BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

13 Warning Signs That You’re Heading for Burnout – and How to Avoid It!

Burnout is a mixture of physical and mental exhaustion with your organization or career. It can lead to a dramatic fall in your performance, and can seriously impact your health and well-being.

As this article points out, what makes burnout so poignant as well as painful is that it mainly strikes people who are highly committed to their work: you can only burn out if you have been “alight” in the first place.

 

Recovering From Burnout: Finding Passion for Your Role Again

Burnout is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. It can occur when you experience long-term stress in your job, or when you have worked in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time. You can also experience burnout when your efforts at work have failed to produce the results that you expected, and you feel deeply disillusioned as a result.

Burnout doesn’t go away on its own; rather, it will get worse unless you address the underlying issues causing it. If you ignore burnout, it will only cause you further harm down the line, so it’s important that you begin recovery as soon as possible.

Recovery from burnout is a slow journey; not a quick dash to some imaginary finish line. You need time and space to recuperate, so don’t rush through this process.

The recovery strategies that we’ve outlined in this article are all useful in different situations. Some of these strategies will work for you, while others won’t, so find a balance of strategies and best practices that feels right to you.

 

8 Ways Leaders Delegate Successfully

There is mounting evidence that delegating more responsibility for decision making increases productivity, morale, and commitment, all of which impact company culture. A 2015 Gallup study of the entrepreneurial talents of 143 CEOs on the Inc. 500 list showed that companies run by executives who effectively delegate authority grow faster, generate more revenue, and create more jobs.

According to John C. Maxwell, author of Developing the Leaders Around You, “If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.”

Yet, for many leaders, delegating feels like something they know they should do, but don’t do…

 

Are You Pursuing Your Vision of Career Success — or Someone Else’s?

You’ve checked all the boxes. You’ve graduated from the right college, held the right internship, flourished in the right graduate program, and landed the right job at the right company. You’ve followed the path that everyone else told you would be the one to lead to success — to your dream job — only to find that your dream job doesn’t feel so dreamy after all.

The good news is that you aren’t alone. Across each generation, the realization that success hasn’t brought with it the expected happiness has created a zeitgeist moment where conversations about purpose, fulfilment, and satisfaction reign supreme.

If you’ve determined that your dream job is not really all that dreamy, it may be that you have done all the right things along everyone else’s path to everyone else’s definition of success, only to realize when you’ve moved into a new age or life stage that the great life you built was meant for someone else…

 

Great Mentors Focus on the Whole Person, Not Just Their Career

Aspiring leaders need more and better mentoring than they’re getting today. There is remarkably little analysis or advice on how to mentor the whole person, extending beyond the career to include discussions about behaviour, values, relationships, parenting, finances, and even spiritual life. Mentoring the whole person takes more effort, more time, and more thought. In this article we discuss practices for doing it well…

 

What Is Personal Empowerment? Taking Charge of Your Life and Career

Do you ever feel that you have no control over your life and work? Perhaps you feel dominated by your colleagues, or overwhelmed by the demands of your job. Or is your time outside the workplace spent tending to other people’s needs at the expense of your own?

This sense of powerlessness can be immensely frustrating. But, no matter what personal challenges you face, you can always make choices that give you back control. Understanding this is the essence of self-empowerment.

In this article, we examine personal empowerment in more detail, and explore the tools and techniques that you can use to achieve it.

 

Made a Mistake? Own It, Learn From It, and Move On!

We all make mistakes. The important thing is how we react to them. An honest error will likely be forgiven if you admit to it and learn from it.

And ensuring that you put what you learn into practice can help you to forgive yourself, too. You can explore five practical steps for doing this with our article, “How to Learn From Your Mistakes”.

 

Celebrating Achievement. How to Help Your Team Feel Good

Acknowledging and applauding success is a great way to motivate your team.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of acknowledging and applauding success. We’ll examine some of the psychology behind reward and recognition, and we’ll outline a range of ways you can celebrate achievement.

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

 

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

Stop Talking, and Just LISTEN!

