Kare and I have enjoyed the opportunity to work together on this joint blog project. And, the time has come for the sun to set on it.

We have both met and interacted with some incredibly talented and gifted people in the process of putting Ugluu together. We have learned much from the experience, from our contributing authors, and from each other.

Other projects now demand our attention, and we have come to the conclusion that we cannot invest the time in Ugluu that a project like this needs to keep going and growing. So, we have decided to stop actively adding content here.

We will, at least for now, leave the site here for people who enjoy what we have collected. We just will not be adding more content.

We thank our readers for stopping by and our contributing authors for their efforts.

If you would like to connect with us, please stop by our other blogs.

You can connect with Kare at Say It Better and at Moving from Me to We.

You can connect with me (Guy) at The Recovering Engineer and at Having Fun Together.

As Red Skelton used to say: “Good night and God bless.”

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CEOS. Parents. Dishwashers. Teachers. Children. Anyone can be a leader, including you. When you bring the best out in others so they become higher-performing with and for others – you are a leader. Here are three traits that such leaders share.

1. Act Like You Want Others to Act

Gandhi said “We must be the change we wish to see in the world”. To lead, we must demonstrate the attitudes and behaviors we want to cultivate in others. If you’re a business leader and you want your staff to dress professionally, you set the example by arriving in a suit every day. As a teacher who wants students to learn to make and keep agreements, set deadlines for turning in homework and the timetable for when they will get their corrected assignments back. Keep your part of the agreement.

2. Prove You Care and Value Others Who Do Too

The second element of true leadership is to inspire others to care, not just for those closest to them but as an attitude of support towards all others.

One of my mentors, Dr. Tim Goddard, lost his daughter, Cpt. Nichola Goddard, when she was killed in Afghanistan in 2006. The family was devastated. Thoughout their time of grief for the loss of their daughter, they also sought ways to find positive outcomes from their tragedy, and hope for peace in the world. One way was to start a scholarship fund in memory of their daughter. Scholarships are awarded to graduate students at the University of Calgary are citizens of Papua New Guinea, Nichola Goddard’s birthplace, as well as to citizens of Afghanistan, where she died and to Canada’s First Nations, Inuit or Métis people, with whom Captain Goddard spent many of her formative years.

Canadian Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, thought this scholarship was such an important tribute that he added $25,000 from the Canadian government.

By instinctually acting to care for others, leaders demonstrate an “I’ve got your back” attitude of support that inspires others to act the same. That contagious mutual support enables us to feel part of a larger whole, to be resilient and thus ready to serve each other.

3. Expect Their Best

Leaders empower others by acting as if we can accomplish great things. One of the key ways leaders demonstrate that ‘act as if’ attitude is by appealing to the best side in someone, their strongest talent and deepest belief. When I was coaching a resourceful, dedicated director of a university international language program, she kept describing the barriers she faced. She was frustrated with the limited funding and time she had. I replied that her deep caring for her students and her ingenuity to leverage what she did have were priceless lessons for her students. Her very resourcefulness could be a source of inspiration for her students along with the topic she was teaching. In short I appealed to what mattered most to her and what we both knew she did well. Later, she told me that was a pivotal conversation for her, as she realized that her first order of business was to serve her students and help them become the best they could be.

By practicing these three traits in your work and life situations you’ll hone your natural strengths as a leader and raise the bar of performance for yourself and for others around you.

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Does your team operate as a healthy community? Here are the three things we had to do to stay sane under one roof:

#1: Trust Each Other

To build trust in a relationship, everyone should be able to say the following statements to their colleagues and leaders.

1. I believe that you care about me as a person.
2. I believe that you won’t judge me on second-hand information. If you hear someone saying negative things about me, you will vow to check this out for yourself.
3. I believe that you won’t talk negatively about me to others. If we have a problem, you will come to me to talk about it. If you have to sort things out with someone else first, you will come to me shortly after.
4. If I have a problem with you, I will ask to speak to you privately soon after the offense occurred. I will then:
   • Get clear about what I believe happened that made me feel the way I do.
   • Listen to your perspective and try to understand what you meant
   • Work toward an agreement with you about how we will handle these situations better in the future.

