Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

Clients

February 27th, 2018
Tags: business consulting, business services
Posted in Business Consulting, Conflict, Productivity

People regularly ask us “who are your clients?” The answer is broad. We help people work better together is not just a tagline. it is truly what we do. We’re business consultants. In this sense, any business or organization with employees and leaders qualifies. Throughout decades, Raleigh Consulting Group has worked with businesses big and small, next door and abroad. As small as less than 10 employees and as big as a few thousand workers. The field in which these businesses are in–bio pharma, education, insurance, finance, marketing, doesn’t matter because we won’t come in and tell you how to create better medicine or what financial strategies to develop. Instead, we focus on our field of expertise; people, business strategies, leadership, teams, among other business categories.

Most business owners and top leadership are often too focused on the day-to-day tasks of running their business (as they should be) that they overlook the morale of their organization. They don’t notice that their departments aren’t communicating well. Sometimes they miss the mark when it comes to inspiring and empowering their employees to do their best, independently, until problems arise. Few potential clients reach out when profits are high and when employee turn-over is down. Most call when there is a “people problem”: Recently hired employees keep quitting, unexpectedly. A new employee is clashing with an existing colleague. Individuals in the organization are rejecting and fear change. It is exciting to see that many companies are starting to see that investing in their teams is just part of building their businesses. Because if they don’t develop and enrich their teams, they’ll leave for an organization that will.

Our ideal client is a decision maker within the organization: A CEO, President, Founder, a VP. Once an issue that affects people in your organization is identified, it is critical to get right to work and find a solution. Reach out today! There’s no issue too sensitive or too big. It’s likely that what-ever you or your business is facing, we’ve encountered it before and have solutions. We’ll help you get through it.

Poor Hiring Interviews

June 19th, 2017
Tags: benchmark, hiring, interviewing, job interviews
Posted in Hiring & Recruitment, Newsletter, Productivity

I’m a horrible interviewer. In the past, when I’ve had a need to hire a person, I interviewed for personality only. Did my own personality match well with the other person? Did we have an engaging conversation? Did I see them fitting into Raleigh Consulting Group? My first impression of someone usually didn’t predict future job success. I was going about it the wrong way. This New York Times article “The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews” confirms what I already knew, that unplanned interviews are not a smart or efficient way to find the best fit for a position.

“This is a widespread problem. Employers like to use free-form, unstructured interviews to “get to know” a job candidate” writes Jason Dana. He explains that in 1979 a study was conducted at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston to see if interviewers could predict future performance of medical school candidates. They could not accurately predict future performance or attrition. Research that he and his colleagues have conducted shows that the problem with interviews is worse than irrelevance. They can be harmful. They can undercut the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees. According to this article, the key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. So great is people’s confidence in their ability to glean valuable information from a face to face conversation that they feel they can do so even if they know they are not being dealt with squarely. But they are wrong.
What can be done?

From the article along with my suggestions based on the experiences I have working with my clients.

1. Conduct a Job-Related Benchmark: Understand what the job wants. Employ the help of subject matter experts in your company to find out what the position is accountable for accomplishing. Often, the owner or leader of the company think they know what the job wants, but the best people to ask are the top performing employees in the position you are seeking to hire.
2. Structure Job Related Interviews: Ask all candidates the same questions. This procedure makes interviews more reliable and predictive of job success. Once you’ve gathered information about the candidate’s credentials and skills, compare them to some of your top performing employees. Do they share similar qualities? Are they driven by the same things? Are they comfortable in the same work environment where they will be?

3. Create Job Related Simulations: Have candidates complete a simulation of the job they are applying for. I know that this is hard in some instances, so if you can’t physically have them complete a simulation, bring up real-life scenarios. Ask them how they would solve an issue with a customer, how they would mentor an employee or what they would propose as a leader of a business to move it forward. Hearing their ideas will give you insight into how they deal with people, pace and procedures.

It’s always worth the investment to search for the perf ect candidate. Most times onboarding the wrong person is detrimental to the organization’s culture, and you’re not doing a favor to a candidate who will eventually grow to dislike their work, dislike you and not perform to the best of their abilities if they’ve been selected for the wrong position. Fit is key.