In a world of instant communication, it seems like everyone’s talking and everyone’s got something to say. But who’s listening? Really listening?

By becoming a better listener, you can build better relationships, avoid misunderstandings, be a better negotiator, and a better boss.

You can learn how to hear what people are really saying by practicing Active Listening.

 

The Rhetorical Triangle: Making Your Communications Credible and Engaging

If your heart sinks at the thought of presenting information to an audience, you’re not alone! Many people struggle with delivering their message. It’s a skill you need to learn and practice.

When trying to get your point across, either in speech or writing, you often only get one shot – and if you lose your audience, you may not get them back.

This is why you need to choose your words carefully, and present your points in a style, manner and sequence that best suits your message. The Rhetorical Triangle is a tool that helps you to get your thoughts in order and present a clear position.

In this article, we explore how you can use it to improve your written and verbal communications.

 

Ready for a Real Vacation? How to Make the Most of Your Precious Time

It’s been a productive year of early mornings, lengthy commutes, and long, focused sessions at the office. Now you’re looking forward to two wonderful weeks of doing as you please, when the only decision you need to make is what to order for dinner.

Fast forward, and you’re sitting on a beach, with the warm breeze ruffling your hair and the sound of the surf filling your ears. Then your phone rings, and it’s the office calling you about something urgent that you need to deal with. Just like that, the mood is broken.

If this scenario sounds familiar, you might wonder how you go about really “getting away from it all.” Well, the truth is that taking a real vacation takes a good deal of planning and preparation – but it’ll be worth the investment when you come back refreshed and revitalized!

 

Returning From Vacation: Handling Work After a Break

You’ve had some time off, staying up late, sleeping in, and spending your days relaxing. It was great! However, it’s now your first day back at work after your vacation.

You’ve been in the office only an hour, and you’re not sure how you’ll survive to the end of the day. You have hundreds of unopened emails, a huge list of phone calls to return, two reports that are overdue, and three meetings to attend. And that’s just this morning!

In this article, we’ll explore how to ease back into work after a break. We’ll look at strategies for coping with your workload, as well as for dealing with the emotional aspects of getting back into your working routine.

 

How to Give Your Team the Right Amount of Autonomy

Leaders often say they want to empower autonomous teams and free the front line to innovate, but they also fear the chaos that might be unleashed if they do. What if people go off in too many directions? How will people make decisions? What about resources? Who gets what, and how do you mitigate all of the risks? It’s possible to create alignment and control — while also giving your employees more freedom — by putting guardrails in place. These guardrails can help leaders make a real change.

 

Don’t Set an Agenda Before Important Meetings

You’ve probably heard this advice about meetings before: Set an agenda and stick to it. But if the purpose of your meeting is to solve a complex challenge, this advice couldn’t be more wrong.

Complex problems — like how to grow a company faster, or realize the benefits of a merger, or comply with new regulations — are often multifaceted and entangled, and to solve them you can’t dictate what the group will discuss. After all, how do people talk about something that is an amorphous mess? Plus, a preset agenda will bias the outcome and undermine the group’s ownership over the process. And you can’t possibly know ahead of time the topics the group needs to discuss to figure out the solution.

The group needs an agenda, but the group members need to decide how to spend their time together…

 

6 Causes of Burnout, and How to Avoid Them

A fog of burnout surrounds you: You’re perpetually exhausted, annoyed, and feeling unaccomplished and unappreciated. Everything in you wants to quit your job. But is that the best choice? Ultimately only you can know what is right in your situation. But there is research that can help you determine whether you can salvage your current job or whether the mismatch between you and your current position is so great that you need to look for a new one.

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

10 Common Time Management Mistakes: Avoiding Common Pitfalls

How well do you manage your time? If you’re like many people, your answer may not be completely positive! Perhaps you feel overloaded, and you often have to work late to hit your deadlines. Or maybe your days seem to go from one crisis to another, and this is stressful and demoralizing.