#2: Honor the changes we are all experiencing

Every time priorities, job responsibilities and the make-up of the team changes, so do we. Plus, our lives outside of work are constantly changing. Therefore, we should honor and support each other as we live through change. Periodically, we should renew our relationships by asking:

• How do we describe our relationships? Are they easy? Hard? Why?
• What needs to be celebrated about how we have related so far?
• What can we agree to leave behind?
• What should we agree to continue/stop/start doing from this point going forward?

This is an especially useful exercise when one peer is promoted or given a great new assignment above his or her friends. Looking at the new relationship will help to relieve hard feelings.

#3: Commit to playing together

There is nothing more nourishing and renewing than play. To create healthy bonds at work, you need to laugh with your colleagues and share fun experiences.

Good peer relationships are vital to your success. Bad relationships can be fatal. It’s not enough to make sure everyone is talking. You have to continually talk about how you can get along better to reach your peak of effectiveness. Create a healthy community to ensure your team’s success.

© Marcia Reynolds

Related posts:

1. How Would You Define The Problem?

You should try to make your company, your division, your department feel to them like a furniture shop felt to the workers, before the industrial revolution.

“Perhaps eight men work there. One of them is the boss. He owns the shop, but he works there, visibly. The other seven receive wages. The work done by the boss is not all done with tools; sometimes he uses a pencil. He draws designs, writes occasional letters, puts down figures about wages, costs, and prices,” wrote Alexander Heron in a little-known 1942 masterpiece, Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on employee communication.

Read Heron’s description of the shop, and reorganize your employee communication program to create a meaningful workplace where workers know what’s happening, and why.

This kind of workplace:

The shop or factory is on the same lot as the house where the boss lives; he owns it. The other seven know how much his taxes are each year. … They were all in on the discussion before the new lathe was bought, and they remember the price and the freight. They remember how the boss borrowed some of the money from his wife’s sister.

They know that the dining room “suit” on which they are working now is for Jane Winton, [who] used to be Jane Carey, the schoolteacher, before she married Bill Winton, the banker. They know it has to be as good as the furniture she saw in Buffalo, and that if it is good Bill’s mother is going to give the boss an order for another lot which will keep them all busy through the winter.

They see the finished job emerging under their skilled hands, day by day. They know how difficult it was to get the seasoned walnut, and what it finally cost, what price is to be paid for the finished job, how much the boss will “make” on it, and how much of that will go to pay off the loan from the sister-in-law.

They know that the boss has gradually built a reputation for honest quality and skilled workmanship and that they are part of that reputation. They know why once in a while they have had to wait a little for their wages—when the taxes had to be paid before the money came in for the new counter and fixtures at the drugstore.

Above all, they know the boss. Their attachment to him is basically not sentimental but practical. He is the salesman who gets the orders which bring work to them. He collects the money which pays their wages. He manages to accumulate the working space and the equipment. They are realistic enough to know that they can get their full and fair share of the income of the business. …

They know. Because they know, they understand. And in that full and simple understanding they “put themselves” into every job.

Related posts:

1. First, Take Good Care of Each Other

When you add it all up – incessant Web surfing; over-allegiance to chat rooms, forums and discussion groups; fixation on online pornography, gambling and games; music, movie and other media downloading; and a wide variety of other fixation – the portrait of a society and indeed a world sitting on its derriere, breezing through one
screen after another emerges.

By some estimates, as many as 10% of Web users are living with one or more forms of Internet dependency, which has now been given the name of Internet Addiction Disorder, or IAD. IAD, as acknowledged by the American Psychiatric Association, is characterized by individuals who devote gargantuan amounts of time to online activities to the detriment of their careers, studies, families or loved ones, and social and community participation.

If you find yourself spending increasing amounts of time online and experiencing a growing sense of anxiety when you’re not online, you may be at risk. What’s more, the phenomena is not confined to the Internet per se. People who check their cell phones, pagers, telephone answering devices, and any electronic information or communication gizmos on a too frequent basis may be exhibiting addictive behavior.

