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Inspiring Thin-Skinned Employees: Transforming Insults into Purpose

In the workplace, your employees can be remarkably sensitive. The slightest hint of bad news ignites a wildfire of rumors, fueled by the rapid spread of WhatsApp messages.

What you perceive as unproductive behavior is often the result of your interventions only addressing surface-level symptoms rather than the root causes. As soon as you tackle one popular complaint, another fresh grievance emerges to take its place, leaving you feeling like you’re trapped in a never-ending cycle.

To break free from this pattern, it’s essential to rethink your approach to addressing thin-skinned staff. Instead of merely treating the symptoms, consider these three strategies for fostering a more profound sense of purpose and inspiration among your employees.

Hurricane Heroics: Unleashing Extraordinary Potential

In the aftermath of a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, we often witness acts of everyday heroism. Neighbors who once refused to speak to one another put aside their differences and unite to overcome the shared challenge at hand. In the face of life-threatening disruptions, people tap into hidden reserves of resilience and compassion.

But what if this extraordinary energy and resolve could be harnessed within the workplace, without the need for a catastrophic event to occur?

The answer lies in understanding the powerful influence of the future on human behavior. When people have something significant to look forward to, they inherently act differently. The problem is that many employees have become jaded, expecting only disappointments and discomforts from the future. This negative mindset fuels their hypersensitivity, causing them to perceive every error as a personal slight.

However, what if this obsession with the future could be reframed as an opportunity rather than a hindrance? Perhaps their reactions stem from a genuine desire to care about the future, and there’s a way to channel this passion in a more constructive direction.

An Urgent, Inspiring Future: Harnessing the Power of Purpose

The ability to envision a return to normalcy is what empowers people to bounce back swiftly after a hurricane. This imagined future provides them with something to look forward to, uplifting and inspiring them even in the face of tremendous loss.

As they survey the wreckage, they help others find hope, moving themselves out of their comfort zones, taking risks, overcoming historical biases, forgiving debtors, sacrificing time, and donating money. In other words, they tap into their hidden reserves of discretionary resources to spend untapped treasure.

As an employer, witnessing this transformation in the same staff members who nearly went on strike over cafeteria lunches can be astonishing. However, instead of dismissing your people as unsolvable mysteries, it’s crucial to recognize their wider humanity. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

Offering your staff a compelling “why” can be achieved by crafting a joint future that deviates from the default trajectory.

Your Company’s Peculiar Destination: Embracing Discomfort for a Greater Purpose

Most employees go through the motions, primarily concerned with their creature comforts and conveniences rather than anything else. In response, many managers become afraid to ask too much, habitually lowering their expectations to avoid conflict.

However, the reality is that they simply aren’t asking for enough.

Imagine a manager who asks their staff, “Are you OK?” each day. Eventually, someone musters the courage to respond, “No, I’m not.” The manager inquires about the issue, resolves the problem, but continues to ask the same question the next day, perpetuating a cycle of addressing surface-level concerns.

Now, consider a dramatic alternative: A manager convenes their staff to create a vivid picture of the department’s future – an invented future that goes well beyond business-as-usual. This joint aspiration becomes a win-win for all involved, instantly repelling those who are the most resistant while attracting the best employees who crave a greater sense of purpose.

It’s as if a metaphorical hurricane has swept through, igniting a shared desire to take extraordinary actions, even if they cause personal “discomfort.” This phenomenon was observed by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who noted that those who found a “why” were more likely to survive the concentration camps. Additionally, Frankl stated:

“… mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish… Such a tension is inherent in the human being…”

“We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill…What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

Unfortunately, prioritizing purpose over comfort is a concept rarely taught in classrooms. However, it offers managers a powerful tool to inspire and engage their employees. By crafting a shared vision of a future that transcends the mundane, you can tap into your staff’s innate desire for meaning, fostering a sense of urgency and determination that propels them beyond their perceived limitations.

In the face of adversity, people are capable of remarkable feats. As a leader, your role is to create an inspiring “why” that ignites the same level of passion and commitment, transforming insults and hypersensitivity into a relentless pursuit of a greater purpose.

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Move Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Productivity

You have a serious concern for your personal productivity. It’s annoying to realise moments where you could have done things more efficiently. Why? You are someone who hates to see time being wasted. But when you reach out for help, all you receive is “foreign” advice, far removed from your experience.

At this point, most of us throw up our hands in frustration. I certainly did when I moved back to Jamaica in 2005. I quickly realised that much of what I had learned about being productive didn’t work locally.

It was humbling.