Many of us know that we could be managing our time more effectively; but it can be difficult to identify the mistakes that we’re making, and to know how we could improve. When we do manage our time well, however, we’re exceptionally productive at work, and our stress levels drop. We can devote time to the interesting, high-reward projects that can make a real difference to a career. In short, we’re happier!

In this article we’ll look at 10 of the most common time management mistakes, as well as identifying strategies and tips that you can use to overcome them.

 

The PERMA Model: Bringing Well-Being and Happiness to Your Life

We all want to be happy. When we’re happy, we’re productive, we’re good at building meaningful relationships with those around us, and… we feel great!

However, happiness is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down, and by focusing on it too intensely, we can end up feeling unfulfilled.

In this article we’ll look at the PERMA Model. This helps us think about what we need to do to flourish – and be really happy as a result!

 

How to Work with Someone Who Thinks They’re Always Right

Many people suffer from “chronic certainty” on issues for which no perfect answer exists. Here are three ways we’ve seen leaders get underneath chronic certainty to help themselves and others broaden their perspective — and have more productive conversations…

 

The First Thing Great Decision Makers Do

As a statistician, I appreciate the quote by applied statistics pioneer W. Edwards Deming, “In God we trust. All others bring data.” But as a social scientist, I’m compelled to warn you that many decision-makers chase data with too much zeal, running from ignorance but never improving their decisions. Is there a way to land in the sweet spot? There is, and it starts with one simple decision-making habit: Commit to your default decision up front…

 

The Assumptions Employees Make When They Don’t Get Feedback

“If I’m not causing problems, I must be doing fine.”

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

 

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

Level 5 Leadership: Achieving “Greatness” as a Leader

What makes leaders great? Is it their courage? Their business acumen? Their expert knowledge? Their ability to organize?

Truly great leaders have a specific blend of skills. But they also possess something else; certain characteristics which are harder to define.

If you’re in a leadership role, then you’ve likely wondered how you can move to that “next level,” going from good to great leadership.

In this article, we’ll examine “Level 5 Leadership” – a key idea that helps you do this. We’ll explore what it takes to achieve greatness as a leader, and we’ll discuss strategies that you can use to move up to this top level of leadership.

 

Second Level Thinking Skills: Going Beyond the Obvious and Avoiding Unintended Consequences

Have you ever made a decision that you were sure was fool proof, only to discover it had unintended consequences further down the line?

For example, imagine you’re a team leader for a goods manufacturer. To boost flagging productivity, you set your team an ambitious target to create 20 percent more product in the next six months.

Inspired by this stretch goal, your team end up producing 30 percent more – a great result! Or is it?

Once the celebrations die down, you realize that things are starting to unravel. You discover that the warehouse team isn’t equipped to handle the influx, and it’s creating a backlog. Not only that, but an unexpected fall in customer demand means sales are dropping. Your seemingly good idea ended up costing your organization money.

Your initial decision appeared reasonable on the surface (and did have a good outcome locally), but you didn’t foresee the potential wider impact – and that’s what “second level thinking” is all about.

 

What Are the HALT Risk States? Understanding the Risks of Working on Empty

Do you ever feel like you’re “running on empty” at work?

Maybe you skipped breakfast before working on a big presentation, or you struggled to speak up in a meeting after only a couple of hours’ sleep. Perhaps you’re emotionally exhausted because you feel like you just don’t “fit in.”

If so, you’ve probably encountered the HALT risk states.

HALT stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. The model was first developed to help addicts in recovery see when they were most vulnerable to relapse. Since then, it’s been useful for other people, too – both in the workplace, and in their personal lives.

This article examines when you need to “call a HALT,” and how to act quickly on the warning signs.

 

The Little Things That Affect Our Work Relationships

Interactions with colleagues can often be confusing, not to mention a source of stress. This is a phenomenon we’ve seen regularly in the almost nine years we’ve each spent studying work relationships. After all, how you relate to your co-workers can make or break how you feel about your job. When you identify with them, for instance, you’re much more likely to be happy with your organization.

