4 things successful people don't do after 5 p.m.

CBS News
By 

AMY LEVIN-EPSTEIN / 

MONEYWATCH/ October 24, 2013, 7:58 AM:

(MoneyWatch) Yesterday, this blog listed five things successful people do after 5 p.m. (a spinoff of the popular Forbes.com piece about things those same people do before 8 p.m.) But what about behaviors that can negatively impact your chances for success?  In other words, what are the things that effective employees and executives don't do as the work day winds down? Here are four.

They don't stay at work all night. Effective executives take some time to recharge each evening, said Julie Morgenstern, author of "Time Management From the Inside Out." And they don't just try to turn off their smartphone -- they actually schedule quality personal time. "First, they set an alarm to get out of the office on time. Then, they schedule something fun, relaxing or rejuvenating after work, whether it's an exercise class, meeting with a trainer, dinner with friends or family, etc.," said Morgenstern.

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They don't go straight home. If you go directly home from a long work day to a busy home life, you can still feel like you're at work -- or at least, your mind is -- when you're trying to recharge. So avoid answering work emails or speaking to clients on your ride home. "Successful people implement some sort of mindful transition between workday and home -- music, a walk, a visit to the gym -- something that signals [the] workday is over," Morgenstern said. Even listening to music or a podcast, or reading a book, on your commute can ease that transition.

They work through stress in healthy ways. Capping off a long day at the office with more than one stiff drink may not be a good idea, said efficiency expert Andrew Jensen. "Successful people strive for self-control and don't try to temporarily drown out the stresses of life through excessive drinking," he said. After all, nobody ever said that hangovers helped them perform better.

They don't excuse other unhealthy habits. "Very successful people don't neglect their bodies by fueling with junk food or by rationalizing they are too busy or too tired for exercise," Jensen said. That's not to say that there aren't great executives who have climbed the corporate ladder fueled by the vending machine and late-night food orders. But being unhealthy hardly makes it easy to function at your highest level. Plus, companies generally like their executives to look fit and attractive. So if you won't make healthy choices for your health, do it for your career.

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Amy Levin-Epstein is a freelance writer who has been published in dozens of magazines (including Glamour, Self and Redbook), websites (including AOLHealth.com, Babble.com and Details.com) and newspapers (including The New York Post and the Boston Globe). To read more of her writing, visit AmyLevinEpstein.com.

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5 things successful people do after 5 p.m.

CBS News:
By 

AMY LEVIN-EPSTEIN / 

MONEYWATCH/ October 22, 2013, 11:45 AM

(MoneyWatch) You may have read the popular post by Forbes writer Jennifer Cohen about five things incredibly successful people do before 8 a.m., which highlighted smart suggestions like visualizing their day and making their schedule top heavy. But that's not the only outside of work window in which you can pump up your productivity. Recently, I spoke to some career experts about things you can do after 5 o'clock that can help rejuvenate you and get you prepared for a top-notch tomorrow. Here are five they suggested trying:

Wrap up your day

This includes responding to every email you received during the course of your day, says Julie Morgenstern, author of "Time Management From The Inside Out.""Do this, even if just to tell the sender that you've received their email, and will get back to them within the next day or so with an answer."

Plan for tomorrow

Take a look at the rest of your work. "See what's on their schedule for the next day (and two beyond that), pull necessary prep documents and files, and have everything set to hit the ground running the next morning," says Morgenstern. And prioritize that massive To Do list. "Name your top 3 (to 6) priorities for the next day-to ensure you proactively complete those priorities, no matter what else flies at you unexpectedly," says Morgenstern. Don't forget to do the same for your team. "Plan your team's next day's priorities, and send out instructional emails or check ins."

Take time for friends and family

Successful people invest intentional time in their personal networks, says efficiency expert Andrew Jensen. "They recognize that success at work is empty without success in their home and with their family," says he adds. The key is to make it quality time. "They actively exercise listening, while restraining from dominating the conversations," says Jensen.