To read the article yourself, click here.

For more information on how we benchmark, go here.

Doing What You Love Outside of Work

March 31st, 2016
Tags: enjoying work, motivation, productivity, work-life balance
Posted in Coaching, Newsletter, Productivity, Time Management

“Do what you love in your life outside work.” It’s an idea that Roger W. Ferguson Jr. proposes in a recent Time article. He elaborates that “it’s helpful to see life-work not so much as separate spheres that must be ‘balanced,’ but as a continuum, each falling into and influencing the other.”

As someone who struggles with life-work balance, I find this idea comforting. It’s hard to remove your professional life from your personal life, especially when you enjoy seeing work colleagues and friends outside of work.

Ferguson offers some specific advice on what to love outside of work:

Physically: “My exercise regimen gives me the energy and stamina to tackle whatever comes my way during the workweek.” Although, unlike the author, I do not exercise for an hour each morning, I have started to do push ups and sit-ups with the help of a handy app.

Intellectually: “My reading habits keep me on top of what’s happening in my industry, the economy, the markets, and the world at large — helping to inform my decision-making at the office.” I too love reading magazines, an online newspaper and scrolling through social media to catch the latest things that others in my circle are reading. Some of you probably have received forwarded articles from me.

Emotionally: “My involvement with outside organizations enables me to connect with all sorts of fascinating people— demographers, educators, social scientists, healthcare leaders — who have invaluable insights about trends with important business implications.” My best days are spent casually catching up with people. I truly believe that face-to-face time with others can be inspiring, motivating and fun. As much as my schedule allows, I try to meet up for lunch or coffee with people, because I know that this is the best way to build relationships.

The restorative power of doing what you love is invaluable. In an ideal world, you love your work and that is what makes you happy; but if not, find creative ways to stay stimulated and healthy outside of your work environment. Perhaps a yoga class, regular walks in local parks and trails, going out with friends for dinner where you are intentional about not bringing up work related stressors.

Try it! You’ll see that it will fill you with energy and positivity. And we all could use some of that throughout our week.

Avoiding Manic Mondays

September 24th, 2015
Posted in Coaching, Newsletter, Productivity, Time Management, Uncategorized

Generally speaking, I am a very organized person. Yet at times, I let things get behind. Once the awareness of my situation hits me in the face, I get into action quickly. It always surprises me how little time it takes to get back on track. However, we all know that prevention is the best medicine. That’s why these tips stood out to me. They can help all of us stay on top of the stuff that just builds up. (Making those Mondays not quite so daunting.) Inc.com brings you these tips below to achieve a more relaxing start to the week:

1. Plan your week on Sunday.

If you wait until Monday morning to plan and schedule your week, it will not take long before you find yourself engulfed in daily business “fires” and adding tasks and meetings before you even finish your planning. Instead, consider planning your week on Sunday evening, when it is quiet and you have the time and space to concentrate. You will sleep better knowing the task is done and you can devote more time to a morning routine that eases you into the week.

2. Create a morning routine.

There is plenty of evidence that shows that getting out of bed a few minutes early, rather than snoozing your way through your morning, has tremendous benefits to your mental and physical wellness. If you have a tough time in the mornings, try getting up and taking a quick and brisk walk around your block, which will get your blood flowing and tell your body and mind that it is time to wake.

3. Purge that email.

Your email box can be incredibly intimidating on Monday morning, filled with unread emails from the weekend and the previous week, all of which will immediately make you feel like you’re behind. Instead of reading every old email, delete them. Start with newsletters–they are old news anyway–and then find the confidence to purge any email that was not important enough to answer immediately in the first place. Too many emails to really get through? Consider one of the many applications, such as Sanebox, that can help you get your email under control.

4. Connect with a friend.

On Monday, take five or 10 minutes to call a good friend or reconnect with an old friend, one with whom you can have a non-business conversation. These conversations often offer perspective to my life and typically end in a smile–and they help two people ease into the week.

5. Take one new personal risk.

There is a great deal of benefit to writing out your goals. I like to spend five minutes each day to review my ongoing goals and priorities. On Mondays, however, I make it a point to set one new and aggressive personal goal for the week, such as trying new exercise, reading a book, or learning a new song on the guitar. The point is to provide you motivation during your busy week to pursue an interest that you enjoy outside of work.

