To live is to suffer.
–The Buddha
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, there must be a in meaning in suffering. … Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
— Viktor Emil Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning
One always finds one’s burden again. … The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
–Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus
Life is mainly froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble.
Courage in your own.
See also on this blog, Be Kind.
A transformational leadership style, one that conveys a sense of trust, meaningfulness, and individually challenges employees, contributes to greater employee well-being*
- Leading by example,
- Contributing to a common goal,
- Intellectual stimulation,
- Positive feedback for good performance,
- Recognizing the needs of others, &
- Resolving conflict
–Christine Jacobs, University of Cologne
in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
via Transformational Leadership
Has Positive Effects on Employee Well-Being.
*Psychological well-being includes:
self-acceptance
the establishment of quality ties to other
a sense of autonomy in thought and action
the ability to manage complex environments to suit personal needs and values
the pursuit of meaningful goals and a sense of purpose in life
continued growth and development as a person
I have great respect for Dan Gallwey; he is a pioneer of coaching and really gets it. Heard him just yesterday on a video from the 70s or 80s, paraphrasing.
When an employee or competitor fails to deliver what you require, start by inquiring into what he sees as the requirement, what he saw in the performance. Growth comes from seeing the world differently, not from being criticized or corrected.
—Tim Gallwey in a conversation with
John Wooden, Red Auerbach,
George Allen, & Werner Erhard
Bad presentation–or resistant audience?Executives often find themselves assigning blame. Many believe that ranking and sorting their colleagues is a key management skill–and I agree. A much rarer and more powerful skill is the ability to see our own contribution to the unwelcome behavior we see around us. Why is self-awareness more powerful than judging others? Because altering my own behavior is the best access I have to altering the future.
I know this. I teach this. I also forget to practice it.
In November of 2007, for example, I was in San Diego attending a weekend training for coaches. A breakout session was led by the author of one of the best-known books on coaching. It is a good book and I was very eager to attend. His ninety minute workshop was scheduled six times over two days–I was in a morning session on day two.
The author immediately struck me as irritated, aggressive, and arrogant. (Here I am, always ranking and sorting.) His opening seemed vague and rambling and his responses to questions were not pertinent. (Here I go, proceeding to collect evidence for my case.) People were shaking their heads and looking at each other. Coaches are a fairly supportive audience but in the first fifteen minutes, five of the thirty people walked out, one while the author was responding (elliptically) to his question! (Perfect. I have other people agreeing with me, a seductive substitute for truth.) I decided to (more…)
The Motley Fool: As you well know, Costco has taken some heat on Wall Street for being overly generous to its employees. According to a recent New York Times story, Costco store workers earn an average of around $17 an hour, which is 42% more than employees at Sam’s Club, which is owned by Wal-Mart. You have said Costco’s pay structure makes for good business. Explain.
Costco co-founder & CEO Jim Sinegal: Well, first of all, we have a very low turnover in our company. Our turnover is something in the 20% range, and that is including a lot of seasonal hires that we have both in the summer and at Christmas. After employees have been with us for more than a year, that turnover rate goes below 6%, so we take great pride in the fact that people join us and they stay with us. Our attitude has always been that if you hire good people and provide good wages and good jobs and more than that — if you provide careers — that good things will happen to your company. I think we can say that that has been proved by the quality of people that we have and how they have built our organization.
Costco vs. Wal-Mart
Comparing some workplace statistics,
as reported by the companies.
- Employees covered by company health insurance
- Costco 82%
- Wal-Mart 48%
- Insurance-enrollment waiting periods (for part-time workers)
- Costco 6 months
- Wal-Mart 2 years
- Portion of health-care premium paid by company
- Costco 92%
- Wal-Mart 66%
- Annual worker turnover rate
- Costco 24%
- Wal-Mart 50%
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Curiosity, Confidence, and Your Cerebral Cortex Podcast
A conversation with executive coaching client Ron Dimon. Part 9
This latest podcast is part nine of a funny and practical conversation between top executive coach Tony Mayo and his longtime client Ron Dimon. Ron is an expert on the use of information by executives of large organizations. Listen as two experienced business people play with useful ideas in this episode including:
Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.