People tend to think about work relationships in the wrong way, however. Evolution wired humans to appraise situations as either “good” or “bad,” so they could act on threats and opportunities. Instinctively, we assess our relationships with colleagues in similar either-or terms. The problem is, there are many types of work relationships — good, bad, and everything in between. A large body of research not only confirms this but shows that individual relationships often include a mix of both positive and negative aspects.

 

When Life Gets Busy, Focus on a Few Key Habits

We’re constantly optimizing — identifying our most essential priorities and activities while reluctantly and painfully cutting things that are important but not urgent.

Maybe you’re facing a life event that forces this type of radical prioritization. Whether it’s changing jobs, taking care of a sick parent, relocating, or facing a diagnosis, disruptions in life can make it hard to maintain moment-by-moment focus and well-being, much less think months or years in the future. Long-term goals remain important. But in the fog of life’s most intense moments, long-term focus can be hard…

 

To Come Up with Better Ideas, Practice Paying Attention

We live in a world where virtually every business is an “ideas” business. Executives and entrepreneurs are desperate for insights that allow them to amaze customers, reimagine products, and otherwise separate themselves from the crowd. But it’s hard to see new things if you don’t know how to pay attention, how to cut through the endless meetings, messages, and emails, how to really listen to and begin to decode what’s happening in the world that truly matters to your organization…

 

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

 

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

How to Challenge the Status Quo Successfully!

It can be daunting to speak up; to go against the grain. Even when we know something should be different, we don’t always have the courage to take action. And when we do, we risk our ideas falling on deaf ears, or being overruled or ignored.

But fortune favors the brave! Let’s look at some approaches that can increase your chances of success when you’re considering a challenge to the status quo.

 

Dealing With an Over-Eager Leader

Over the course of our careers, we’ll experience many different types of leadership.

A good boss is likely to respect your opinions, motivate you, and be a joy to work with. A bad boss might undermine you, fail to deliver on promises, and cause undue stress.

An over-eager boss, however, will behave a little like both: they may be respectful, but might also hold unrealistic expectations or give you an unmanageable workload. And when you’re not living up to expectations, it can have a detrimental effect on your work and self-esteem.

Over-eager leaders can come in different flavors, too. Some may have unreasonably high expectations – they think you can handle an insurmountable workload or aren’t aware of how much you’re actually doing.

And then there is the over-eager leader who never seems to sleep. They can do a hundred things at once and never tire or lose enthusiasm – the Thomas Edisons of this world. It can be hard to keep up with such an energetic co-worker, and if that person happens to be your boss, they might expect a subordinate to keep up with them.

Both of these situations could lead to you feeling unworthy, anxious, forever rushed off your feet, or even bad at your job, so what can you do?

 

How to Build Your People’s Resilience

Stress management is one of the foundations for building employee resilience.

Stress reduces employees’ resilience. Organizations need to take steps to ensure that their people are not forced to cope with unnecessary stress, whether it’s from excessive workloads or poor management styles.

So, what are the main workplace stressors, and how can organizations prevent them from arising in the first place?

 

5 Myths About Strategy: Why we believe them and why we’re wrong

There are lies, there are big lies, and then there are myths. And myths are the worst of the three.

Unless you have sealed yourself off in a social media echo chamber, lies are easy to spot. Except, that is, when the lie is a big one. People hearing or reading big lies start to doubt themselves and think ‘maybe I have got things completely wrong’. That’s why politicians and propagandists tell big lies. They’re not trying to assert a truth so much as sow doubt and confusion about what is true. That’s bad, but a smart person can resist a big lie by looking at the evidence at hand.

Myths present a different, subtler trap, which is what makes even smart people fall for them. They are usually based on a plausible half-truth, and they do not immediately lead you astray if you start to act on them. It’s only with the passage of time that you realize that you’ve made a mistake, but by then your wrong choices can’t be unmade and the damage is done.

We encounter myths in most realms of human endeavour, and the discipline of strategic thinking is no exception.   Here are five of the most pernicious ones I’ve encountered in a long career studying strategy and advising companies about it…

 

Great Leaders Are Thoughtful and Deliberate, Not Impulsive and Reactive

Observing your responses is the first step to improving… find out more in this insightful article!

