Be Your Own Coach

By: Nick Tasler

In today’s highly uncertain environment, wouldn’t it be nice to have a wise advisor available to you 24/7? Help keep you, your team, and your organization on track?

In fact, that sagely guidance is more accessible to you than you think, and it doesn’t even require you to keep a high-priced executive coach on retainer. You could be just the advisor you’ve been looking for.

Executive coaches perform two essential functions. First, they provide clients with sound, objective advice. Secondly, they help clients execute that advice. With a few simple yet highly effective, proven techniques you can start tapping into your inner coach.

How to Give Yourself Sound Advice
Recall someone you know - a colleague, an employee or boss - who recently made a decision that they now regret. You saw it coming. Your advice was right on the money, even though you’re too big of a person to say “I told you so” (even if you're thinking it).

Now, think of a regrettable decision that you made recently. Maybe you wasted budget dollars on that unnecessary office equipment, or let your envy of a competitor drive you into a saturated market. Or maybe you compounded a problem with your team by putting off a tough decision. In hindsight, the right choice was clear all along, but you botched it up.

We’ve all been in both of these situations. Why is it that we’re so good at giving advice to other people, but so often blunder when giving ourselves advice?

It's all about objectivity and emotion. When we dish out advice to others, we really don’t have anything to lose or to gain, which removes emotion from the situation. So, we can give clear advice on what someone should do because we don’t have a vested interest. On the other hand, our emotions kick into overdrive when we’re the ones taking the big risk or potentially receiving the big reward.

But with just a little imagination we can overcome our less rational selves. Psychologists have discovered that when people imagine a situation as though it were happening to a friend instead of to themselves, they are able to think much more logically. Katherine Milkman, a researcher at the Wharton School, explains that this simple trick can shift our entire mode of thinking. Pretending that we are the coach advising the client moves us from what psychologists call "system 1" thinking (the “want” system driven by our impulses and emotions) to "system 2" thinking (the more deliberate and logical “should” system).

So, the next time you’re trying to decide what to do, imagine that a friend has come to you for guidance on the situation. What would you advise?

Of course, once you’ve adopted that outside perspective and decided what you need to do, the next step is to actually follow the course of action.

How to Act on Sound Advice
NYU Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues have amassed more than two decades of evidence supporting the idea that wording can make all the difference between intention and action. When we frame our advice with an if-then format, we are far more likely to follow through. For example, instead of saying that you “want to spend more time on strategic planning,” or that you “will try to be more strategic this month” you should phrase it as “if I’m still at the office after Wednesday’ status meeting, then I will spend 30 minutes on strategic planning.”

The power of the if-then format comes from its ability to create instant habits. The “if” part of the statement places an automatic reminder in your brain to be on the lookout for a specific situation. When your brain recognizes that you are indeed sitting in your office after Wednesday’s status meeting, it automatically cues you to perform the “then” action (i.e. “spend 30 minutes on strategic planning.”) If-then formatting replaces the years of behavioral conditioning it would normally take to create a habit. Gollwitzer has found that if-then phrasing makes people as much as two to three times more likely to stick to an exercising regimen, eat healthier, avoid distraction, and do just about anything else that typically pits us against our own wills and wants. The same technique can help you bridge the gap between your intentions and your behaviors.

One day, you might find that you want the expert guidance of a bona fide executive coach. Until then, you can turn yourself into a quality interim by taking an outside perspective on your future courses of action, and by using if-then planning to execute them.

Help Your People Do a Better Job

By: Nick Tasler

Disengagement happens. Contrary to what most of us think, however, poor management isn’t always the cause. The fact is that being an inspiring, emotionally intelligent leader and an excellent coach isn’t always enough to keep your people fully focused and productive. Sometimes they need a change to their job more than they need a change to their manager.

A team of researchers led by Justin Berg, now a graduate student at the Wharton school, developed an innovative tool called the Job Crafting Exercise. Based on more than a decade of research, the tool helps guide employees through a process of reorganizing their current job tasks into new self-defined “roles.” It not only helps employees see their jobs differently, it helps them do their jobs differently. The result is a more engaged and ultimately, more productive employee.

