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Positive Organisational Scholarship

Positive Organisational Scholarship

Positive Organisational ScholarshipThe easiest way to understand Positive Organisational Scholarship is to think of it as the systematic study of Positive Psychology, at the level of an organisation. And, if you need a primer on Positive Psychology, take a look at our article.

A lot of the formal descriptions of Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS) use dry academic language. Put simply, it’s the study of what makes members of an organisation perform at their best levels, by focusing on what they do well.

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Self Confidence

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog is going back to basics. This is the first of a series of posts on management skills.


Self confidence is the starting place for any manager.  Your promotion to managerial role has probably been triggered more by your expertise in doing your previous job, your reliability, and your character, than by any specific evidence of your managerial capability.  And that’s fine, because it is the way most of your colleagues were promoted too.

But it can leave you feeling a little nervous about your suitability to manage and, when your boss tells you to ‘get on with it – I have every trust in you’ you can feel a little isolated.  Your boss leaves you to it, your new management peers don’t yet trust you, and your team are wary of how you will treat them, now you have become a manager.

Here are three exercises to help boost your self-confidence.

Exercise 1: A Reassuring Word

Write down your answers to the following sentences:

  • ‘I earned my managerial role because…
  • ‘My three most valuable managerial assets are…
  • ‘The managers I learned most from are…
  • ‘I will know I am doing a good job as manager when…
  • ‘Things will go wrong; that’s life.  If they do, the people I can go to are…

Exercise 2: Seeing Success

Imagine it is Monday morning and you are in work, ready to start the day.  In a minute, close your eyes and picture yourself there.  Picture your first few conversations and meetings going well.  Notice yourself handling the situations effectively, feeling well-prepared.  As you go through your morning, picture everything you do going as planned. At each stage, notice how good that makes you feel.  At the end of your morning, imagine how positive and confident you will feel.

Now, close your eyes and play that movie in your head for several minutes.

When you have done this, make a note in your notebook about how you felt at the end of each part of your morning.  Write down what you did to achieve your successes.

This is an exercise to repeat several times over the coming days.  Each time you do it, choose another day and either the morning or afternoon.  Every time you do it, you will increase your base level of confidence.

Exercise 3: Power Poses

One of the reasons some people feel more confident than others is simply levels of hormones in their bodies.  For example, increased testosterone levels increase confidence, whilst increased cortisol levels decrease confidence.  Perhaps it is surprising, but your gross posture affects levels of both of these hormones and, whether you are a man or a woman, you can increase testosterone levels and decrease cortisol, by adopting power poses.

You can do these poses for two or three minutes before going into a stressful situation and you can maintain confidence-boosting hormone levels by maintaining upright, open postures during your day.

Power Poses

Stand upright, legs apart – slightly wider than shoulder width – and put your hands on your hips.  If there is a table, counter or a solid back of a stable chair available, place your hands firmly on it, about 70-80cm apart (wider than your shoulders) and lean forward.  Adopt these poses for two minutes or so.

If you have a chair to sit on, try sitting upright, legs apart, with feeet firmly on the floor.  Plant your hands firmly on your upper thighs, with elbows outwards.  Lean your body back a little, with head a little forward.  Or try putting your feet up on a table, leaning back in your chair, with your hands clasped behing your head, elbows splayed out.  Adopt one of these for two minutes.

If these poses remind you of a typical ‘old-school alpha-male boss’, they should.  The difference is that you will adopt these poses privately for a few minutes at most, to boost your confidence for the next meeting; rather than maintain it in the meeting to intimidate your colleagues.

Upright Postures

For all-of-the-time posture, keep to standing with feet at hip or maybe shoulder width, head upright, as if pulled by a puppet string, and arms by your sides.  This open body, coupled with upright posture, will not only make you feel more assertive, but will enhance your breathing, your vocal tone and projection and present your image as confident and authoritative.