 

Avoiding the Expertise Trap

Sydney Finkelstein, professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, says that being the most knowledgeable and experienced person on your team isn’t always a good thing. Expertise can steer you wrong in two important ways. It can stop you from being curious about new developments in your field. And it can make you overconfident about your ability to solve problems in different areas. He says that, to be effective leaders, we need to be more aware of these traps and seek out ways to become more humble and open-minded…

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

 

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

Leadership Styles: Choosing the Right Approach for the Situation

From Winston Churchill and Angela Merkel, to Queen Elizabeth I and Martin Luther King, there can be as many ways to lead people as there are leaders.

Fortunately, businesspeople and psychologists have developed useful frameworks that describe the main ways that people lead. When you understand these frameworks, you can develop your own approach to leadership, and become a more effective leader as a result.

In this article we’ll highlight some of the common approaches to leadership that you can use. We’ll also look at some specific styles of leadership, and we’ll explore the advantages and disadvantages of each.

 

How to Create a Personal Learning Plan: Taking Control of Your Career Development

Gracey can barely believe that her probationary period is almost over, and she’s really enjoying her management role at a small software development company. But she has a nagging worry.

She really valued the support and direction that she received from Myles, her line manager during her probation. He had set clear goals and targets, and had given her regular feedback. But now, nothing.

Myles has made it clear that, while his door is always open, he expects Gracey to make her own way now. However, she isn’t prepared to sit back and wait for training opportunities to just appear, and she wants to take control of her own professional development.

In this article, we’ll examine how you can take a proactive approach to your development by creating a personal learning plan.

 

5 Ways to Leave Your Work Stress at Work

Firaz was recently appointed CEO of a $1 billion company where he had held various roles over the past nine years. He had coveted this position for two years, but, now that he had it, Firaz was far from happy.

Work was stressful in a number of ways. He felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of managing the executive leadership team, particularly because they were his peers not that long ago. Another stressor came from managing a board that, while united in its support of him as CEO, was divisively fractured about the company’s strategy. Feelings of fear and inadequacy related to taking the company forward in the midst of new government regulations and stiff competition also added to the stress.

In addition, Firaz wasn’t feeling successful at home either. Before accepting the CEO role, he had promised his wife and children he’d be home for dinner each night. And, although he was physically present at the dinner table, his mental attention was captured by a new text pinging every few minutes. He became irritated over small things. He often fell asleep when he should have been awake (like while reading to his kids) and was awake when he should have been asleep (at 3 am).

Firaz’s work pressure was seeping into his home life and cutting him off from one of the most important resources for easing his stress — his family.

You don’t need to be a CEO to feel like this. Stress is a part of most jobs. Here are five ways to recharge at home without adding stress to the lives of the very people who most want to support you.

 

4 Reasons Talented Employees Don’t Reach Their Potential

No matter how talented someone might be, there is no guarantee that their talents will translate into top performance. The science of human potential has generally illustrated that an individual’s overarching competence cannot be fully understood unless we also account for their emotional make-up, preferences, and dispositions. No matter how smart, knowledgeable, and experienced you are, there is generally a difference between what you can do and what you normally do.

This is one of the reasons why talent identification efforts fail: when employers focus too much on candidates’ potential — the best they could do if they were motivated to do their best — they forget that the critical outcome they should try to predict is what people are actually likely to do once they are in the job, in particular their typical performance. Just like you shouldn’t assume that what you see in someone when you meet them on a first date is what you will keep on seeing when you are married to them five years later, there will probably be a difference between what you see in candidates when they are applying for a job and what you see from them when they have been in the job five years later (though science can help you predict this, too).

 

How to Get Your To-Do List Done When You’re Always in Meetings

Each morning, you emphatically write at the top of your to-do list, “Work on presentation!” Perhaps you even underline it a time or two for emphasis. But at the end of the day, your resolve has turned to dismay: yet again, you spent most of your time in meetings. And when you had a bit of time between them, you didn’t make any progress on your presentation.