As a teacher of time management programs, I thought I knew a thing or two. Instead, I was struggling to apply a formula I had used for over 20 years of professional life in the USA.

But I decided that I should find an expert to understand my new situation. If there was a “Personal Productivity in Developing Countries” book, I required it.

After searches on Google and Amazon, I gave up. So I tried searching “War Zone Time Management”. Nothing there either.

But what I wanted seemed obvious to me. I needed to manage my task-load productively in ways that fit my hectic circumstances. And culture. This meant I could not simply mimic what experts in New York or London were doing.

Therefore, I had to dig deeper for some answers. Here are the main findings which became part of my second book, Perfect Time-Based Productivity, and today shows up in training and conferences.

Finding #1 – We teach ourselves the art of task management…but haphazardly.

We all know we learn how to run at an early age. However, it’s not the sprinting Usain and Shelly-Ann practice as professionals. That has to be learned, which means that several habits must be unlearned.

The same applies to task management. After we are shown the concept of time as eight-year-olds, we begin to create tasks. At the start, it’s mostly a memory game.

Finding #2 – Challenges to Becoming Better

Improving your skills in this area isn’t easy. Unlearning old habits is hard, and this topic is just not taught in school. Instead, it’s sink or swim for students.

Also, task management is not an occasional obligation. Unlike sprinting, you are doing it all the time, every single day. Therefore, you just cannot pause to step back and reflect in order to improve. You must develop while you are executing.

Furthermore, this isn’t an optional activity. We are required to use one technique or another so we can be fully functional adults. The only question is, at what level will we perform? And should we do so consciously or not?

Finally, if you have a knowledge worker’s role, you must adopt digital technology. The most common are email and WhatsApp. Some also employ task management software, perhaps supplemented by paper – the most ordinary technology of all.

This all makes the job of becoming a better task manager hard. In this case, being smart or experienced doesn’t help. The playing field is level and anyone can ascend to greater heights with the right knowledge.

Finding #3 – The Key to Improvement is Not a Guru

While great sprinters need coaches, you probably don’t have one for your task management. Therefore, you must mimic what they do and become an expert at diagnosing your current performance in this area.

The best place to start is with the defects – moments when you notice a problem which indicates you have fallen below your desired standard.

For example, each time you forget a task, find yourself late, lose track of an email message or feel overwhelmed…these are all helpful signs that your system has broken down. To determine the best solutions, you need to engage in conscious self-diagnosis.

Do so with the leading tools available. Some are described in my book, but there are self-diagnostic tools offered in workshops, webinars and articles. Their intent is to help you get to the source, so that you can fix problems and effect improvements.

Unfortunately, most of us are satisfied way too early. We look around at others in the office and decide what the average performance might be. Then we set our aspirations accordingly. We end up being mediocre.

However, if you are committed to world-class achievement, there is a lot to choose from. While local role models may be hard to find, they should also be envisioned from case studies. They’ll assist you in departing from one-size-fits-all answers to crafting custom solutions.

In summary, unlike the mid 2000s when I returned to Jamaica, this challenge can be met. “Jamaican Productivity” need not be an embarrassing joke. We are faster on the track than anyone in the world, and can also become just as individually effective.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

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Email: Not a Nuisance, It’s Your Job

You are forced to deal with email every single day, most of it arriving at odd moments. At the same time, you need to be effective, but it seems that there’s invariably a slew of messages getting in the way. You want the problem to go away so that you can just focus on doing your job. This is a common sentiment, but is this frame of mind a help or hindrance?

It’s fashionable nowadays to complain about email. Why? There are always too many messages. They arrive at the wrong time, and important ones get buried by all the others.

But you’re not alone: everyone you know appears to be caught in the same trap. You derive some comfort knowing that some are even worse than you.

The only people who seem to be on top are the super-responsive. Apparently, they have nothing else to do each day but reply to email…within moments. But are they being effective? If they can reply to you immediately, are they actually doing any useful work?

You know you don’t want to become like them, but what are your alternatives? Here are some ideas you can use to be effective.

1- Email is not going anywhere

Whether you call it acceptance or resignation, your fate in using this technology is sealed. Asynchronous, digital messaging is a permanent fact of professional life. In other words, we aren’t going back to the days of paper letters, faxes, or telegrams. And time-consuming meetings, phone calls or Zoom won’t ever become a replacement.

So unless you’re retiring soon, take a deep breath and “hug up” this reality. And while you’re at it, stop complaining about your inbox being flooded. The fact is that email incompetence is afflicting almost everyone. The only ones exempt? The few who receive a trickle of messages each day…like less than 25.

Don’t aspire to be like them. Take responsibility now and in the future.