Five Steps to Reinvigorating Your Team With Job Crafting:
1. Clarify the Business Objectives of their Job. Before allowing employees to begin the Job Crafting Exercise, it’s vital for managers to clearly state the outcomes that an employee’s job needs to produce for the organization. After all, the exercise is futile if employees become fully engaged in a job that fails to produce results.

2. Allow Employees to Complete the Job Crafting Exercise. The tool instructs employees to list their current job tasks, and then their strengths—what the employee is good at doing; their passions—what types of tasks the employ enjoys doing; and motives—what outcomes the employee wishes to achieve from their work, such as pay or recognition. Employees then arrange their strengths, passions and motives into clusters with certain job tasks. These clusters become the new self-defined roles of their job. Berg emphasizes that employees don’t actually eliminate any of their essential job tasks when completing the exercise. They simply reorganize their job tasks in a way that is more personally satisfying.

3. Don’t Interfere. “Managers have to let go of the prison guard tendency,” Amy Wrzesniewski says. Wrzesniewski, a professor at the Yale School of Management and one of the tools co-creators explains that as long as managers have properly clarified the job’s required outcomes and provided adequate reasoning for why these objectives are necessary, the manager must let her people go through the exercise on their own. This key distinction is what makes the tool so much more effective than traditional “job design” techniques in which managers or HR departments designed an employee’s job for them.

4. Create a Plan with the Employee. Once the employee completes the exercise, managers should sit down with employees to discuss how they can help the put that new job role into action. This isn’t a managerial sign-off ritual as much as it is a short working session (30-40 minutes) to make sure that both manager and employee are working toward the same ends. It’s also a learning opportunity for the manager. Co-creator and distinguished professor at the University of Michigan, Jane Dutton points out that one of the bonuses of job crafting is that management often learns about more effective ways of working that they can apply to other areas of the organization.

5. Craft in Teams. “In a team environment,” Wrzesniewski says “it’s often beneficial for employees to do a little job-swapping.” Inevitably, the Job Crafting Exercise will reveal necessary tasks that an individual employee doesn’t care much for doing. Some employees like more social tasks such as making phone calls or attending meetings, while others love digging into more solitary problem-solving tasks. Both sets of tasks need to be completed by the team, but it usually doesn’t matter which individual performs which task.

While it’s undoubtedly true that disengagement happens, nobody says it has to happen for long.

"Welcome to the Neighborhood" Party this Saturday

Alison Tasler | Jacob's Well – church for people who don't like church

Dear friends and neighbors,

You are invited to come welcome a new family into the neighborhood. Basra Hersi and her daughter, Ladan, and two sons, Yahye and Anas, moved into their very first home on a chilly and blizzard day the end of November. Basra is originally from the Somalian capital of Mogadishu and has raised her family here in the U.S., most recently in Minnesota. Basra said that to have a place they can call home is absolutely a "dream-turn-reality". Some of you may have met Basra or even her home this past summer. Their home was built by Habitat for Humanity hands from all over the twin cities (4636 4th Avenue South).

As you can all imagine, meeting new people at backyard BBQ's or at McRae Park across the street have been out of the question the past few months. Please stop by between 10-12noon Saturday, February 27th to welcome them! As a first time home owner, single mother of 3, juggling a full time career and moving into a brand new community (in the winter!), life has been pretty wild. Please bring Basra and her children something that was helpful to you when you first moved into your home or neighborhood. A good recipe, favorite repair shop, babysitter, spare tool kit laying around in the garage, Mpls snow removal tips, bill payment planning, local doctor/dentist, good person to fix ABCD around the house, etc, etc. I think you get the picture. All those things that come with learning a new home and neighborhood over time would be wonderful to share with Basra. Purchased gifts/items are not necessary!!! We all have loads of wisdom and maybe extra "stuff" to pass along.

Looking forward to introducing the Hersi's to all of you,
Nick, Alison, Rueben and Frankie Tasler

4740 Bloomington Avenue South - Mpls, MN 55407