Are you spending less time devoted to career, community, social and recreational pursuits because of the amount of time you find yourself online. You know you’ve gone too far when you’re experiencing relationship woes, loss of friendships, loss of sleep, and, in particular, career or academic jeopardy.

The key to overcoming any addiction is to first acknowledge that you indeed are afflicted. Following that acknowledgment, you then have to summon the requisite motivation to change. Without realization and motivation, nothing is likely to happen.

Unquestionably, the Internet is a marvel of our age. The ability to find answers, make connections, order goods, satisfy curiosities, control the vast sea of knowledge contained therein is certainly enticing. It boggles my mind to think what Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, and other geniuses throughout human history could have achieved aided by the knowledge they could have gained using the Internet. At the same time, such geniuses, being all too human, may too have fallen into some of the same traps in which we mere mortals now find ourselves firmly ensconced.

As with so many aspects of life, the key to using the Internet effectively is to achieve a fine balance. First, if this works for you, establish a time limit for daily use. Thirty minutes a day many not be enough, three hours may be excessive. At work, depending on your job responsibilities, all day may be the norm. Thus, your task is to choose the limits for your personal life.

Recognize that excessive Web use may be the indicator of problems in other aspects of your life. Are you devoting time here because there are voids elsewhere? Or are you using the Internet as a tool of procrastination in shirking your responsibilities? If you recognize that you’re using the Internet to avoid the challenges of life, shying away from battles that need to be fought, it might be a good idea to speak to a therapist.

Most of us surf the net alone. But if you find reading up on the news or keeping current in some other pursuit is rewarding and enjoyable, you don’t have to forsake your family or friends in the process. Can you arrange your space so that you and your significant other, you and your children, or you and whoever can be online at the same time in close proximity, such as at the same table, so that, much like playing cards or a board game, you achieve a variation on the theme of togetherness. That in itself may go a long way towards alleviating some of the problems that excessive time on the Internet may be causing.

What step will you take now to turn from the screen, to go out and enjoy time with the people you value – proving to them that you do?

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Here’s a handy checklist to make your next meeting so productive that people leave with a strong sense of purpose and plans to support each other.

Running the meeting

Be sure to have a clear purpose for each meeting that can be articulated in advance to invited attendees.

Only invite individuals who are needed for the decisions to be made at that meeting.

It is the rare meeting that needs to last more than 20 minutes.

Agree to discuss topics that need joint decision-making or timely clarification of information for individuals to prepare their next actions.

Don’t use meetings for:

• disseminating information that can be shared in other ways.
• report-outs of information that is not relevant to all individuals in the room.

The only people invited to a meeting should be those who have some value to add or something to contribute to the agenda and purpose of the meeting.

What to do before, during and after a meeting

Before the meeting, make sure the topics on the agenda are going to be relevant to everyone in the room. Determine the agenda ahead of time and send it to everyone. Invite them to add to or clarify something on the agenda so that the attendees have some say in what is going to be talked about. They should be part of the decision-making.

During the meeting, engage individuals by name and related to the topic being discussed.  Avoid side conversations or tangential comments.  Avoid “death by PowerPoint” by using it sparingly and with images versus words to best engage the right side of the brain.

To ensure a thread to the group’s conversation, evoke the Native American tradition of using a “talking stick.”  Whoever has the stick gets to talk. When done it is passed to one person who wants to pick up the thread of that conversational point. This helps introverts break into the conversation and be heard without interruption, and it reduces the frequency of people talking over each other or interrupting.

The underlying rule is to let everyone be heard while keeping the conversation flowing towards a collective decision – even if that acknowledged decision is that the group has not yet reached agreement.

Before the meeting is adjourned, review the actions items agreed upon, the person accountable for each and the related timelines. When people feel heard, appreciated, and able to use their best talents, they are more likely to volunteer for tasks.

As a core Rule of Engagement for your meetings, those who are accountable for actions meet their deadlines, brief colleagues sparingly by email and warn them in advance when a deadline cannot be met, providing their alternative plan for completing it.

Some researchers believe that 90 percent of meetings don’t have to happen. If you are calling for a meeting, clearly state the mutual benefit or main goal for all attendees to participate and the specific need(s) for each individual to attend. That is your surest sign of respect and understanding amongst your colleagues.