So you keep waiting for the “perfect time” to sit down and knock out the whole project in one go. But meetings keep interfering and your presentation languishes on your to-do list, weighing heavily on your mind until you can’t escape it any longer. In a flurry of activity, you work day and night to get it done. You meet the deadline, but suffer in the process and dread the next time you need to finish another large task.

This cycle of knowing what your most important priority is, but feeling like meetings keep you from doing it, can be incredibly frustrating. But as a time management coach, I’ve seen that even if this way of working has been your life-long pattern, you can develop a more sustainable and less stressful approach to projects. Here are some tips on how to get project work done even when you need to start and stop for meetings.

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

Give Your Employees Specific Goals and the Freedom to Figure Out How to Reach Them

As more aspects of work become automated, it is increasingly important for people to focus on building skills that support creative and innovative tasks only human beings can perform. Efficiency is turning into the watchword of machines, and the opportunity for humans is work that addresses unseen problems and opportunities. This means we need to be very explicit with employees about how we measure success and the metrics that drive it (specify more). Then, having stated clearly how success is measured, we need to allow employees to freely, creatively pursue ways to reach it (specify less).

 

13 Ways We Justify, Rationalize, or Ignore Negative Feedback

Everybody loves feedback . . . as long as it’s positive.

But most of us dislike negative feedback so much that we’ve even changed the name — it’s not negative, it’s constructive.

Still, it’s an irreplaceably valuable gift.

We need to know when we are doing things that don’t land the way we planned.  When our impact veers from our intention.  And the best — often times the only — way to discover that gap is through feedback.

That said, chances are you fight against it…

 

Why Highly Efficient Leaders Fail

With ever-increasing demands at work for both mid-level and senior leaders, the ability to execute and get things done is a key driver of success. But it can ultimately become a leader’s downfall, resulting in unintended costs for the individual, as well as for their teams and organizations.

The high levels of efficiency that allow highly task-focused leaders to be so productive often come at the expense of a more people-based focus. Things like building relationships, inspiring a team, developing others, and showing empathy can fall by the wayside. Highly efficient leaders often lose their focus on people due to a limiting belief that more people-focused activities will slow them down and impede their ability to execute, and to ultimately be successful.

 

Paraphrasing and Summarizing: Summing Up Key Ideas In Your Own Words

Imagine you’re preparing a presentation for your CEO. You asked everyone in your team to contribute, and they all had plenty to say!

But now you have a dozen reports, all in different styles, and your CEO says that she can spare only 10 minutes to read the final version. What do you do?

The solution is to paraphrase and summarize the reports, so your boss gets only the key information that she needs, in a form that she can process quickly.

In this article, we explain how to paraphrase and how to summarize, and how to apply these techniques to text and the spoken word. We also explore the differences between the two skills, and point out the pitfalls to avoid.

 

Improving Physical Health and Well-Being at Work: Avoiding the Dangers of Sitting Down

Seph imagines that his body is a temple. But the reality is that he sits all day at a computer. He works late, feels stressed, eats junk food, and spends his evenings on the couch watching TV.

He knows that his physical health and well-being are suffering. Seph wants to make changes, but he’s struggling with the “practicalities.” He’s finding it tricky to break his sedentary and stressful work routine.

In this article, we’ll look at ways to tackle situations like Seph’s – by building activity into your working day. We’ll also show that, by focusing on fitness and health, you can boost your own productivity, performance and resilience, and that of your team.

 

How to Start Your Day: Managing Mornings When You’re Not a “Morning Person”

The alarm rings with the sunrise, and you leap out of bed, shower and get dressed. Next, you brew the perfect mug of coffee before heading off to work with a spring in your step!

Sound familiar? Perhaps not. And you’re not alone: many dedicated, conscientious people struggle to “get going” in the mornings.

Research shows that biology determines whether you’re a “lark” or an “owl.” A lark will wake up and fall sleep early, while an owl is an evening person who will peak later in the day. This is called your “chronotype.”

There’s not much you can do to change your chronotype, but you can manage it. In this article, we explore strategies that you can use to set yourself up for the day if you’re more owl than lark.

