005 Managing Yourself with Specific Measurable Results • PODCAST [Retired]


 

To avoid the #1 forecasting mistake, click here.

 


 

Keep me informed about Tony’s webinars, in-person coaching sessions, and free Life Planning & Goal Setting tools.


 






* indicates required

 




 

Click to download pdf Goal Setting Kit

Since 1996, I have led groups and individuals through a powerful goal-setting process with astonishing results: marriages, career changes, doubled incomes, published books, and more.

The two downloads linked from this post include all you need. Use the Specific Measurable Results (SMR) Kit workbook and podcast to follow the same planning method my executive coaching clients have long employed. Like them, you can create a (more…)

University of Chicago Alumni Career Webinar

University of Chicago Alumni Career Webinar

Mind Your Career Webinar:
Would I Benefit from Coaching?

From the University of Chicago website:
Kick-start your New Year with executive coach and dual alumnus, Tony Mayo, AB’77 MBA’78.

  • Differences between coaching, consulting, mentoring, managing, therapy, training, and just plain friendship.
  • Basic logistics of what it costs, how much time it takes, how to know if it is working, and how long the results last.
  • Finding, selecting, and getting started with an executive coach.
  • What topics and concerns are best addressed with coaching.
  • Typical components of a coaching conversation.

Click here for links to the companion articles mentioned in the presentation.

Also available as an audio-only podcast.
Click here.

 


 

The following transcript is included mostly for the search engines. If you want to read along with the video, just turn on the YouTube subtitles.

(more…)

Tony Mayo’s Executive Coaching Services

Executive Coaching Services One-to-one executive coaching: in person, by telephone, or via Internet video worldwide. Plus these options.  Speaking, Training, & Books Keynote Speeches Webinars & Workshops Tony’s Amazon Author Page The Courage to Be in...

Coaching from the Man Who Launched 40,000 Businesses

 


 

Failing entrepreneur: “My problem is money.”

Entrepreneurship Coach: “No, your problem is trying to do everything yourself. Finding people is your job.”

One of Sirolli’s current goals is to work with business schools to shift the nature of entrepreneurial education. “Most schools teach entrepreneurs that they must have all the skills—product, marketing, financial management. They reward students for putting together a go-it-alone business plan instead of collaborating or identifying who they need to start a business with. In this way, [the schools] often set their students up for failure.”

I told [the trainee coach], “There are just two things you should never do. Don’t initiate anything yourself and never try to motivate people.”

The newly anointed [Entrepreneurship Coach] objected that it would be a disaster to rely on locals for ideas, but promised to do “nothing” until given different instructions. Within two months, he had 46 projects under way.

–Ernesto Sirolli, Ph.D.
The Entrepreneurship Coach
by Sally Helgesen
in Strategy + Business

 


 

The Science of the Good Life

 


 

See it at AmazonThe founder and driving force of “Positive Psychology” has summarized his lifetime of research in this accessible book for the lay reader. Though padded with the usual flab of today’s nonfiction–refutations of criticisms most readers have never encountered, tangential personal anecdotes, and repetition–the substance of his findings are practical and enlivening. Dr. Seligman even summarizes the components of a life well lived in a mnemonic acronym.

P – E – R – M – A

  1. Positive emotion,
  2. Engagement [A/K/A Flow]
  3. positive Relationships,
  4. Meaning, and
  5. Accomplishment.

I prefer FAMES, if only for the irony, since fame is at best a fleeting and ancillary aspect of a satisfying life.

  1. Flow, escaping the self through challenging activity
  2. Accomplishment & Progress
  3. Meaning, a generative story
  4. Experiencing welcome emotions
  5. Social Support

Details below.

 


 
Selected excerpts
Flourish:
A Visionary New Understanding of
Happiness and Well-being
by Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D.

Atria Books. 2011-04-05
Page numbers from Kindle Edition.
[Tony’s comments in square brackets.]

 


 

PREFACE This book will help you flourish. There, I have finally said it. I have spent my professional life avoiding (more…)

Fear is Running Your Career and Your Company

 


 

Your efforts to lead, manage, and sell often fail because of people’s fears. The fear may be disguised as resistance, indecision, lack of creativity, poor communication or reluctance to take responsibility. You can work on the symptoms forever, but the big rewards come from dealing with the fundamental fears we all share.

We promise according to our hopes and
perform according to our fears.

— La Rochefoucauld

I painted a lot of houses when I was a teenager. Each season, when school let out, I had to force myself up the ladder again. I didn’t look down, I maintained a white knuckle grip, I kept as much of my body in contact with the ladder as possible. The occasional trips across a plank between ladders were performed sitting down with one hand on the wall. Every sway and breeze was a stomach churning calamity. Some say acrophobia isn’t a fear of heights but a fear of falling and hitting, but that wasn’t true for me. I didn’t think about falling. My body just hated being up there. Over the course of a few days I got more accustomed to being on the ladder and by the end of the summer I even made a few trips across the plank standing up. The fear never went away. I just managed it better. The next season it would be back, full force.

Why would anyone do that to themselves? Why did I tolerate so much discomfort? Why would I place myself in situations which brought up so much fear? The reason, ironically, was (more…)

Evolving from Management to Leadership

 


 

This summary note, based on recent conversations with coaching clients, is useful for any business owner who has grown beyond finding and fixing and is ready for the next stage of development.

 Strategic Leadership

Developing people is your primary work product.

  1. Empowering others by holding a space that calls forth excellent performance
  2. Being open to & on the lookout for ways the strategic leader is limiting other people’s development, e.g. rescuing and intervening.
  3. Remember to share credit and responsibility.

Expecting relevant, actionable reports rather than chasing answers

  1. Training and then trusting your people to report also supports their development, i.e., learning which events, changes, and data matter to leadership
  2. Makes visible who is up for responsibility–or not

Standing in the future

  1. Vision.
  2. Strategy
  3. Opportunities.
  4. Structures.
  5. Positioning.

The key is, more and more, stepping out of operations, perhaps by putting someone else in charge of day-to-day, even month-to-month operations.


 

Jeffrey Pfeffer

 


This was a guy in one of their [Men’s Wearhouse] stores in the Northwest who was an exceptional salesperson. But the company’s managers believe in the concept of team selling — they believe in this idea of human development that you always succeed when your colleagues around you succeed, and that you ought to participate in all this training. And this guy said, “I’m not going to do any of this stuff.”

 

The company’s big measures are the number of transactions and the dollars of sales per transaction. This guy was way above on the number of transactions but not doing very well on dollars per transaction. What that meant was that people would come in the store and he would steal them. Finally, they said to this guy, “We want you to get with the program,” and he wouldn’t.

 

So they fired him — and guess what? Sales in the store went up 30 percent. His replacement, of course, did not sell as much as he did. But everybody else in the store sold more. In other words, he was bringing everybody else down. And you see this in other organizations where there is one star.

 

Jeffrey Pfeffer
Strategy & Business