They take care of themselves

Investing in your health is always a smart personal, as well as business decision (if you're constantly sick, or even just tired, you won't function at your peak). "[Successful people] eat a healthy dinner, understanding the value of nutritiously investing into themselves and the corresponding returns they can expect. They exercise, channeling away pent up stress while strengthening their bodies and helping ensure a better night's sleep," says Jensen. While you're taking care of your body, don't forget to keep your personal finances healthy, too. "Don't let it pile up and become an increasingly stressful distraction," says Jensen.

They sleep for 8+ hours

Think staying super late is great for your career? While there are some circumstances that warrant it, in general sleep is a good career choice. "A good night's sleep is the secret weapon of highly successful people," says Alex Doman, CEO of Advanced Brain Technologies and author of "Healing At The Speed of Sound." "In the short term, a lack of adequate sleep can affect judgment, mood, ability to learn and retain information, and may increase the risk of serious accidents and injury," says Doman, adding that over time the effects may be even more grave. "In the long term, chronic sleep deprivation may lead to a host of health problems including, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and obesity."

Make these five behaviors after-hours habits, and you might find that you become efficient -- and successful -- over time.

© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

• Amy Levin-EpsteinON TWITTER »
  View all articles by Amy Levin-Epstein on CBS MoneyWatch »
  Amy Levin-Epstein is a freelance writer who has been published in dozens of magazines (including Glamour, Self and Redbook), websites (including AOLHealth.com, Babble.com and Details.com) and newspapers (including The New York Post and the Boston Globe). To read more of her writing, visit AmyLevinEpstein.com.

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Emotional Leveraging: It’s Really Not Manipulation?

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Jim Sniechowski, PhD

“Leverage” has become a significant if not dominant concept in the corporate lexicon and it’s now a buzzword used every day in many ways. Here are examples of how I’ve heard “leverage” used: “He carries a lot of leverage” and “You’re not exercising the right leverage” and “How do we leverage these relationships?” and “We need to leverage this negotiation” and “We have to leverage our human capital.”

So just what is “leverage?”

Leverage is using something you already have---in the case of human capital the skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by the employees of a company---to achieve something new or better.In other words you don’t have to invent something to achieve your objective. You can use what is already present.

So what about emotional leverage? What do you think and how do you feel about the idea of using people’s emotions to achieve some objective? Many people would say it’s repulsive, unfair and controlling, and what’s worse, even devious and manipulative. But is it really?

Understanding Financial Leverage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the purposes of this post, consider that you are managing a person who is a passionate idealist. He assesses his decisions and actions through the lens and measure of his ideals which he holds dear. However you, as his manager, can clearly see that his commitment to his ideals, partly conscious and partly unconscious, is standing in the way of his getting along with the members of his team. His believes that the other team members fall short of what he views as acceptable. According to him, unless they can “come up to” his bar he has difficulty working with them. But he is an excellent talent and an asset to the company. What do you do?

You can request that he be given an individual contributor role. But for the overall purposes of your department he has been assigned to you and it makes most sense that he be on your team.

You can try various techniques to “get him” to conform. But trying to change someone, no matter how important or valuable your objective, is generally a futile endeavor. People don’t change unless there’s something in it for them. So what do you do?

People Buy Emotionally and Justify Logically

An axiom in sales states that people buy emotionally, whether it’s an object or an idea, and use logic to justify what they’ve bought or bought into. To sell or persuade someone of something you must begin with establishing emotional appeal.

Idealists crave that which transcends the bounds of the material world; because for them reality is fundamentally mental and mentally constructed. They are less attracted to money, or titles, or material things---although unconsciously that may be a different story as long as you can link it to their beliefs. They are powered by ideas placing high value on emotional self-awareness as a precondition for the bettering of humanity. Applying the sales axiom to facilitate change you must begin by “embracing” rather than resisting what the idealist holds dear---his need for excellence, the purity of his point of view, and his desire to contribute to the betterment of humanity. That’s where you will find his emotional base. In sales it’s called the “sweet spot.”

This describes only part of the idealist’s character structure but it will do for the purpose of illustrating the power of non-manipulative emotional leverage. What he is committed to is generally of high value. If his beliefs can be used to turn him toward cooperatively it would benefit the team and his own sense of fulfillment.