2- Your suffering is avoidable

Think back to the days when you were among the “exempt”. You didn’t have a problem. In fact, you were happy to be sent email. It showed that you mattered to other employees and friends.

However, your joy was short-lived. When 25 incoming daily messages turned into 150, you hit a threshold: your old techniques stopped working. For example, if you used to check email in the quiet intervals between tasks, meetings or projects, you probably saw this shortcut become impossible.

Instead, evening and weekend email became the norm. Plus, others began to complain that you are not returning messages fast enough. Your “time management” skills were questioned.

While this state of affairs is awful, there is an answer.

You need a different, new set of practices to address a high volume of email. Furthermore, this approach needs to scale so that you can handle double or triple the volume you receive today. Why? Not only is email unavoidable, its use is growing.

3- Instant Repair

The complex blend of habits and technologies we use means that fixing email is like plugging the leaks on a rickety boat. There are a vast number of things which can go wrong, all of which add to the overall burden. Tackling them all is beyond the scope of this article, but here is one basic concept. Set aside high-quality time for email by blocking time each day in your calendar.

With this technique, email transforms from a thankless chore to a prime activity. Here, you can give your full and undivided attention. Consider it to be an appointment you simply cannot skip. A professional requirement. For example, a surgeon would never skip washing her hands before an operation.

Why the high priority? The fact is, each email requires you to make a decision and this takes energy. Add in the fact that you must quickly switch mental contexts from one message to the next, and the challenge multiplies.

It’s as if each day’s most important choices are distilled into a single sprint. If you try to make them piecemeal, prepare to see your inbox turn into a bottomless pit of unmade decisions.

Setting time aside each day is the only way to ensure that the molehill doesn’t turn into a mountain. Unfortunately, it only takes a few days of neglect to turn a peaceful inbox into a ticking time-bomb.

The best method is not to respond like a firefighter. Instead, treat email as a priority that deserves its own time-slot, and mindset. Use a fresh head so that you can make a series of difficult, but high-quality snap-decisions.

Soon, it will become the heart of your job, rather than a nuisance. And you will be effective.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

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First: Check Your Calendar or Read Email?

In general, you want to be responsive to those who wish to reach you. Consequently, each morning, before doing anything else, you scan your email inbox for new messages. However, if you have ever questioned the wisdom of this habit, your concerns are justified. The most effective professionals refuse to process email first. Instead, they start the day differently: they plan the time in their calendars.

Back in the mid-1990s when email was introduced to the general public, receiving a message was a rarity. It was exciting. Your computer announced the event, and audio-visual pop-ups celebrated its arrival.

But the practices you developed to address this new form of communication may no longer work. Why? They were suitable for a handful of messages, but useless for the 100+ deluge we face today.

One habit you may have adopted is the first-thing-in-the morning-check. If you’re opening email as the initial task upon entering the office, jumping in the car or sitting up in bed in your pajamas, you may be committing an error. Here are the reasons why.

  1. You should be timeblocking your priorities

Most of us are careful to write down appointments with other people, treating our calendar as if it were a scheduling tool used by doctors and dentists.

In addition, the most productive also schedule their priorities. Unwilling to leave them to chance, they program time in their calendars to complete them. The result? Each day they are more likely to act on the tasks which are most important. This technique is known as timeblocking.

However, when you don’t timeblock, you are at the mercy of other forces. Some days your energy might be lagging… so you check social media. On others, you may be feeling a lack of motivation… so you focus on routine actions.

Left to chance, it’s easy to miss deadlines because your work is being driven by factors unrelated to the importance of the task and its urgency.

Even so, as ruinous as these internal factors are, the worst culprit of all is the email you receive from others.

  1. How colleagues control you with messages

Too many people accept a passive role in their jobs. In other words, they see themselves as good soldiers whose job it is to take orders. In extreme cases, often with younger staff, they only aspire to make others happy.

If you’re in this cohort, email is a fantastic way for other people to transmit their priorities. Your assignment? Simply answer as many messages as fast as possible, and do what they tell you to do. Consequently, they give you more to do… which increases your email volume. The faster you respond, the more you get.

With this mindset, it’s only natural for you to check your inbox as soon as you can in the morning. If you never break the habit, you end up spending the better part of the day at the mercy of others who are happy to overlay their priorities over yours.

Unfortunately, while some encourage this practice, it’s not sustainable. To climb the corporate ladder, a person needs to show increasing self-direction and intrinsic motivation. In other words, they must lead, not follow.

Doing so means letting go of the anxiety felt when you haven’t replied to someone immediately.

