Archive for January, 2009

Secret #5: Give up Control.

The last secret is often the most difficult to put into practice, especially for managers and leaders. We love having control! 

But the old “command and control” models of leadership are on the way out the door. Leadership is becoming more collaborative, adaptive, and virtual. Control is out, but communication and trust are in. 

Successfully leading a results-driven team is all about trusting your people to accomplish the results for which they are responsible. 

This is just a small sampling of Secret #5.  

Sign up to receive the full 5 Secrets of this FREE e-course at http://www.WorkStyleDesign.com. 

Secret #4: Offer unlimited freedom and flexibility.

This secret is all about schedule control: the ability to control when you work, where you work, and how many hours you work. Unlimited freedom and flexibility allows your team to work during their peak hours and adapt their work to fit their lives.

As long as results are being produced, everyone continue to enjoy this freedom. And if results aren’t being produced, together you try to find a solution—or someone loses their job.

Complete schedule control is an absolute must and is truly the future of work. 

This is just a small sampling of Secret #4.  

Sign up to receive the full 5 Secrets of this FREE e-course at http://www.WorkStyleDesign.com. 

I loved yesterday’s Dilbert cartoon. Scott Adams gets it. Let’s stop treating people like livestock and start treating them like adults.

The people we work with can and should be trusted to behave like adults. If you want to be known as one of the “Best Places to Work,” implement a results-only work environment (ROWE) and set your people free!

Secret #3: Clarity of results is essential.

In a recent survey I conducted, people said their primary cause of stress and frustration at work was unclear priorities and objectives, and an overall lack of direction. They weren’t certain what was expected of them, when it was due, and didn’t know what the boss thought was most important. 

As a leader your primary responsibility is to clarify results for your team and remove the ambiguity and fuzziness many workers are experiencing.

And don’t forget about measurement! A results-driven team understands how to measure their results so they can objectively understand if they’ve fallen short, met, or exceeded expectations. 

This is just a small sampling of Secret #3.  

Sign up to receive the full 5 Secrets of this FREE e-course at http://www.WorkStyleDesign.com. 

Last month I wrote a post about cloudworking and highlighted the Light Up Your Cloud contest hosted by Cloudworker.org. The winners were announced last week with the grand prize going to Josh Pollard who submitted a great picture with his cloudworking tools and an adorable baby.

As I reviewed the winning entries, I noticed a few themes that ran throughout:

• Cloudworkers have a “my life fits me” mentality. 

One of the huge benefits to cloudworking is the ability to fit your work into your life. You determine your schedule, you determine where you work, and you determine how to fit everything in so you can spend your time the way you want. The flexibility associated with working in the cloud frees you to design a life that fits you. 

• The term “cloudworker” isn’t limited to tech or IT jobs. 

While Josh Pollard, winner of the contest is an ASP.NET developer, 2nd place went to a member of a band, and 3rd place to an analyst and researcher. You are a cloudworker if you utilize technology and online collaboration to work anywhere at any time. You don’t have to be in IT. 

• Cloudworkers are actively challenging what “work” means. 

One of the winners, Dave Raymond, member of the band Damiera said, “I have no desk, I have no office, I have no schedule, I have no home.” What it means to “work” is quickly changing. Work is not a place you go, it’s something you do.  

Cloudworker.org sponsors a new Light Up Your Cloud contest each month. You have 8 days left to submit an entry for this month’s Big Tweet-Off! Here’s what to do (provided you have a Twitter account—if you don’t, signup now, it’s free):

1. Take a picture of your workspace.
2. Tweet that picture to @cloudworker.
3. Wait for the winners to be announced. 

The contest ends January 31st and they will pick the 3 cloudworking-est cloudworker work spaces to win cool prizes. You can check out my entry here: http://twitpic.com/16cjo

Secret #2: Work has fundamentally changed.

Work isn’t what it used to be! It made sense years ago to gather in an office building to meet during core business hours to get work done—in fact, we had to—we didn’t have the Internet, e-mail, iPhones, or texting. If people didn’t physically get together during a regularly scheduled 40-hour work week, it would have been next to impossible to accomplish results!

We now have the ability to work from virtually anywhere in the world, at any time of day, with people around the globe. There are very few limits; especially to those willing to question the status quo on how we now conduct business.