Further tips for productive meetings

1. Confirm that the suggested meeting time is convenient for all participants
2. Make and stick to an action-based agenda that has received input from participants before the meeting.
3. Listen well: specifically respond to what you hear, proving you understood, and then offer your opinion.
4. Be clear, brief and specific in your communication.
5. Be engaged, purposeful and thoughtful so that you don’t derail the conversation and stay focused on reaching decisions in a timely, collaborative manner.
6. Recognize individuals for their specific contributions.
7. Honor participants’ time: if you are finished with the agenda for a one hour meeting in just 30 minutes, adjourn.  If you are not finished a 30-minute meeting at the 30-minute mark, schedule another meeting and adjourn.
8. Eliminate unnecessary meetings by reviewing the agenda to see if the items could be accomplished by email, phone or smaller meetings of fewer people.

DON’T’S

1. Don’t hog all the airtime.
2. Don’t reprimand anyone in front of the group.
3. Don’t check or use your blackberry, iPhone or other device while in the meeting.
4. Don’t do the opposite of any of the tips listed above – unless you have a better rule to propose – and I encourage you to propose it in the comments below!

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Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her team recruited volunteers to play a game. Some were asked to play by the rules. Others were instructed to ignore them. To not play fair.

After all participants played the game together, they were then asked to observe each other in a second activity. Scientists measured some of the volunteers’ brain activity as they observed some of their former game opponents apparently being subjected to different levels of pain.

Result?

The brain areas that signal pain became active in all who thought they were observing pain in others. This provides neural evidence of their empathy.

Yet, when those who’d played “unfairly” in the earlier game appeared to be in pain, male volunteers who observed them showed significantly less empathetic brain activity than when they saw fair-players in apparent pain. In fact men felt more desire for revenge.

For women the response was different. They showed the brain responses of empathy regardless of how they felt about the participants’ moral behavior. Earlier research supports this finding.
Regrettably, I feel I’d respond more like a man in this experiment.

Learn more about how our brain affects our behavior in Donald Pfaff’s book, The Neuroscience of Fair Play. Relatedly read On Being Certain and Predictably Irrational.

Here’s the good news. Men and women can use meditation to change our instinctively negative reactions – even in the face of unfair or otherwise negative behavior. Monitoring the brains of Tibetan monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, neuroscience professor Richard Davidson found that the monk’ first instinct was compassion rather than anger.

Here’s the bad news, at least for many of us.

To become that compassionate, monks spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. Learn more about the power of compassion in Emotional Awareness, a book by the foremost expert on reading faces and on lying, Paul Ekman.

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“My life is the complete opposite of everything that I want it to be.”

Jerry says, “Since all of your instincts are wrong, then the opposite must be right.”

George immediately realizes that this is a great idea. So, instead of ordering his usual lunch, he orders something totally different. Suddenly a beautiful woman turns to look at him. Now, instead of relying on his usual unsuccessful pick-up technique of pretending to more wealthy or more sophisticated than he is, George simply says:

“Hi. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”

She looks at him with a big smile, and answers in a sultry voice. “Hello.”

Later, George takes the woman to a movie. Sitting behind them are two tough looking men who are speaking loudly and kicking their seats. Instead of his normal reaction of shrinking in fear, George stands up and tells them to shut up. Stunned by this direct response, the men cower. Later, George has a chance interview with George Steinbrenner. Instead of trying to flatter him, George confronts Steinbrenner, telling him off for doing a lousy job with the team, and Steinbrenner immediately hires him. Now, with a beautiful girlfriend, new-found confidence, and a dream job, George realizes the power of his new strategy.

George’s new life happened because he identified routine patterns of thought and behavior that don’t work, and found a new way of being that allows for growth, freedom and prosperity. His path to growth includes four essential steps:

1. Objectively look at your situation and, without blame or guilt, acknowledge that there’s a problem. When we do this, new opportunities appear that we could not have imagined
2. Be honest with yourself and with others about who you are; your inclinations, skills, strengths, and limitations. As George discovered, we are most effective, successful, and charismatic when we are honest about who we are.
3. Act with courage. George tells the two loud men in the movie theater to shut up, even though his natural inclination is to do nothing, or to run away. George found that fearful things shrink when confronted head on; they appear to be threatening thugs but are, in reality, just a lot of noise and distraction that dissolve when looked at directly.
4. Speak the truth. George learned that successful people actually want to hear the truth, even when – or especially when -  it is difficult to hear.