Emotional Leverage

To employ emotional leverage begin by recognizing that emotions are information, not unlike thoughts. They are data points you must assess. If your intention is to benefit him as well as yourself you won’t abuse his emotions. You won’t disrespect or abuse what he values. But you must keep his emotions at an arm’s length. You cannot become immersed in them or you will lose your ability to assess and determine what is best for both of you. For the purposes of persuading him to become a better team player you must see his emotions as a lever to move him.

To succeed using emotional leverage you must:

● Remain aware that his vision is the product of an emotional base and, no matter how he rationalizes his position, he clings to it for some emotional reason;

● See that if you want him move in your direction enough to be able to work well with the team your task is to discover the emotional value that drives his vision---his sweet spot; and

● Understand that once you know his emotional sweet spot you can craft an approach that blends his need with yours so that you both can feel successful.

And you are doing so by leveraging his emotional state.

To reiterate, you are using something he already has, his passionate idealism, to achieve something new or better for you and for him.

The point here is to keep in mind and be sensitive to the emotional elements involved---mostly in him. In that way you can use emotional leverage to best serve him, your team, the job, and the company, and not least of all yourself as an excellent manager.

This example of an idealist is only one of many personality types you will encounter but the process of emotional leveraging remains the same.

How do feel about emotional leveraging? Please let me know.

(Photo Credit: Jenny Waterloo Flickr)

Jim Sniechowski, PhD and his wife Judith Sherven, PhD http://JudithandJim.com have developed a penetrating perspective on people’s resistance to success, which they call The Fear of Being Fabulous. Recognizing the power of unconscious programming to always outweigh conscious desires, they assert that no one is ever failing. They are always succeeding. The question is, at what?

Currently working as consultants on retainer to LinkedIn providing executive coaching, leadership training and consulting as well as working with private clients around the world, they continually prove that when unconscious beliefs are brought to the surface, the barriers to greater success and leadership presence begin to fade away. They call it Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous.http://OvercomingtheFearofBeingFabulous.com

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Why I Get My Best Ideas in the Shower

strategy+business magazine:

Theodore Kinni

I get a lot of good ideas in the shower, but I never thought too much about why until I read a new book by Ori Brafman and Judah Pollack, The Chaos Imperative: How Chance and Disruption Increase Innovation, Effectiveness, and Success (Crown Business, 2013). It turns out that it’s not the water pelting my noggin or the shampoo that promotes healthy, silky smooth hair triggering my creativity. It’s the default mode network in my brain.

Neuroscientists have long known that the human brain is always on, even when its owner isn’t consciously using it. (For other perspectives on this phenomenon published in s+b, see Matthew May’s piece from the Spring 2013 issue, and the Thought Leader interview with Loran Nordgren in the Autumn 2013 issue.) In fact, that’s exactly when the default mode network—a connected group of functional areas within the brain—is most active. As Brafman and Pollock explain it, “The default mode is always engaged, unless we actually interrupt it to perform a specific task.”

This neural network helps us evaluate our environment, reflect on it, and make connections between external information and the data we have stored in our heads. These connections are the fodder for all kinds of creative endeavors, including business innovation. ...

English: Albert Einstein Français : Portrait d'Albert Einstein (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Brafman and Pollack would say that my shower is “white space”—a time and a place in which I let my thoughts become less structured and more chaotic. In The Chaos Imperative, they point out how the white space in the lives of people like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs produced some pretty good ideas, like the theory of relativity and all those digital fonts in your computer. The authors also describe how they have worked with the U.S. Army to produce fresh thinking by introducing a bit of white space into an environment in which being “on task” is a fetish.

So, if you’re pursuing innovation in your company (and what company isn’t?), what can you do get white space working in your innovation process? Brafman and Pollack offer these four tips in the book:

Image via CrunchBase

Employ white space judiciously. It works best when you have a clear goal in mind and have already spent some time consciously working on a problem.

Consider how much white space is too much. Ask people if they feel like they need more or less unstructured time.

Move. As long as it doesn’t require a good deal of conscious thought, exercise is a proven way to trigger the default mode network.

