into something like this: To lay my cards on the table – I arrive in the office between 8:30-9:10 every morning, depending on what train I get. I leave the office about 5:30-6:30 (I’ve only had to sign the late-working book once in two years) and quite often have a relaxed lunch away from my desk with colleagues.
And I very rarely work weekends. I reckon I put in about 40 hours a week. Biz ladies: saying “no” It’s funny how topics and posts happen here at D*S. Sometimes they’re planned way ahead of time and sometimes they happen over the course of a few days. Other times, like this post, they seem to flow naturally, as if my brain had already written the words and my hands merely needed to transcribe them. Sometimes your body and mind decide together when it’s the right time to say something.
Most people who know me outside of D*S know that I’m someone who trusts my gut almost indiscriminately. For the first five or six years of running D*S I was the Queen of Yes. For today’s Biz Ladies post I’m going to share my personal path to LEARNING TO SAY NO- along with the tips, tools and tricks I’m using to keep this way of thinking in place. The full post continues after the jump… The Beginning Early one morning in December of 2009 I found myself lying in bed with my heart pounding.
I woke Aaron up and told him that I thought I needed to go to the hospital. Overcoming Fears 1. 1. 2. 2. 1. 2. 3. Yes? TT_info%20graphic_v3_0. Academic assholes and the circle of niceness. Recruitment Process: Interviewing. Negotiation - Andrew Gibbons free management and organisational downloads and learning material. Are we biologically programmed to have a preference for Thinking or Feeling? How To Be A Horrible Leader – 50 Bad Leadership Traits | Todd Nielsen. Why creating and articulating your brand is important.
Soapbox Science: Top Recommendations from Top Women in Science. Deepak Chopra On Enlightened Leadership. How to Recognize and Resolve Conflict in the Lab, the Classroom, and in Other Academic Settings | GradMatters: The Blog for Tufts' GSAS. Make the World Better | Star Stryder. 10 Rules For Amazing & Brilliant Women. We Need to Tell Girls They Can Have It All (Even If They Can't) - Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. Top 10 reasons why professors leave: elephant in the lab series | Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog. 10 Happiness Tips for Busy People. Networking Tips: How to Go from Awkward to Awesome. 5 Steps to Game-Changing Relationships. The 3 Most Important Questions | Mindvalley. Why I Want a Wife | Classic Feminist Writings. How Many Arms do you Have?
Bioscience Careers: WOMEN IN SCIENCE. The 19 engineers - Ingenious Women - Our projects - About us - The UKRC. Why women leave academia and why universities should be worried | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. Good Practice in University Chemistry Departments. When Scientists Choose Motherhood. Motherhood 'detrimental' to women's scientific careers, study concludes. _Work_Life_Balance_Executive_Summary. » How NOT to Multitask – Work Simpler and Saner. Essay on dual career issues faced by women in science. Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty.
For Science Ph.D.'s, There Is No One True Path - Commentary. Are You As Busy As You Think? Having Difficult Conversations. Difficult Conversations: Nine Common Mistakes.