As George demonstrated, and as all wisdom traditions tell us, we can choose how we respond to the people and events in our lives, and create new ways of being that bring about positive transformation.

Image by thinkpublic.

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“First, Take Good Care of Each Other.” That’s what the sign in the lobby of each Experient office says. When I was part of the leadership team there, we had a very strong belief that in order to lead the industry in serving our external clients and suppliers, we had to first play well in our own sandbox. The sign in the lobby was a gift from the Anaheim Marriott’s GM, Doug Watson, who also believed in the power of internal customer service.

We all have customers, whether they are external or internal. High-performing organizations will develop and nurture a culture that emphasizes a strong commitment to service, in house and out in the field. Employees who enjoy their jobs and their relationships with their co-workers are more likely to offer excellent service when it comes to the paying customers.

Here are some ways to develop great internal service culture:

Get together — Pot-luck lunches, drinks after work, birthday celebrations, a community project … these are just a few of the ways employees from different departments can come together to get to know each other, beyond the day-to-day grind.

Show gratitude — When was the last time you thanked someone in accounting or told his or her boss how valuable s/he is? How about arranging to have candy or pizza delivered to some of your colleagues who are working through crunch time? Or maybe really blow them away and proactively offer your assistance? Random acts of kindness are truly appreciated, especially by those in the trenches. An organization that has a good balance of timely public and private recognition is sure to have motivated employees.

Walk a mile in their shoes — Does everyone in your organization understand and appreciate the various responsibilities of their co-workers and how they can positively or negatively affect their efforts? Have you ever shadowed another department for a day or even a few hours? This tactic is especially insightful for those departments that rely on each other. Complaints will quickly diminish.

Coordinate deadlines — Instead of directing co-workers to turn a project around by what may be an unreasonable date, ask them what kind of turnaround works for them, given their other priorities.

Cut the gossip — If someone complains to you about another employee, do you instruct them to take their issue directly to that employee or do you help spread the disease within your organization?

Make team decisions — Are decisions made from above and then communicated to the rank and file or are employees asked to provide valuable input on decisions that impact their area?

Standardize service, inside and out — Have you developed best practices for providing service that apply to both external and internal customers?  Do they address speed of response, tone, attitude, and mutual respect? Are they reinforced and recognized on an ongoing basis?

Take Away

To distinguish yourself as an organization that delivers exceptional customer service, you need to start from the inside out, and from the top down. That means cultivating an internal culture of respect and support for each other, from the CEO to the receptionist.

You can help that along by seeking opportunities to:  get together outside of the office, thank each other for a job well done, get to know everyone’s roles, communicate directly with each other, and work together as a team — especially when it comes to making deadlines and decisions.

Related posts:

1. Listening Is an Act of Leadership

I wonder if this sounds familiar at all. Have you ever had this experience at work? Begun a meeting or a conference call, or even initiated a project, running full steam ahead and expecting others to keep up. Or perhaps you’ve been the one pulled by someone else. We do it all the time.

In my pursuit and practice of Working for Good over the past three decades, I’ve found that how we work is as, if not more, important than what we do. We can work in a green business, a social service organization, or some other endeavor focused on making the world a better place, but if we treat others and ourselves with disregard or disrespect in the process, we end up creating something far short of our intention. The process is the product.  And the process is about connecting.

The more I practice the skills of Working for Good–which I identify as awareness, embodiment, connection, collaboration, and integration–while carrying the intention to serve through my work, the more I relate to an insight by Mother Teresa:

I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time—just one, one, one. So you begin. I began—I picked up one person. Maybe
if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand. . . .The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin—one, one, one.

Working for Good is essentially about how we show up for one person at a time, and for each person we encounter. There is no “saving the world,” but there is co-creating it with one another. To do that, we have to truly be with one another. The place we start from is always the same. Right here. And the time of our departure is always the same. Right now.