This inner turmoil which leads to feelings of overwhelm has a name: The Zeigarnik Effect. There’s no way to climb the corporate ladder without learning to manage it.

  1. By the end of the day, you have accomplished little

We all know that person in the office who is very busy with email, but seldom accomplishes much. Often, they appear exhausted.

You may think they are simply being lazy, but here’s a simpler explanation. They are failing to examine the habits, practices and routines picked up in adolescence. Therefore, they become stuck.

The antidote is to exercise relentless, continuous improvement in your task management. For example, checking your calendar before your email inbox each day is not a popular habit among Jamaican workers.

However, by seeking out best practices and experimenting with them, you can be as productive as anyone else in the world. At the highest levels, professionals accomplish both productivity and peace of mind. The key? High performance in core areas such as task management, even when your friends, family and colleagues don’t act as role models.

If you’re serious, bypass the conventional wisdom. Drive each day using the priorities written in your timeblocked calendar. This best practice (and others) will help you become someone who has both peace of mind and productivity. You’ll be striving to find the right answers to greater personal capacity.

Francis Wade is the host of the Caribbean Strategy Conference on June 23-25. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

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On Fostering Powerful Admins

As an up-and-coming leader in your company, do you need an administrative assistant? If you are adamant that you don’t, consider that it’s only a matter of time before your mind changes. The question is, do you know why this will take place?

The position of administrative or executive assistant has been under assault. In times past, the role was the exclusive domain of women who possessed shorthand, typing, and organizational skills. While the first two tasks have been replaced by note-taking technology, the third has become all-important.

In fact, there are a number of women running Jamaican companies behind the scenes. They all used to be admins. Outside their organizations, they are unknown, but insiders know the real story. Recently, Big Bosses’ memory has started to fade. Their facility with the latest technologies has slipped, but their admin has stepped up to play a vital, but quiet role.

Furthermore, persons in these roles have added specialized digital and online skills no-one else in the company has. But they are far more than IT geeks. Their unique position means that if you aspire to the executive suite, or already sit there, you need an admin by your side.

Take note of the McKinsey research completed by DeSmet and Bevins. According to their article “Making time management the organization’s priority”, admins enhance a leader’s power. Also, executives who are effective time managers receive “strong support in scheduling and allocating time”. Only 7% of ineffective time allocators said the same.

What would it take for you to have that level of support, preferably before you become desperate? Here are a couple of steps.

Invest in Administrative Talent

Following the low pay, low-skilled secretarial positions of the past, some companies still treat admins as if they aren’t important. For example, some HR managers are quite willing to put a brand new hire in the office of the CEO, believing that such persons are interchangeable.

Using the old, outdated definition, they are.

However, once admins are seen as a critical part of executive success, the game changes. The person (who can be any gender) requires specialized training in each step of their development. This should be introduced as they climb the career ladder, enabling them to serve managers at higher levels. In fact, there should be a healthy pipeline of assistant talent at all times.

Also, companies shouldn’t pay assistants peanuts. Not only is the role important, it should attract quality persons who have their own aspirations. Low salaries simply won’t engage those who can add value to the C-Suite.

Be Prepared For a Partner

As a high-performer, you may be quite capable of navigating any new technology, and managing the demands on your time. However, the moment will come when you won’t be able to juggle all your business and personal commitments on your own.

As such, you need to give thought to the kind of person you intend to work with. What practices will they perform? How well? Should other staff relate to them as the power behind the throne?

Unfortunately, personal productivity among executives varies widely, because few have received any formal education on the topic. As such, they aren’t taught how to leverage someone who helps them manage a busy calendar, to-do list, or project plan.

Up until now, it’s also unlikely that you have benefited from the feedback or coaching required to be productive at higher levels. As such, you may be underestimating the demands which will be made on you, and the need for a team approach.

Consider the television show “The West Wing”. Jeb Bartlett, the President, had a decades-long working relationship with his admin, Mrs. Landingham. Several times per day, he asked: “What’s next?” In keeping with the character of a perfect assistant, she was always ready with an answer.

If you haven’t recruited such a person in preparation for promotions you hope to attain, start looking. Likely subjects may already be in your company. But sometimes you can recruit talented admins from other organizations where they just aren’t being appreciated.

More importantly, if your corporation doesn’t foster its administrative assistants, undertake a coordinated attempt to change the culture. If folks think that having an assistant is a perk like a bigger office or a company car, challenge this thinking.

Introduce the idea that admins are powerful contributors to the executive suite. Without them, your organization may be wasting time and effort on meetings, email and scheduling activities.