6. Make an “appreciation list.”

In addition to making out that extensive weekly to-do list, also take a minute to write down at least five things for which you are grateful. More than likely, they will be the same from week to week–your wonderful family is always a good thing to be happy about–but doing so will put life in perspective and the positive emotions you create could affect your happiness, optimism, and self-esteem.

7. Pay it forward with kindness.

Keep in mind that you are sharing this Monday with everyone on earth, so to help relieve the stress of the beginning of the week, consider an unselfish act of kindness during your morning, such as a compliment to a complete stranger or leaving a co-worker a kind note. It will make both of your days a little better. 8. Indulge in inspiration. If your week is starting off slow, consider allowing yourself the guilty pleasure of indulging in a little inspirational content. Something as simple as an inspirational quote or a lengthier article from UpWorthy or video talk from TED Talk can give you the boost you need to get over the Monday blues. Here’s wishing you a wonderful week ahead…

-George Alwon

How Good Is Your Boss’ Emotional Intelligence?

May 1st, 2015
Tags: emotional intelligence, EQ, productivity, workplace relations
Posted in Connecting, Newsletter, Productivity

Emotional intelligence is about being able to understand your and others’ interior lives and how your actions and environments affect them. Believe it or not, those above the middle management level don’t always score so high on their emotional intelligence. Travis Bradbury, author and co-founder of TalentSmart, analyzed the score profiles of more than a million people, working across industries on six continents. Middle managers stand out with the highest emotional intelligence (EQ) scores in the workplace.

Companies have a clear tendency to promote people into front-line supervisory and then middle management positions because they’re good with people. They assume that a manager with high EQ is someone that people will want to work for. Interestingly, emotional intelligence scores decline precipitously as you move above middle management, with CEOs having the lowest EQs in the workplace, on average.

Here, Bradbury writes for Forbes and offers up some of his favorite EQ-boosting strategies below.

These tips apply to anyone, even if you’re not a leader.
Acknowledge Other People’s Feelings
Assertive, action-oriented executives don’t exactly ignore other people’s feelings. What they tend to do instead is to marginalize them or “fix” them so that they don’t get in the way of action. While some have suggested that this is a predominantly male problem, it can more accurately be described as a “power problem.” People who fail to acknowledge other people’s feelings fail to realize that lingering emotions inhibit effective action. So the next time you notice someone on your team expressing a strong emotion, ask him or her about it. Then listen intently and play back what you have just heard in summary form. By validating their emotions, you’ll help them feel understood so that they can move forward without hindrance.

When You Care, Show It
Good leaders always notice when people on their teams are doing good work, but they don’t often show it. When you appreciate something that another person does, let him or her know about it. Even a quick email or pat on the back goes a long way in this regard. There are people who do great work around you every day. Don’t put off letting them know how you feel about it. Your praise will build fierce loyalty and inspire your people to work even harder.

Watch Your Emotions Like A Hawk
You may think you have a world-class poker face, but if you’re like the average executive, your weakest self-awareness skills are “understanding how your emotions impact others” and “recognizing the role you have played in creating difficult circumstances.” In other words, you would become a much more effective leader if you obtained a better understanding of what you feel, when you feel it. Practice this by taking notice of your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors just as a situation unfolds. The goal is to slow yourself down and take in all that is in front of you, so that you can understand how your emotions influence your behavior and alter your perception of reality.

Sleep
I can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and improving your relationships. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation also raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present. The pressure that leaders are under often makes them feel as if they don’t have time to sleep, but not taking the time to get a decent night’s sleep is often the one thing keeping you from getting things under control.

Quash Negative Self-Talk
A big step in developing emotional intelligence involves stopping negative self-talk in its tracks. The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that—thoughts, not facts. When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it’s time to stop and write them down. Literally stop what you’re doing and write down what you’re thinking. Once you’ve taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity. When it feels like something “always” or “never” happens, this is just your brain’s natural threat tendency inflating the perceived frequency or severity of an event. Identifying and labeling your thoughts as thoughts by separating them from the facts will help you escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive new outlook.