Create a micro white space. Don’t look for answers as soon as you ask a question; give people 20 seconds or more to reflect. Likewise, start an idea session with a minute of silent reflection on the meeting’s purpose.

Theodore Kinni is senior editor for books at strategy+business. 

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Seven Ways to Make Your Strategic Planning Relevant

strategy+business magazine
Matthew Siegel

One of the most important shifts in many companies today is the move toward a capabilities-driven strategy. Companies that define a “way to play,” lined up with a handful of key differentiating capabilities that deliver on that value proposition, have a definite competitive advantage. Your own company may have redesigned your strategy accordingly. Now it’s time to execute.

English: Capabilities value contribution to strategy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Undoubtedly, you already have a planning and performance management system—otherwise known as a strategic plan and corporate budget. This is a group of deeply ingrained methods for allocating costs and tracking. ... They tend to foster silo-based thinking and to spread investments across all activities. That makes them irrelevant to your strategy—at best. At worst, they will undermine the development of key capabilities. ...

A truly relevant planning and performance management system will help you instill the discipline and accountability to make hard choices. It will make it easier, not harder, to assign the lion’s share of investment to your differentiating capabilities. And it will keep things on track with clearly articulated objectives and performance metrics. Here are seven guiding principles that will help you put such a system into place:

1. Emphasize key capabilities in your strategic plan. Look beyond short-term marketplace opportunities and challenges. Articulate what you need to do, different from what any other company can do, to deliver on the company’s unique value proposition. Tie strategic objectives to those capabilities. ...

English: A diagram of the (strategic) planning cycle showing the key stages in the loop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

2. Spell out capability-building initiatives in the plan. Design roadmaps for developing and steadily upgrading specific capabilities over time. Then, in each annual plan thereafter, spell out how you can further advance these capability-building initiatives. ...

3. Manage discretionary and non-discretionary spending separately. A successful strategy concentrates investment dollars where they are needed most: the company’s distinctive capabilities. Traditional budgeting can undermine this goal by allowing individual units to spend discretionary dollars as they see fit—often favoring pet projects, even if they have no strategic relevance. To prevent this, use zero-based budgeting to determine the amount of non-discretionary expenditures needed to “keep the lights on” throughout the company. The rest of your spending should go through a management process, connected directly to the strategic plan.

4. Use cross-functional governance to balance company priorities against the priorities of individual business areas. Governance forums should use a set of clearly defined decision rights on a regular basis to steer the business. ...

5. Create guidelines for evaluating investment demands. Your company is subject to a range of investment demands with varying degrees of relevance to strategic priorities. Detailed investment guidelines will help assess these requests, especially when you’re balancing “apples and oranges” demands (such as regulatory compliance expenditures versus capital spending proposals). ...

6. Give leaders cross-functional authority to build capabilities and hold them accountable. Capability-building efforts fail when nobody has the authority to carry them out. Help individual leaders build capability systems across functional lines by making sure others can see that they have the requisite decision rights and position. ...

7. Measure and reward progress. Building a strategic capability can often take months or years. Explain clearly how each initiative bolsters a critical capability. Establish objectives and milestones for each initiative. Use these benchmarks to measure and reward progress toward the ultimate goal: a market-leading capability.

A more relevant planning and performance management system yields significant long-term benefits, because it continuously evaluates your company’s performance against strategic goals. The performance benchmarks tell you where and how external changes are affecting your progress. This provides a real-time snapshot of your capabilities at work in the marketplace. Strengths and weaknesses become clear, informing your investment decisions for the next strategic planning cycle. After a few years, this virtuous feedback loop can become second nature, paving the way for real collective mastery of the capabilities that distinguish your company.

Matthew Siegel is a principal with the organizational change and leadership practice at Booz & Company in New York. 

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Don’t Ask, Don’t Learn

strategy+business magazine:

David Silverman is an author, teacher and senior executive at a Fortune 100 firm.