Further Reading

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Self-Help: Therapy for the DIY Age

Self-Help

Self-HelpSelf-help wasn’t always a multi-million dollar industry. Its origins go way back to when the first caveman or cavewoman got up off the floor, brushed themselves down, and got back on with it.

So what is there to say about a Big Idea that’s been around forever and is almost certainly wired into our genes?

For me, it is the self-help industry that is the story. It’s a story of:

  • academic rigour and genuine solutions, alongside
  • mindless credulity and outright charlatanry

Continue reading Self-Help: Therapy for the DIY Age

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VUCA and VUCA Prime

VUCA and VUCA Prime

VUCA and VUCA PrimeThe acronym VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. It may be a military coinage, but it seems to sum up so much of what the modern world feels like.

But, never fear: linguistic fluency and creative ingenuity have conjured a number of strategies to counter the prevailing VUCA environment we inhabit. Best known among them is Bob Johanson’s ‘VUCA prime’. It is an alternative acronym with four ripostes to Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity.

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Growth Mindset: Putting it to Work

Growth Mindset: Putting it to Work

Growth Mindset: Putting it to WorkFour years ago we wrote about Growth Mindset, in our Management Thinkers series. We profiled the originator of the idea, Carol Dweck, and introduced the subject.

If there was any concern then that Growth Mindset may be little more than a fad, further research has only strengthened Dweck’s early conclusions. So, it seems timely to return to the topic.

While this article stands alone, I would recommend you to review the earlier article first. It’s good context. Because, to avoid repeating it, we’re going to use this article to look at how you can put the Big Idea of Growth Mindset to work in your workplace.

Continue reading Growth Mindset: Putting it to Work

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Positive Mental Attitude: You Choose

Positive Mental Attitude

Positive Mental AttitudePositive Mental Attitude is a staple of the self-help movement. But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not about false faith or miracle cures.

Instead, it’s about exercising the most fundamental freedom you have: to choose how to respond to your situation. Positive Mental Attitude is a choice that opens up more options for you.

And that’s why it works for so many people. Because, with more options, you have more chances of getting what you want.

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Grit: Perseverance and Passion

Grit

GritEvery few years we seem to get a new aspect of psychology that is ‘more important to success than intelligence’. In the 1990s it was Emotional Intelligence. In the Twenty-teens, it’s Grit.

So what can we learn from a woman whose father told her that she was no genius? Well, when that woman has a string of academic, commercial, and social successes to her credit by her early 40s, perhaps we should listen to her.

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The Inner Game

The Inner Game
The Inner Game
The Inner Game

What are you really capable of? And what holds you back from achieving it? Competing against your own mental obstacles is the ‘Inner Game’.

Although many people in the world of work have never heard of the Inner Game, nor of Timothy Gallwey, its founder, this big idea has been extremely influential.

Because Gallwey and the ideas behind the Inner Game are very much the immediate progenitors of modern performance coaching. It it is hard to over-estimate the impact that has had on management and organisational life.

Continue reading The Inner Game

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Napoleon Hill: Positive Mental Attitude

Napoleon Hill has a lot to answer for. As if the 1980s’ and 1990s’ surge in the self-help book market wasn’t enough, you can now hardly move around the internet without the offer of a get rich quick scheme or the opportunity to build an amazing lifestyle with barely four hours of work a week. That isn’t to say, that Hill was the first into the market, but he was, perhaps, the first and most important contributor to our literature on personal success.

Napoleon Hill
Napoleon Hill

Short Biography

Napoleon Hill was born into a fairly impoverished Virginia family, in 1883. He was 10 when his mother died, and quickly became something of a local menace, roaming the locality with a six-shooter, trying to emulate his then hero Jesse James. It was his stepmother who pointed him in a new direction. He was to find new heroes in America’s great industrialists, and to learn that the typewriter is mightier than the handgun.