Advocate the notion that these necessary evils are better left to the trained professionals. Show the powers that be that the value of their skills far outweighs the cost of their salaries. Then, champion concrete changes.

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Personal Productivity Scorecard

What can you do in short periods which demand that you get a lot done, sometimes with overlapping deadlines? They are especially bothersome if your calendar is full and you feel as if you are already giving 100%. In those moments, you can’t defy time: you must ramp up your productivity.

As a Jamaican manager, January and September are probably a couple of your busiest months. Why? Both represent traditional returns from days spent away from the office. Projects which have been paused need to be resumed with gusto, energized by your downtime.

Some professionals fear or hate these two busy seasons, and others. They are forced to increase their productivity by several notches, but face a problem. They lack the methods. Believing their plates are full, they are actually mistaken. Here are some solutions the most effective people apply during their crunch times.

1) Tracking Personal Progress

What indicators of success do you use from one week to the next? While your company and department may have no problem measuring financial and operational metrics, there are few professionals who employ a personal scorecard.

If you’re like most, you probably have a vague sense of your performance, but it probably will not be enough. Certainly, those who perform at the highest level of any sport don’t rely on fuzzy feelings. But few professionals know how to create a scorecard showing their measurable accomplishments. And if they track one or two goals like sales or expenses, they almost never have a “balanced” scorecard covering the critical parts of their lives.

Consequently, even if they set ambitious goals such as a promotion or placement on a key project, they get lost. Instead of making progress, the daily grind buries them. A short-term focus driven by emergencies dominates.

Over time, their inattention leads to personal problems: unwanted pounds get added, technology skills wane and close friends drift away. Then, life intervenes with a dramatic, unexpected wake-up call. For example, the big plan for a relaxed retirement turns into a series of medical crises initiated by a heart attack. You failed to maintain your health at a younger age.

The remedy is simple: treat your entire life as if it were a precious resource whose well-being must be actively fostered. Pull out a spreadsheet and begin tracking. The cost? $0.

2) Creating a daily start-up routine

Most professionals who start personal tracking eventually stumble across another powerful technique: the morning ritual. Each single practice, which is a component of the ritual, may be ordinary, but the power lies in completing them as a group, over and over again.

Follow this habit and you’ll find it easy to scale to weekly, monthly and annual rituals. They all serve a similar purpose: at the beginning of a time period, you simply follow your own instructions.

But this is more than a convenience. Research shows that your mind requires a great deal of cognitive energy to innovate a brand new activity. However, when there is an existing script or checklist to follow, you can execute without pausing to re-think. So a periodic ritual saves precious time and effort.

You’ll also find that adding data to a scorecard is easy when it’s part of your daily ritual. The two practices are perfect complements.

3) Recognize Your Own Progress

New recruits from school to most companies often have a difficult time making the transition. The reason? Their former learning environments are highly gamified, but the new one isn’t. What do they find instead? Poor feedback, vague performance reviews, unclear goals and internal politics, which trump objective standards. Disillusionment sets in, blamed on the opaque, unfair nature of corporate life.

If you want to become more effective, you must learn to be content with self-recognition. This may take some maturity to achieve, but it’s the key to accomplishing important goals, even when others may not understand or approve.

This doesn’t mean you should be a hermit: it’s just that outside feedback is just one input, not a final judgment. Retain that ultimate power: as the decision-maker, you can ride far above circumstances and opinions.

Now, you’ll be playing an entirely different game of your own creation. You won’t be relying on the ones other people try to enforce using society’s popular yardsticks. With your scorecard and rituals, you’ll determine success, especially in those moments when your workload spikes upwards.

This should leave you confident. You’ll never be stuck wondering how to respond to a situation that demands more from you than ever before. For you, it will be a matter of adjusting your tracking and rituals before proceeding.

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The unending new-tech learning curve

What can you do in short periods which demand that you get a lot done, sometimes with overlapping deadlines? They are especially bothersome if your calendar is full and you feel as if you are already giving 100%. In those moments, you can’t defy time: you must ramp up your productivity.

As a Jamaican manager, January and September are probably a couple of your busiest months. Why? Both represent traditional returns from days spent away from the office. Projects which have been paused need to be resumed with gusto, energized by your downtime.

Some professionals fear or hate these two busy seasons, and others. They are forced to increase their productivity by several notches, but face a problem. They lack the methods. Believing their plates are full, they are actually mistaken. Here are some solutions the most effective people apply during their crunch times.

1) Tracking Personal Progress

What indicators of success do you use from one week to the next? While your company and department may have no problem measuring financial and operational metrics, there are few professionals who employ a personal scorecard.