You may also set up an automatic “feed” to non-Apple devices by using this link: click here for other devices.
In the first year or so it wasn’t just about proving how tough I was, I had to be tough. I was pretty sharp with people. But I’d learned in the classroom, the last thing you want to do is put somebody down because then they freeze, and not only do they freeze, but the whole class freezes. I had to relearn that lesson as a manager. … Early on I didn’t know how to delegate things. I was always trying to do other people’s jobs. I learned that first of all, you’ll drive yourself crazy doing that, and secondly you won’t have very good people working for you very long.
…
I found it useful to remember that most institutions don’t want to change. They’re institutions because they’ve developed a certain set of traditions and norms and expertise, and change is hard. A lot of the work I’d done as an academic affirmed that usually institutions change when they’re failing. It’s very hard to make them change when they’re succeeding. They take the cues too late from the environment.
I found three things helpful.
One is that you have to paint a picture of other times that that institution has responded to change and difficulty successfully.
Secondly, [it helps] if you can find in the institution a counter-narrative that supports the direction of change.
And finally, you have to look to see whether there are impediments to people doing the right thing. Mostly in good organizations, and the Department of State was certainly one, and I found this at Stanford too, people want to do the right thing — they don’t want to be obstructionist — but sometimes there are things that make it hard for them to do the right thing.
— Condoleezza Rice
On being Provost of Stanford University
& Secretary of State
in Harvard Business Review
Levy: Let’s talk about web services. Amazon Web Services is dominant in hosting—one observer says that you are the Coke of the field, and there’s no Pepsi. How did an ecommerce site wind up in the position where it’s hosting web powerhouses like Foursquare, NASA, Netflix, and The New York Times? … Young startups all tell me that even if Google offers them free hosting, they still want to use Amazon.
Why do you think that is?
Jeff Bezos: We were determined to build the best services but to price them at a level that customers couldn’t match, even if they were willing to use inferior products. Tech companies always have high margins, except for Amazon. We’re the only tech company with low margins.
Levy: How did you do it?
Jeff Bezos: We really obsess over small defects. That’s what drives up costs. Because the most expensive thing you can do is make a mistake. We can afford to focus on smaller and smaller defects and eliminate them at their root. That reduces cost, because things just work.
—Wired
December 2011
Years ago, while I was establishing myself in a new executive coaching practice, I supported my family by working as a part-time, outsourced CFO. Here is a reminiscence of a deep learning I earned during one of those accounting gigs.
I sought help from my own executive coach with the very difficult behavior of a bookkeeper employed by my client. She had called several urgent meetings with the partners and each time threatened to quit, more or less because of me. These meetings were very exasperating as she made charges that were either too vague to dispute or clearly contrary to plain facts. For example, although we repeatedly assured her that she had her job as long as she wanted it she insisted she could not continue to work under such uncertainty and would resign immediately because we were conspiring to take her job away. The partners felt obligated to placate and mollify her because she was the only bookkeeper out of several they had tried who was able to make any progress in getting their bills out to clients.
I said to my executive coach, “I am stressed and bothered because of her unpredictable behavior, of course, but I am mostly bothered by the fact that it bothers me. I am so ‘trained’ and ‘transformed’ I ought to be able to deal with her behavior without becoming stressed, hurt, or angry. I try to remain calm, not react to her outbursts, and keep on working because I need this income. I do what is necessary just to keep getting paid, so why do I lose sleep and spend my non-billable time talking about her with my coach, family, and friends?”
By the way, is this scenario reminding you of anything in your life, right now?
My coach reminded me of the dangers of attachment, of identifying with our property or positions. We confuse preferred outcomes with necessary results. We grasp so avidly to particular bits of property or actions by others that we forget we can still be ourselves without them. We attach money or prestige to ourselves so firmly that we forget that we are not our results or our reputations. What I want is not what I am.
I then remembered the old samurai expression (I suppose all samurai expressions are now old).
The most effective warrior dies before entering the battle.
The bookkeeper was not damaging my body or physically invading my free time. My attachments were the only things making my life difficult. I was attached to looking good in the eyes of my client, I was attached to (more…)
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