8 Ways That
Cooling Down
Can Improve Your Company Right Now
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Development of Communities of Practice
. Improvement comes from education, but not all education is classroom-based. Communities of practice are groups of people who have in common a particular interest or procedure within the company's operations. They are informal, as opposed to a formally structured team, and tend to meet, either in person or on-line, at regular intervals to share knowledge about their area of expertise. Allowing time for employees to participate in Communities of Practice helps to both distribute and generate knowledge and expertise.
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Establishment of Organizational Memory
. One of the greatest losses a company can face is when its knowledge base walks out the door due to downsizing, attrition, or retirement. The concept of Organizational Memory recognizes that the collective knowledge and wisdom of a workforce must be transferred and retained if the company itself is to have a future. This requires time for employees and managers to step away from immediacies and instead establish traditions and opportunities to systematically transfer this knowledge through mentors, classrooms, experiential scenarios, and interviews.
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Identification and Treatment of Burnout and Stress.
Not everyone who calls in sick on a Friday is faking it. Similarly, not everyone who is at work today should be there. Can you tell the difference? People who are burning out will soon be lost to the company. Through absenteeism, presenteeism, resignations, and long-term illnesses these assets quickly lose their potential for the company's bottom line, and worse may lead to personal tragedy. Managers and organizations who allow time to step out of the silo and observe what is truly going on in the heads and hearts and eyes of their staff stand to keep them around, healthy, loyal, and productive.
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Elimination of Firefighting and its Cascade Effect
. Firefighting has a quadruple cost: first, the time and stress involved in fighting the fire; second the need to reschedule and revisit the tasks that were put aside in order to fight the fire; third, the ongoing concern among employees of the fire breaking out again; and fourth, the perception in the minds of the customer, who must balance your quick action in fighting a fire against the existence of the fire in the first place. Though fires and crises inevitably happen, it is the company who sits its people down and works in post-mortem reviewâto identify how to mitigate such fires in the future that stands to refocus its employees' energies on higher value tasks.
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Pattern Identification: There are busy times in the year and quieter times.
There are times when people take vacation, there are long weekends, and then there's the Christmas/ holiday season. Patterns can easily be recognized by people who take the time to lay them out on a tangible surface, such as a wall calendar. Pattern identification can help offset personnel shortages, firefighting, deadline crunches, and can also be instrumental in influencing the needs and expectations of the customer.
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Parallel and Bottom-Up Learning
. Whether implementing large-scale change or simply seeking smaller-scale continuous improvement, more can be done through parallel learning scenarios, in which all levels of an organization together follow a systematic model of inquiry, innovation, and testing. This requires more time than traditional top-down initiatives, but pay off in heightened motivation, buy-in, and, of course, improvement.
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Conflict Management
. Conflicts often escalate because people confuse the issue with the individuals involved. The best time to resolve a conflict is before it becomes a conflict, when it is still just an irksome issue between two people. This requires time to slow down and observe. Sources of conflict don't always go away by themselves, but time spent in advance usually wins back much more later on.
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Superordinate Goals and Motivation
. Companies that take time to demonstrate to its employees the large-scale vision of a single project, or of the company in general, will yield greater productivity, since emotion-based humans work primarily on emotion. Goals are more than a framed mission statement on the wall, though. Managers need to connect, human to human if they are to effectively communicate superordinate goals as well as hear unfettered feedback.
⢠Sleep should be observed as a series of cycles. Waking up is the closing down of this series, and should be approached gradually, rather than with shock.
⢠Light reduces the sleep hormone melatonin and stimulates the body to activity. Use light in any form you can as soon as you wake up.
⢠Our physical body structure hasn't changed in 50,000 years. Excess energy is stored as fat.
⢠Highly processed fast foods answer the call for nutrition but don't deliver in the same way.
⢠Sugar swings yield great influence on lunchtime meal choices, which leads to reduced ability during the afternoon.
⢠Eating more of the right things slower will maintain better internal balance.