At 15, he started a journalistic career, writing articles for local papers, which led, in 1908, to his first big interview, with ageing steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Over a couple of days, Carnegie shared his philosophy on how he became successful, while Hill sat rapt. At the end, so the mythology goes, Carnegie challenges Hill: if Hill would dedicate himself, unpaid, to researching a philosophy of success, Carnegie would get him started with letters of introduction. Hill accepted and got a personal introduction to Henry Ford. This led to further introductions that allowed Hill to interview such ‘great men’ as Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, and Elmer Gates.

In a short biography, we don’t have time to detail the many achievements and setbacks that Hill encountered in his life, including his work as PR advisor to US President Woodrow Wilson. But lasting success appeared to have arrived when, in 1928, Hill was able to publish his eight-volume analysis of everything he had learned on the quest Carnegie had set him. With the proceeds of The Law of Success, Hill bought an impressive new family home. Sadly, another reversal came in 1929, when the Wall Street crash took book sales with it. The Hills were destitute.

There followed a series of ventures and adventures in a colourful life that saw Hill working for another US President, FD Roosevelt (and, it is claimed, penning the famous ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself’ line), launching several magazines (that all folded in a variety of circumstances) and surviving, by pure good fortune, an attempted assassination attempt by prohibition era gangsters.

But let’s cut to the chase. In another attempt to revive his fortunes, Hill re-wrote and shortened his Law of Success ideas into a new book. Hill did this at the prompting of his second wife, who also suggested the (early 2000s -sounding) title ‘The Thirteen Steps to Riches’. His publisher rejected this with a suggestion of his own – which was mercifully abandoned. The book we now know of as Think and Grow Rich, was very nearly titled: ‘Use Your Noodle to Win More Boodle’.

More good fortune and ill were to follow, as were more magazines and more books. Perhaps the most significant of these reads a little like a summing up. Teaming up with businessman W Clement Stone from the early 1950s, the two men taught his philosophy of personal achievement. In 1960, they co-wrote Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. More books were to follow – including some finished and published posthumously.

In 1970, Napoleon Hill died. He had arguably achieved even more than his mentor. Whilst Hill was never remotely as rich as Carnegie, it is Hill’s book that is constantly re-issued and labelled as a classic.

The Cores to Hill’s Philosophy of Wealth and Success

At different times, Hill appears to have had a different ‘secret’ in mind. There are a thousand self-help volumes that repeat much of what Hill has said, but often, he did say it first. He has also spawned an industry of internet memes – lush pictures with Napoleon Hill quotes attached. Among my favourites are:

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

and, of course, the most famous may well be

What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

But there is more to Hill than pithy quotes. In his evocation of ‘brain capital’ in Think and Grow Rich, Hill arguably foresaw the growth of Charles Handy’s Triple-i Company.

It is also important to acknowledge that Hill’s philosophy (like many of the men he interviewed) was rooted in an early twentieth century Judeo-Christian tradition of hard work, male dominance, and biblical foundation. Some of his writing may seem ahead of its time, but other aspects are very definitely of the past. His focus on a will to succeed (compare this to Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’) as a transmutation of male sexual energy reads as nothing more than bizarre to a modern reader.

But his concept of a group of intelligent, challenging individuals surrounding you as a means of accessing knowledge and wisdom, which he called a Master Mind, is probably the origin of modern Mastermind groups, which doubtless are responsible for much business success today.

Napoleon Hill’s Secret(s) to Success

In Think and Grow Rich, Hill alludes to his secret of success, without making it explicit. Most people therefore infer it to be some variant of a passionate, almost ungovernable urge to succeed. This is certainly a theme that recurs. It is also worth mentioning that Hill defined wealth far more widely than financial success, but as the quality of your friendships, the harmony of your family life (coming from a man twice divorced), and good working relationships. This last point is vital.

In the Law of Success – actually, 16 lessons – he argues that:

Only by working harmoniously in co-operation with other individuals or groups of individuals and thus creating value and benefit for them will one create sustainable achievement for oneself.’