If you’re like most, you probably have a vague sense of your performance, but it probably will not be enough. Certainly, those who perform at the highest level of any sport don’t rely on fuzzy feelings. But few professionals know how to create a scorecard showing their measurable accomplishments. And if they track one or two goals like sales or expenses, they almost never have a “balanced” scorecard covering the critical parts of their lives.

Consequently, even if they set ambitious goals such as a promotion or placement on a key project, they get lost. Instead of making progress, the daily grind buries them. A short-term focus driven by emergencies dominates.

Over time, their inattention leads to personal problems: unwanted pounds get added, technology skills wane and close friends drift away. Then, life intervenes with a dramatic, unexpected wake-up call. For example, the big plan for a relaxed retirement turns into a series of medical crises initiated by a heart attack. You failed to maintain your health at a younger age.

The remedy is simple: treat your entire life as if it were a precious resource whose well-being must be actively fostered. Pull out a spreadsheet and begin tracking. The cost? $0.

2) Creating a daily start-up routine

Most professionals who start personal tracking eventually stumble across another powerful technique: the morning ritual. Each single practice, which is a component of the ritual, may be ordinary, but the power lies in completing them as a group, over and over again.

Follow this habit and you’ll find it easy to scale to weekly, monthly and annual rituals. They all serve a similar purpose: at the beginning of a time period, you simply follow your own instructions.

But this is more than a convenience. Research shows that your mind requires a great deal of cognitive energy to innovate a brand new activity. However, when there is an existing script or checklist to follow, you can execute without pausing to re-think. So a periodic ritual saves precious time and effort.

You’ll also find that adding data to a scorecard is easy when it’s part of your daily ritual. The two practices are perfect complements.

3) Recognize Your Own Progress

New recruits from school to most companies often have a difficult time making the transition. The reason? Their former learning environments are highly gamified, but the new one isn’t. What do they find instead? Poor feedback, vague performance reviews, unclear goals and internal politics, which trump objective standards. Disillusionment sets in, blamed on the opaque, unfair nature of corporate life.

If you want to become more effective, you must learn to be content with self-recognition. This may take some maturity to achieve, but it’s the key to accomplishing important goals, even when others may not understand or approve.

This doesn’t mean you should be a hermit: it’s just that outside feedback is just one input, not a final judgment. Retain that ultimate power: as the decision-maker, you can ride far above circumstances and opinions.

Now, you’ll be playing an entirely different game of your own creation. You won’t be relying on the ones other people try to enforce using society’s popular yardsticks. With your scorecard and rituals, you’ll determine success, especially in those moments when your workload spikes upwards.

This should leave you confident. You’ll never be stuck wondering how to respond to a situation that demands more from you than ever before. For you, it will be a matter of adjusting your tracking and rituals before proceeding.

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The Perfect Work Day

How do you design an inspiring day’s work? Is it a matter of luck, or chance? Or can it be engineered and turned on like a switch?

Let’s begin by defining what your “ideal” work day looks like. It probably doesn’t mean sitting in meetings dominated by others. Neither does it involve hours responding to electronic messages that should never have been sent in the first place.

Some employees don’t even try: they have resigned themselves to deliver a half-hearted effort. It’s the very opposite of a great days’ work.

Instead of following their example, let’s imagine that you have set a personal standard for top quality performance. In your best moments, you are solving unique problems using your finest abilities.

However, you can’t be successful without committing a major portion of your attention. In peak episodes, you tackle challenges which cannot be solved while watching television, or browsing YouTube.

But the structure of the modern office does not lend you much help, and this carries over to working from home. As such, these miracle days need to be consciously created, and may benefit from the following three elements according to the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and other experts.

  1. Uninterrupted Time to Hit the Flow State

It takes about 20 minutes to “get into the groove” and achieve the high-performing Flow State. In this mode, time flies as you give a challenging task your complete attention.

You have blocked all human, audible, visual or other interruptions to stop you from staying in a deep problem-solving mode. Here, you are using all the expertise you can muster to create a unique solution.

Your mind should also be free of distracting concerns that threaten to take you away. Handle them by scheduling time to deal with them later in your calendar and you’ll be shielded from their intrusion.

Given the priority nature of this work, your time in the Flow State must be pre-scheduled. This protects it against other activities which may crop up.

  1. Condition Your Environment

Unfortunately, your boss may not agree. Some of the worst managers believe they have a right to impose their priority-of-the-moment on you at a whim, disrupting whatever plans you had.

This is often little more than a power play.