⢠Those who skip breakfast entirely condemn their body to experiencing “famine mode,” which actually contributes to weight gain.
⢠A fast-food breakfast or skipping breakfast entirely not only depletes mental and physical energy but also leads to poor food choices at lunchtime, which can adversely affect afternoon productivity.
⢠Allow time for a 15-minute breakfast either at home or somewhere else other than the workplace.
⢠The commute to work serves as a daily warm-up that gets the mind in the right place for work. The commute home does the same in reverse.
⢠Carpooling is a great opportunity for mentoring.
⢠Tasks should be assessed and valued before moving ahead with them in order to avoid the blindness that can come from reactionism.
⢠Multitasking and prioritization are best served by slowing down, writing down, and then negotiating.
⢠The best time to exercise depends on your job, your metabolism, and your ability to communicate with your manager.
⢠Slow exercise is far more efficient than a high-impact workout for burning fat.
⢠Slow weight-training reps are far better for building muscle than fast ones.
COOL
DOWN
Getting Up and Waking
⢠How do you get up in the morning?
⢠What sort of alarm clock do you use? Is it shrill or gentle? Immediate or gradual?
⢠What time do you get up in relation to the time you need to properly prepare for the day?
⢠Would you be able to get up 15 minutes earlier?
⢠Have a look at different (and better) types of alarm clocks that will help the waking process through the introduction of light. Remember, sleep is governed in large measure by a hormone called melatonin, which the body can only manufacture in the absence of light. To counteract the sleep-inducing effects of melatonin, you have to have light available. This is why these clocks work so well; they introduce light gently, while you are still asleep, and start the stimulation up to half an hour prior to your desired waking time. Samples are available at the
Cool Down
section of my website at
www.bristall.com
.
⢠Use timers. Use a timer to turn on a light, perhaps in the living room or kitchen, so that the light is on by the time you move from the bedroom to the kitchen. This will give your body an additional light stimulation.
⢠If you drink coffee in the morning, use a coffee machine with a timer, so that the aroma of coffee meets you on first waking. This is an additional source of sensory input that will allow you to break away from the sleep pattern. It's also nice to have the coffee ready.
⢠When is your best time for exercise?
⢠What is your favorite type of exercise?
⢠How easy/difficult is it to implement regular exercise into your workday?
⢠What arguments or negotiations could you present to your manager or colleagues?
⢠Who could you buddy up with to ensure your exercise regularly?
⢠Music is available through numerous online services, including iTunes.
⢠If you work out at home, Pandora (
www.pandora.com
) is an online radio station in which you program your own music. Tunes that share similar properties are offered to expand your collection of favorites, and over time, the system learns your tastes to a very accurate degree. You can listen through your PC.
⢠Spoken word books are available by mail through SimplyAudio-Books (
www.simplyaudiobooks.com
). Your local library is another resource.
⢠Movies are available by mail through NetFlix (
www.netflix.com
) and BlockBusterOnline.
1
Data for this paragraph taken from The U.S. Census Bureau, The American Heart Association, and The Canadian Heart and Stroke Association.
Â
IN ALL TRANSACTIONS
THE CUSTOMER'S TRUE PURCHASE
IS YOU. NOTHING ELSE
.
CHAPTER 7
BECOMING A
COOLER
PERSON
THE POWER OF KNOWING
Are you noticeably great or are you one of the crowd? How would other people answer that question about you? What does your image say to those around you? Is it helping you get ahead? Is speed revealing ragged edges and imperfections? Most importantly, how do you know?
Human beings, including all of your colleagues and clients, take in 70 percent of what they know and understand about the world around them by way of visual cues and non-verbal communication. In Chapter 2, case studies of Bruno and Karen, and later, of the locomotive engineers highlighted the effects of a diminished ability and opportunity to read body language in negotiation situations. They quickly caused intellectual isolation. People really do judge situations and other people by what they see and take in. Consequently, it is of great strategic value for those who wish to impress, influence, and get further ahead, that they slow down and learn more about how they come across in all manner of situations. This is what this chapter is about. It looks at some of the key areas in which progress can be gained through a combination of conscious awareness and preparation.