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

The Life Career Rainbow: Finding a Work-Life Balance That Suits You

We all move through different stages in our lives and our careers. And, just as demands on our time in our personal lives vary, so do demands at work.

When demand is high in one area but low in another, life and work can be more enjoyable and more fulfilling. But, when demands are high in both areas, we may become overstretched, stressed or dissatisfied. That’s why it’s vital to find the right work-life balance.

The Life Career Rainbow can help you to achieve this. In this article, we explore how you can use the tool to maintain balance at each stage of your life and career.

SMART Goals: How to Make Your Goals Achievable

Do you ever feel like you’re working hard but not getting anywhere? Maybe you see little improvement in your skills or achievements when you reflect on the last five or 10 years. Or perhaps you struggle to see how you’ll fulfil your ambitions during the next few years.

Many people spend their lives drifting from one job to another, or rushing around trying to get more done while actually accomplishing very little. Setting SMART goals means you can clarify your ideas, focus your efforts, use your time and resources productively, and increase your chances of achieving what you want in life.

In this article, we’ll explore what SMART goals are, and we’ll look at how you can use them to achieve your objectives.

Finding the Right Work-Life Balance: Creating a Healthy, Rewarding Life

People have debated the concept of “life balance” for decades, and it means something different to everyone.

One person might think he’s achieved balance when he can leave work early enough to eat dinner with his family. Someone else might view it as having a flexible schedule, so that she can study for a part-time graduate degree. Yet another person might feel fulfilled by spending her “free” time advancing her career.

In short, you achieve life balance when you have enough time to pursue both work and personal interests that you love. However, when you feel as if one side of your life is using up too much of your energy, you can become stressed, your productivity can fall, and your personal relationships can become strained.

In this article, we’ll look at life balance, and how you can find one that works for you.

Developing Charisma: Increasing Your Influence in the Workplace

Have you ever worked with a very charismatic leader? If so, then it’s likely that almost everyone in the organization liked, trusted and admired this person.

People listened when she talked, colleagues supported her ideas, and talented people wanted to join her team. In short, everyone wanted to be around this person!

Charisma is something that many people believe you’re born with. However, this isn’t the case – you can become more charismatic, and we’ll explore how you can develop charisma in this article…

Better Public Speaking: Becoming a Confident, Compelling Speaker

Whether we’re talking in a team meeting or presenting in front of an audience, we all have to speak in public from time to time.

We can do this well or we can do this badly, and the outcome strongly affects the way that people think about us. This is why public speaking causes so much anxiety and concern.

The good news is that, with thorough preparation and practice, you can overcome your nervousness and perform exceptionally well.

Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. Psychological safety isn’t about being nice, she says. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. And she argues that kind of organizational culture is increasingly important in the modern economy.

Are Your High Expectations Hurting Your Team?

This study of more than 300 executives in 10 countries shows that approximately 35% of executives fail because of a tendency toward perfection. That’s because achievement-oriented leaders tend to be chronically dissatisfied. While you may be thinking that you’re “just pushing them to be the best,” you may actually be setting them up to fail. Step back and reconsider whether your constant pushing may have unwanted side effects.

 

 

Copyright © 2019 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

 

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

Managing Friends and Family Members: Balancing Personal Relationships at Work

It can be difficult to work alongside close friends and relatives. In this article, we’ll highlight the challenges that can occur when you manage friends and family members, and we’ll look at how you can deal with them more effectively.

Supporting a Friend or Co-Worker Suffering From Stress: Lending a Helping Hand When Things Get Tough

In this article, you can learn how to identify stress in others, and explore a five-step strategy for tactfully offering your support, without becoming overburdened yourself.

How Timeboxing Works and Why It Will Make You More Productive

This article discusses the problems with ‘to do lists’ and the benefits of timeboxing.

Don’t Give Up on a Great Idea Just Because It Seems Obvious

“I spent eight years failing to act on an innovative idea that I knew would work. It was an idea that had not just technological promise but also societal value. It would help people contribute to the most important, impactful charities in the country. But I kept letting it languish.