This is a variant, of course, on the oft-cited and truly multi-cultural Golden rule: that you should treat others as you would wish them to treat you.

But it was in the 1950s and with the publication of Success through a Positive Mental Attitude that Hill described his settled opinion. People who succeed tend to be those who view setbacks as nothing more than a step on the road to success. A positive mental attitude, which finds its modern form in Positive Psychology, Learned Optimism, and a Growth Mindset is Hill’s final secret to success. And it seems a fitting one. Because few people in our Great Thinkers and Doers series have suffered so many setbacks, and mounted as many comebacks as Hill. His final success serves as one data point in the anecdotal confirmation of Hill’s self-help secret.

You may like The Growth Mindset Pocketbook and The Positive Mental Attitude Pocketbook.

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Angela Duckworth: True Grit

What are the best predictors of success in life? Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence blew the bottom out of general intelligence for most of us, back in the mid 1990s.

One facet of emotional intelligence is motivation, and this is front and centre of the work of another psychologist. Angela Lee Duckworth’s research interest is competencies other than general intelligence that predict academic and professional achievement. And she has been putting the spotlight on two of them: self-control and perseverance.

Angela Duckworth

Very Short Biography

Angela Lee was born in 1970, and grew up in New Jersey. She was the third child of immigrants from China, who had fled the cultural revolution. The parents were exceptionally results-oriented, leading to three children who have all excelled. However, as the third child, Duckworth recalls feeling a sense of benign neglect, as her parents focused their attention on her older siblings.

She was exceptionally bright and worked hard, entering Harvard and graduating in neuro-biology in 1992. Two years later, she took up a scholarship to study neuroscience at the University of Oxford, leaving with an MSc in 1996.

From there, she joined consulting firm McKinsey and Company (where she met her husband, Jason Duckworth). Promised opportunities to do pro bono work, but being allocated work in the pharmaceuticals sector, Duckworth left and started teaching, first in New York. During this time, she started paying attention to why some children succeeded and others failed.

She joined a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Positive Psychology Center, under the leadership of Martin Seligman, who supervised her study. She was awarded her PhD in 2006 and took up an academic post there. She is now a Professor of Psychology and leads the Duckworth Lab, which focuses on two traits that predict achievement: grit and self-control.

Grit and Self-control

Duckworth’s work shows that two traits predict success in life:

  • Grit
    the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward long-term goals
  • Self-control
    the voluntary regulation of behavioural, emotional, and attentional impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions.

These two are different. Grit equips you to pursue especially challenging aims over long periods; years or even decades. Self-control operates at a short timescale in the battle against distractions and temptations – willpower, if you like.

Duckworth’s research shows that the two are related, but not totally correlated. People who are gritty tend to be more self-controlled, but the correlation is not total: some people have masses of grit but little self-control, while some exceptionally self-controlling people are not especially gritty. Her team has developed non-commercial scales that measure each.

Duckworth’s research has found that, when they strip out the effects of intelligence, grit and self-control predict objectively measured success outcomes. They have used contexts as diverse as children’s spelling competitions, military officer training, and general high school graduation results.

Because of the importance of these factors, therefore, Duckworth has introduced them into the routines for her family: husband and two daughters. Academically, her team is researching ways to instil self-control and grit into children. She has shown that children can learn and practise strategies to build grit and self-control.

In a recent Pocketblog, we looked at the work of Carol Dweck, on Growth Mindset. Duckworth sees Dweck as a role model and is collaborating with her because she has found that children who have more of a growth mindset tend to be grittier. Once again, there isn’t a perfect correlation, but enough to suggest that one of the things that makes you gritty is  a growth mindset: the attitude ‘I can get better if I try harder’. This should help you to be tenacious, determined, and hard-working: gritty.

Angela Duckworth’s work in her own words

Angela Duckworth’s 6 minute talk on Grit is one of my favourites and has over 6 million views. She is also working on a book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance due for publication in early 2016.

[ted id=1733]

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