Knowing What You Look Like
This section is not a chapter on choosing wardrobes and hairstyles. There are many other books that do that. For our purposes, it's not just
what
you look like that counts; it's that you
know
what you look like that is truly important. Your chosen style of dress and presentation will penetrate the mind of the observer and will travel first by way of his emotional routing system, which means that judgments, positive or negative, and feelings of attraction, indifference, or repulsion are made on the spot. This is very powerful stuff.
The people who
know
this, and who are in control of their image, have a creative intellectual advantage over those who do not. Here's how they do it:
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Eye contact
. Primarily, impressions are made through eye contactâthe windows of the soul. Not only is eye contact with others stronger and more frequent when you are aware of your visual presentation, the “shape” of the eye, that is to say the highly expressive areas of skin and facial muscles that surround the eye present a more focused, more direct appearance. To use two extreme examples, think of Mick Jagger and Woody Allen. Mick Jagger, one of the most charismatic and successful entertainers in music history, has a uniquely piercing visual approach; he maintains eye contact far longer than most people, and the skin and muscles that form his eyelids and upper face appear to “hone in” on the person to whom he's speaking in an unmistakable fashion. Compare this to the characters played by comedian Woody Allenâcharacters renowned for their neuroticism and lack of confidence. Although these are merely fictional people, Woody Allen capitalizes on his own facial characteristicsâraised eyebrows, wide-open eyes, and a generally sad and preoccupied demeanor to convey a person more confused than focused.
Obviously, the goal for any person wishing to advance in life is to aim for the camp in which facial signals direct their energy outwards, towards other people, rather than inward upon a worried self. The more aware you are of how you look, the easier it is for your facial muscles to do this, and therefore project your charisma silently but effectively.
Tips for Managing Your Image
⢠Schedule your travels to always arrive early. Make sure you can get to a location with a mirror so you can ensure you look the way you want. Remember, this is not an exercise in vanity; it's an exercise in personal control.
⢠Carry a travel kit that contains all the toiletries and tools required to keep looking consistently good. (This applies to men as well as women.) This can include:
⢠Headache relief medication (Aspirin, Tylenol, etc
.
)
⢠A pocket mirror and hairbrush
⢠Breath spray/mints
⢠Spot remover for clothing
⢠Crease relaxant spray for clothing
⢠A cloth to buff up shoes
⢠A lint brush
⢠Scissors for trimming stray threads
⢠A tiny tube of superglue for sticking buttons back onâquicker than sewing
⢠A snack (such as a granola bar or dried fruit bar).
⢠Hire the services of an image consultant to gain a professional outside opinion on clothing, hair, jewelry, and other visuals. Use this person's extensive knowledge of others to help build and maintain a consistently impressive look.
⢠Choose the clothes you plan to wear for the days ahead and organize them in a sequence that will remove the need for decision-making in early mornings.
⢠Practice knowing how you look by videotaping yourself. This is the only way to really know, since it shows you in “real image,” as opposed to “mirror image” as mirrors do. Schedule a conversation with a friend or family member expressly for the purposes of videotaping yourself. Hold a conversation as you would with a client, manager, or colleague, and review your mannerisms, eye contact, the frequency of smiles, posture, and body language and the way your clothes, glasses, hair, etc
.,
appear. This is a very revealing exercise, but that's what it's for.
â¢
Body language and posture
. This awareness further translates into effective body language and posture. People who know what they look like walk into a situation fully in control. Their knowledge about their appearance relaxes their mind and liberates their creativity. It allows for their conversations to be well-guided, relaxed and time-efficient. It allows them to recall and relate key facts and discussion points and maintain active, interesting discussions. It allows them to listen actively to others and project sincerity and interest. These are the types of qualities that impress people.