Over time, you must make it your duty to train your boss to get what he/she wants in a different manner. In other words, there should always be a conversation to discuss the outcome wanted and its priority relative to other commitments.

The sooner you both realize that an unthinking habit of random switching won’t work, the better off you’ll both be. Your top quality work will give him/her improved results.

Consider the case of an employee I met who is managed this way. In a class she reported that she doesn’t make plans – she just does whatever her boss tells her to do that day. She arrives at work each morning as a blank slate.

Unfortunately, this kind of staff member is the first to be fired when budgets are cut. Why? She brings nothing unique or distinctive to the workplace, and learns little over time. Anyone can replace her.

If you work from home, you must be even more careful, as you should also turn off disruptive technologies and train family members to leave you alone when you’re doing your best work. But the principle remains the same. People in your life need to know when you are deeply engaged.

  1. Coffee and Stimulants

I never grew up a coffee drinker and only tried the stuff for the first time a few years ago. After some experimentation, I learned that it helps me do my best work, but there’s a caveat: like many good things in life, it needs to be carefully rationed.

As such, I drink only a single cup every one to two weeks, just when I need to enter the Flow State. In these rare instances, it does its job very well, allowing me to continue focused work for three times as long.

I’m not addicted, and my body is not accustomed to a daily dose. In addition, I only use it on weekends where I have more control, due to the fact that most offices are closed. This reduces the chance of emergencies and interruptions.

COVID-19 hasn’t changed the need for us to do great, inspiring work, but most agree that a traditional office isn’t required. In many cases, it only makes things worse.

However, there are principles which you can’t violate wherever you pull out your laptop. Customize them for your emerging hybrid situation and you can be more productive than even ever before in any environment.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

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Converting Your In-Person Conference to a Virtual Summit

Is your organization accustomed to holding real-life gatherings for scores or hundreds of its followers, shareholders, customers or members? If so, what should it do in these pandemic times? Are large-scale, virtual events as simple as they seem?

In October last year, I got lucky. A colleague included me in the execution of his two-day online summit. Thousands participated from around the world, and based on what I learned, I subsequently launched two such events of my own. My most recent effort, CaribHRForum Virtual Conference featured over 1350 participants, with 75 speakers spread over three days.

While my learning curve has been quite steep, here are some shortcuts I recommend to scale this challenge, even in a world of continuous, disruptive change.

1. Get the Business Model Right

Like many activities of this nature, there is a commercial reality that must be addressed in order to produce a material benefit. While it might appear easy to copy other online events, that’s a mistake if the organizers’ goals aren’t exactly the same as yours.

To illustrate, some hosts are happy to increase the size of their mailing lists. Others just want to sell a specific product to a narrow audience. The point is, your organization must define the outcomes and target dates it wants to attain from the venture.

For example, at the start you must choose which crowd to attract, what topics to cover, which technologies to use, what skills are needed and more. These are strategic decisions which should be driven by your organization’s vision. That’s not to say the past should be ignored: but you should assume that you are looking to attract a younger, more tech-savvy version of your traditional audience.

By now you may realize: this is not simply about making a virtual carbon copy. Instead, this activity should complement your new post-COVID strategy and the best way to accomplish this is from a blank canvas.

2. Hunt for Skills

Unfortunately, the team of folks you relied on to pull off your in-person events may find itself lacking. The skills needed for a project of this nature are vast, deep and changing from one month to the next. As such, it’s unlikely that you will find them all at once. In other words, expect team members to be in a relentless learning mode as they grapple with evolving technologies.

For example, you’ll need folks who are skilled in internet marketing, website design, customer service, online community management, copywriting, image and video editing, event handling, speaker selection/training and more. While some of these may appear to be traditional capabilities, the virtual expression of them is unique.

Case in point: A skilled graphics designer accustomed to a traditional role may not understand the difference between Instagram Story promotions versus those in the Feed. Facebook’s advertising platform may be incomprehensible.

The bottom-line is that managing the skills needed for a virtual conference is a game of constant vigilance. Few organizations can afford to hire an external specialized team so you must use volunteers or employees. They will only possess a subset of the skills you need so get everyone in learning mode from the onset.

3. An Early Start

Most organizations under-estimate the need for a business model that works and the skills which are needed. Consequently, they start working on their online conference far too late.

This has a compound effect: an overdue start means a lesser choice of speakers. This, in turn, makes the event unattractive to your audience. They may conclude that you’re only offering a glorified webinar: heavy on splashy graphics and light on content. Unfortunately, fewer attendees means less revenue.