The second secret to leading a results-driven team is accepting that work has fundamentally changed. Work is not somewhere you go, it’s something you do. It’s time for our beliefs about work to catch up with technology.

This is just a small sampling of Secret #2.  

Sign up to receive the full 5 Secrets of this FREE e-course at http://www.WorkStyleDesign.com.

Secret #1: Work doesn’t work. 

The way we’re working is broken. Work doesn’t work. 

As a nation, we are overworked, stressed out, and burned out. We aren’t able to relax, we don’t take vacations, and we’re unable to enjoy time with our family and friends. 

Successful leaders realize that work doesn’t work. However, they also know there is a better way to work. 

This is just a small sampling of Secret #1.  

Sign up to receive the full 5 Secrets of this FREE e-course at http://www.WorkStyleDesign.com. 

I’ve created a FREE e-course on how to successfully lead a results-driven team. The lessons are a short five-minute read, interactive, and provide insight on how to: 

• Increase your team’s overall productivity.
• Create satisfied and loyal employees who work harder and are more creative.
• Enjoy unlimited freedom & flexibility (and still achieve results).
• Quit standing in the way of your team’s success.

You can sign up by visiting http://www.WorkStyleDesign.com or by filling out the form that’s on the top right hand side of the blog.

A few days ago Ken Nowack posted some interesting statistics about leadership and talent management on his Results vs. Activities blog. Point #9 in particular caught my eye:

“61% of more than 1,300 executives from 71 countries believe that telecommuting decreases chances of advancing in one’s career despite that finding that over 33% of the executives notes that telecommuters are more productive (2007 Futurestep).  42% of the 1,730 executives said telecommuters were as productive as workers in traditional settings and 36% were more productive.  66% of the 1,944 executives said taking a sabbatical or extended break was “extremely” or “somewhat” beneficial to a person’s career.”

It’s interesting to see those statistics in the same paragraph because it highlights the conflicting beliefs many people hold about work and how it gets done. The study found that telecommuting is bad and will hurt your career, even though you’re more productive when you’re not in the office! But if you’re out of the office for a long time on a sabbatical it’s great for your career! What? It doesn’t even make sense.

Working outside of a traditional office setting isn’t inherently bad or good. It’s just another way to work. All that really matters are the results you produce. If you are productive and consistently get your job done well and on time, it shouldn’t matter where you work. 

And it definitely shouldn’t impact your career. It’s time we stopped rewarding people based on the time they put in working in the traditional office setting. Reward and recognition should solely be based on the results people produce.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and answer the following questions:

1. Does telecommuting (or any other flexible work arrangement) hurt career progression?
2. Are telecommuters more or less productive than traditional office workers?
3. Do sabbaticals help or hurt your career?

I don’t care for the term “work-life balance.” It just doesn’t make sense to me. Who wants a balance between work and life? Balance implies a state of equilibrium or equality. That means if we look at a 24-hour period (and I subtract 8 hours for sleep), I’m to spend 8 hours working and 8 hours doing “life” stuff. And if I want to spend more time on personal things, I need to increase the hours I spend working—all in the name of balance. Hmmm… not really what I’m after.

In an old, but great post on why he doesn’t want work/life balance, Ryan Healy, co-founder of both Employee Evolution and Brazen Careerist, talks about blending work and life, rather than balancing work and life. Work and life aren’t separate entities. Why exactly do we feel the need to keep the two separate?

Blending work and life implies a sense of fluidity between work and personal tasks. You adjust and adapt your schedule to fit your needs. Work adapts to fit your life, not the other way around. In a global, technologically advanced society, where we can produce results from virtually anywhere, at any given time, why do we continue to be bound by rigid barriers between work and life?

In naming my company I came up with the term “workstyle design” to partly capture this concept. Workstyle design is an active process of purposefully creating a style of working congruent with your beliefs, values, and lifestyle needs. It’s about designing a work environment that allows you to effortlessly float between your business life and personal life. It creates fluidity between work and life—not balance. 

In his post, Healy mentions that the term “work-life balance” doesn’t even make sense to Generation Y employees. They understand and resonate with blending work and life. I think work-life balance’s days are limited. The future of work is about fluidity of time. When the architecture of time is redesigned, there is room for business, personal life, and whatever else you need.