We need to teach our children how to ask better questions. Because although most jobs don’t have the

Camera E-207 show a plume near the aft strut that attaches the right solid rocket booster (RSRB) to the external tank. Photo courtesy NASA (Štart raketoplánu Challenger STS-51-L. Kamera zaznamenala plameň šľahajúci z motora SRB) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

potential to impact the world in the waythe NASA Challenger disaster did, when employees don’t possess the tools to make a team excel through questioning, we will continue to experience failures that could have been avoided.

Without skill in asking, fraud, incompetence, and ego dominate instead of reason and group cohesion. Too few of us are taught to ask questions as a means to overcome these destructive forces.

Inquiry, as we are taught in school, comes in two main categories: “I don’t understand, teacher” and “Let me show you how much smarter I am than you, teacher.” The I-don’t-understand question is simply that. The teacher presents something, the student raises his or her hand and says, “But what if there is no squared variable?” The teacher explains, “Then use method B,” and that’s that. ...

English: A logical fallacy. Statement 1: Most of the green is touching the red. Statement 2: Most of the red is touching the blue. Logical fallacy: Since most of the green is touching red, and most of the red is touching blue, most of the green must be touching blue. This, however, is a false statement. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As for the let-me-show-you question, well, it isn’t really a question at all. A professor I had once lectured that there was no such thing as “facts,” only “perception based on cultural norms”—for example, a language that works by referencing cardinal direction (north, south, etc.) rather than relative (left, right, etc.). My question: “If someone shoots you with a gun, aren’t you, in fact, dead?” I wasn’t really looking for an answer—although the professor did gamely suggest that he might not be dead if his culture didn’t accept that—I was showing off that I thought I found a logical fallacy. I was using questioning not to gain knowledge, but to gain position. ...

Indeed, because this is how we have been conditioned, we continue this approach to questioning in the workplace. I-don’t-understand gets asked by junior people who, just like students, will stop after the first or second attempt at gaining clarity, shut up, slink off, and attempt to resolve their confusion on their own or by hoping someone corrects them—just like in school.
The let-me-show-you “question” is often posed by people who have run aground in corporate politics. It is sometimes called “grenade throwing” and used to derail others, which wastes everyone’s time. ...

There is a better way, though. One that combines the honest inquiry of “I don’t understand” and the

Camera captures grey smoke emitting from the right-hand SRB on Space Shuttle Challenger before the start of STS-51-L. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

potentially valuable wisdom embedded in “let me show you.” I’ll call it “management questioning.”...

Boss: “What are you doing?”

Employee: Cursory answer.

Boss: “Why do you think you should be doing that?”

Employee: Somewhat more detailed answer.

Boss: “How does that align with what [the company, I, your boss, our strategy document] want(s)?”

Employee: Hopefully enlightened response, but perhaps not.

Boss: “How can we adjust what you’re doing to match?”

Employee: Increasingly engaged response.

Rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

In management questioning, someone, and not always the leader, asks pertinent questions and doesn’t stop until the explanation is fully, ... understood by all. This is the kind of questioning that can uncover deep faults in organizations that are headed in the wrong direction. Great managers are always acting as if they are an independent investigator of their own area of responsibility. They hold the line of questioning until a satisfactory conclusion has been reached, and they do it focused on group progress, not on establishing their own superior knowledge.

.

English: On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger and her seven-member crew were lost when a ruptured O-ring in the right Solid Rocket Booster caused an explosion soon after launch. On the day of Space Shuttle Challenger's launch, icicles draped the Kennedy Space Center. The unusually cold weather, beyond the tolerances for which the rubber seals were approved, most likely caused the O-ring failure. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

.. A great example of staying the course in management questioning is Richard Feynman’s inquiry into the Challenge disaster. If his tenacious techniques had been employed in the first place, there may not have been the same tragic result. Yes, that may be an unfair use of hindsight, but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to consider.

Richard Feynmans don’t exist in most companies. But anyone at any level of management can overcome the limits of how they’ve been taught to question. Yes, it takes nerve to re-ask a question others think has already been answered. Yes, it takes real self-control not to show off your own brilliance when pointing out a gap in reasoning. But it is down this finely calibrated road of confidence without condescension that true leaders learn to go.

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