Try this: Slow down. Connect with yourself. Connect with whomever you are with. And move from there.

Image courtesy www.sxc.hu.

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1. Never discuss business in bed.
   When your business partner is also your spouse, you must create spaces where business is not spoken. Stick to this rule even when you get an idea so hot you don’t think it can wait until the next day. Get up and get out of the bedroom.
2. Have a business plan, but prepare to make changes in it as your enterprise grows and evolves.
   Without one, you run the risk of reacting to whatever comes along. A business plan helps you distinguish between what furthers your goals and what distracts from them.
3. Let the talents/interests/tendencies of each partner determine the division of labor and try to stick to it.
   For example, if one of you is creative or gifted in sales and marketing, give him or her free rein.  Appreciate the partner who does the grunt work like book-keeping and ordering supplies.  Agree to delegate essential tasks neither one wants, e.g. a virtual assistant for administrative chores.
4. Impose business hours on your work day so your business doesn’t overrun your life.
   Schedule meetings for specific purposes, take notes as you would in any work setting, and put all follow up tasks on a calendar. Write everything down. A structure, like the division of labor, helps you to avoid duplicating effort and minimizes the chances of important tasks falling through the cracks.
5. Set aside time when you don’t discuss business at all.
   This is tough when the business is fun and/or demanding.  Achieving a good work/life balance is important for its own sake, and your relationship — and perhaps your business as well — will be the better for it. Take an exercise break together or apart. Learn to enjoy being together in silence: reading, meditating, or gardening.
6. Avoid criticism; focus on what works well and what you can do better, individually and as a team.
   Practice communication skills you’d use on a client on each other. Make requests of each other.  Don’t complain.
7. Consult on and make all the big decisions together.
   Let the smaller decisions be made by the one chiefly responsible, then stand by that decision. Of course, this is rarely so cut and dried, but it helps to have the intention and trust each other to follow through.
8. Above all, have fun.
   Learn to laugh at your mistakes. If you’re like many people, you have had work that wasn’t always satisfying or fulfilling. This is an opportunity to create a work environment that WORKS for you, with the person you know better than any co-worker or employee, by your side. Enjoy the journey together and celebrate accomplishments and victories, big and small.

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Most people, it seems, talk more than listen. They want to be heard, want to make their point. But don’t we all respond better to someone who listens to us? Really listens, so that we feel that we are actually understood? The difference is profound.

It is important advice to remember in discussions where there are different points of view, such as with people from different departments in a company. In fact, this is where our client usually found the reminder most helpful. A company’s president, CFO, head of HR, and head of marketing typically have a very different points of view about issues that affect the company.

The advice is important in negotiation. Rather than just pressing for what you want, if you first understand what is most important to the party you are negotiating with, you may well be able to come to an agreement that gives you both more of what you want.

The advice is important in personal relationships. Many arguments stem from a simple misunderstanding. Mismatched expectations or underlying assumptions are often the problem. Rather than reacting to what was said, if we seek first to understand what the other person expects and assumes, the conversation may not turn into an argument at all.

Being a marketing guy, I’ve found that this great advice is rarely considered in marketing or in sales. Most companies’ marketing reflects the company’s point of view rather than the customers’. But we know that isn’t effective. Prospective customers want to know what the product or service will do for them, not just what it will do. They want to know how what the company offers meets their needs, relieves their pain, or fulfills their desires. They want to know why they should deal with that company, not just why the company thinks its offerings are worth buying.

Here is a sales example: Let’s say you are shopping for tires. The salesman tells you all about the latest performance tires that look cool and really hug the curves. But if you are interested in tires that will last the longest, guess what? He has lost you.

If he pushes the latest “in” thing like tires have the lowest profile, and you are interested in tires that give a comfortable ride or have the best safety rating, he has lost you.

But, if he seeks first to understand what is important to you rather than just telling you what he think is sales-worthy, he can connect with you. And probably sell you some tires.

By seeking first to understand, we can then communicate more readily with the people in our lives, and, in business, with clients and customers.

Understand?

Photo by maldiviandude.

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