Now, somewhat contrary to what the article says, I know many CEO’s with high emotional intelligence. I guess that is because they know enough to bring us in to help with the development of their people and themselves.

For those of you who’d like to check out your own EQ levels, we offer you a free Emotional Quotient™ 3 from Target Training International. (Please limit one per person.) This is of course just one example of the many developmental assessments RCG offers.

How to Reclaim Your Focused Attention

February 20th, 2015
Tags: focus, focusing, productivity, self-monitoring, time-management, time-wasting
Posted in Coaching, Newsletter, Productivity, Time Management

Waste my time? I am my biggest time waster, which I admit can be enjoyable. Being productive all the time might make me a dull guy. And, yes, there is more to life than “being productive.” That being said, there are tricks that we have all learned to focus better on the task at hand. My favorite is having turned off that little notice on the bottom of my screen that announces every email I get. I did that years ago and it really helped me.
What is your favorite distractor eliminator? And how well do you manage your time? (Yes, I know, we can’t manage time…we can only manage our activities).

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 that is stressful and demoralizing. While some people are able to easily get through the day with many achievements ticked off their list, others seem to accomplish very little. With so many tasks and distractions pulling us in so many directions, it takes focus to…well, focus!
Below are some helpful tips from Harvard Business Review on how to harness your attention span:

Build Capacity.
We can expand our attentive capacity through a commitment to practices such as meditation, journaling, time in nature, regular physical activity, and good sleep hygiene. All of these activities support our ability to direct our focus, filter out distractions, and manage our emotions, and we can often realize their benefits with a modest investment of time.While these activities are often enjoyable in themselves, they aren’t indulgences–they’re investments in our ability to operate at peak effectiveness. High-performing professionals often enjoy success early in their careers by virtue of their ability to forego activities like this–they cut back on sleep or go without exercise for extended periods of time. But while those sacrifices temporarily expand our capacity for throughput, they actually diminish our capacity for focused attention.2. Plug Leaks.
Attention is finite, and our ability to focus in the moment is severely limited. Because distractions can fatally undermine effective leadership, it’s critical to avoid “attention leaks.” The functions on our phones and other devices that beep, blink and thrust red numbers in our faces are designed to capture our attention and create a sense of urgency… But how often are any of these interruptions truly urgent? Almost never. Turn them off.3. Limit Multi-tasking.
Another attention-destroying practice is what we’ve come to call “multi-tasking,” an utterly misnamed concept. While insignificant tasks requiring minimal cognitive effort can be performed in parallel, the truly meaningful work through which most leaders add value–one-on-one conversations, facilitation or decision-making in meetings, and creative thought and ideation–require a much more intense level of focus. Multi-tasking in those environments inevitably results in significant inefficiencies as we switch contexts and lose focus before returning to a deeper level of thought.4. Create Space.
Leaders typically face intense demands on their time (in part because everyone wants their attention), and if they’re not careful they can find themselves booked nonstop for days on end. It’s important to maintain some open space in the calendar, on a weekly or even daily basis, which allows for more creative thinking and helps replenish our stores of attention. This inevitably involves disappointing people, all of whom believe their issue is worthy of the leader’s time, but productive leaders realize that they can’t meet all of these requests and must ignore many of them. Here leaders require help from their senior team, family, and friends, and–perhaps most importantly–their executive assistants. People in these roles are uniquely positioned to help leaders protect open space on their calendars, and they’re uniquely positioned to undermine that process if they don’t understand this responsibility.
A final thought:
If you’re a leader sitting in a meeting that’s not worth your focused attention, then you’re serving a theatrical function. Sometimes this makes sense. There’s a place for organizational theater. But more often the whole organization is suffering because your most precious resource is being wasted. Let the people who organized the meeting know that you’ll attend in the future when you’re needed, excuse yourself, and get on with your day. And if it’s your meeting, then you may well be wasting everyone’s time and attention–they may all be there in a theatrical function because they’re deferring to your authority. Have a candid conversation with a trusted ally, and get some feedback on the utility of your meetings.

-George Alwon