A late start may also push you into offering live presentations, versus those which are pre-recorded. While this may seem to be an easy substitute, it actually translates into a frantic last-minute struggle to bring together interviewers, interviewees and the audience in real time. Throw in different time zones, imperfect technology and a tricky supply of electricity or Internet access and you have a recipe for stress.

In these pandemic times, these are challenges you may not be able to avoid. Accept the fact that you are creating an experience that is distinctly different from ones you have undertaken in the past, and that direct comparisons to pre-COVID times add little value.

The truth is, in-person gatherings in large numbers are unlikely to resume in 2021. In the meantime, many of your audience members will become accustomed to the benefits of virtual conferences and summits, and start to prefer this option.

Embrace this aspect of the new normal as a unique capability to be used long beyond the time when herd immunity sets in. Instead, it will probably be a requirement your audience demands, a feature your organization will offer over and over again in the future.

Originally published in the Jamaica Gleaner.

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How to Listen Productively in a Negotiation

The task of negotiating with other people is part and parcel of business-life. However, many hate having to do so, and a large percentage do so ineffectively. One cause is that most focus on the quality of their speaking, fixating on what they need to say. By contrast, masterful negotiators take a different approach: deep listening.

Years ago, I had the fortune of picking up “Getting to Yes” by Roger Fisher and William Ury. This classic book on negotiations outlines several principles; one of which is to listen keenly to uncover the true intent behind someone’s position.

The idea is simple enough: when people are in a negotiation, the job of making requests of their counterparts is unavoidable. On the surface, it seems to be a battle of wills: each side asks for what it wants repeatedly, until the other concedes or refuses. The best tactic is to figure out how to get what you want, while giving away as little as possible.

However, Fisher and Ury advocate a different frame: a “Win-Win” in which both parties benefit. As you may imagine, there are a number of positives to be derived from this approach, even though it requires more skill. Among them is the ability to listen powerfully to what the other party is not saying aloud.

The fact is, each of us asks for stuff we want all day. However, especially when the stakes are high and emotions are raw, we unwittingly hide our true needs and emotional wants behind words. It simply feels too risky to be honest.

But we aren’t being sneaky; it’s just that emotional intent doesn’t translate neatly into actions or objects. For example, a husband who asks his wife to make a cheesecake for his birthday isn’t necessarily asking her to procure a baked good, and may be upset when she purchases one from a store.

For him, the intent is to experience her love and care which means seeing her sacrifice time and attention in the kitchen making the cake from scratch. He may unwittingly want to relive a memory provided by his mother.

But his actual words: “Would you bake a cheesecake for my birthday?” don’t convey his entire intent. Therefore, the mismatch between the two could result in a marital spat, or in the business world, a failed negotiation. How can you get past this sticking point if you find yourself in a similar spot?

1. Notice the mismatch

Skilled negotiators know how to use their intuition to discern such subtle gaps. Something deep inside them indicates that all is not well. However, you may find that your MBA-like training leads you to pay attention to the logic of what is happening: the discernible facts.

But that’s not enough. Furthermore, detecting uneasy feelings is necessary, but not sufficient. Once the inner shift is realized, you must translate the sensation into accurate words.

“It seems that we are making progress, but something inside tells me that we are missing a big part.”

This is a bold step: it’s a request to stop the negotiation in order to investigate a mere hunch based on intangible emotions. Unfortunately, most people self-censor, telling themselves: “Don’t be silly – just move on!” When they do so, everyone loses.

If you’d like to move past sticking points in your difficult conversations, it pays to tune in to your inner feelings, and speak up.

2. Probing for Underlying Commitments

If you do call a time-out, and things seem stuck, it could be that you are giving the other party exactly what they are asking for…but it’s not enough. This is a moment when your intuition can help you probe for deeper reasons.

“I know you asked for cheesecake, but why do you want that for your birthday?”

This is a masterful move in any negotiation because you are probing behind the stated position to see why it was raised in the first place. But this is more than curiosity.

Going deeper opens up the range of possible solutions. For example, the smell of home-cooked cake on a special day could be satisfied by other kinds of baked goods which are easier or less expensive to make.

When you expand the number of options, a Win-Win becomes far more likely. Plus, when you probe their hidden commitments it shows that you care. It’s as if you are setting aside the overt demand for cheesecake in order to give the other person what they really want.

In this context, this kind of listening is powerful as it invents brand new outcomes which neither side could predict beforehand. Without explicitly saying so, the two opposing sides are now working as a team.

For a breakthrough in negotiations, start by deeply listening beyond the words to yourself, and the other person’s true needs.

This article first appeared in the Jamaica Gleaner – http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20200920/francis-wade-how-listen-productively-negotiation