The biggest reason I held back wasn’t fear, being too busy or lazy, or any of the other natural blockades to entrepreneurship. It was something else.

I didn’t move on this idea because it seemed obvious. It made so much sense to me that I was convinced someone else would do it. So, I assumed it would be a waste of time and energy for me.

I was wrong. And it turns out I would have known better if I had listened to some of the best-known innovators, including Isaac Asimov and Steve Jobs. Obviousness, it turns out, is a common — and even important — part of the creative process. Whether you’re considering the possibility of launching a startup or you want to create change within your organization, learn from my experience. Don’t procrastinate like I did.”

How to Collaborate with People You Don’t Like

Discusses useful strategies, ideas and insights that almost anyone can use when they have to work with someone they just don’t like.

Copyright © 2018 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom

 

BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.

 

Helping Your People Find Purpose in Their Work: Finding Deeper Meaning in a Job

No matter what you do, your job exists for a reason. When you know that reason – and when you fully understand how your efforts make the world a better place for someone else – you have found your job’s purpose.

On an individual level, people who understand their job’s wider purpose are happier, more engaged, and more creative. And, from an organizational perspective, when employees see how their roles fit with the company’s goals, staff turnover goes down and productivity rises. People work harder, use their initiative, and make sensible decisions about their work. In turn, the company can operate more efficiently. Everyone, from the CEO to customers, feels the positive effects.

Cultural Intelligence: Working Successfully With Diverse Groups

Some people – those with high “cultural intelligence” – are good at spotting cultural differences, and they adapt their behaviour accordingly. This is a key skill when working with culturally diverse groups. It’s very possible to develop cultural intelligence. In this article, we’ll look at what it is, and we’ll see how to build it.

Don’t Let Lazy Managers Drive Away Your Top Performers

Many people believe that being a good manager only requires common sense, and that it is therefore easy to be one. If this were true, good managers would be commonplace at all levels of more organizations, and as a result, employee engagement and retention would be high. However, only 13% of workers worldwide are engaged at work, and employee turnover rates in the United States are at a 17-year high. As these statistics suggest, either most managers lack common sense, or good management is, in fact, quite challenging in practice.

The Benefits of Laughing in the Office

It turns out that a series of studies shows the positive impact humor can have in the office. “According to research from institutions as serious as Wharton, MIT, and London Business School, every chuckle or guffaw brings with it a host of business benefits,” writes Alison Beard in the HBR article, “Leading with Humor.” “Laughter relieves stress and boredom, boosts engagement and well-being, and spurs not only creativity and collaboration but also analytic precision and productivity.” Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks has also found that cracking jokes at work can make people seem more competent.

Dysfunctional Teams

Is your teamwork not working? Check out these podcasts from HBR. They talk through what to do when your team isn’t communicating, doesn’t respect its leader, or has one employee who’s causing problems.

Building a Positive Team: Helping Your People to Be Happy and Engaged

Have you ever been part of a highly motivated, high-morale team?

If you have, chances are that most days, you were happy to come to work. You were focused and enthusiastic. You enjoyed collaborating with your colleagues and, together, you worked hard and came up with some great ideas.

Positive, highly motivated teams are fun to be a part of. And they can accomplish far more than teams that struggle with negativity and low morale.

That’s why it’s so important that, as a leader, you strive to build a positive team. In this article and video, we show you how!

Team-Specific Motivation: Discovering Your Team’s Biggest Motivators

Each person in your team is unique, and they are all motivated to succeed by different things.

However, chances are that there are some common factors that motivate everyone in your team. And, once you have uncovered these top motivators, you can focus on them to bring out the very best in everyone.

So, how can you identify your team’s top motivators? One way to do this is with the “Team-Specific Motivation” exercise. We’ll look at how you can use it in this article.

 

Copyright © 2018 Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, All rights reserved. We thought you might find this new Library bulletin of interest Our mailing address is:

Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Victoria Hospital

Blackpool, LancsFY3 8NR

United Kingdom