Yes! outlines 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive.

If you want to influence others to higher levels of employee engagement strive to enhance your request with the personal touch.

An ounce of personalized extra effort is worth a pound of persuasion. the more personalized you make a request, the more likely you’ll be to get someone to agree that request. More specifically, this research shows that in the office or in the community, a personalized sticky not could highlight the importance of your reports and communications and prevent them from becoming the proverbial needle in a haystack of other reports, letters, and mailings that are also vying for attention. What’s more, the timeliness and quality of compliance with your request are likely to be enhance as well.

Photo credit: and yes I said yes by http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsgreg/707054525/

This is the second in a five part series interview with Graeme Ginsberg from London. Graeme is the Managing Editor, Research and Reports for Melcrum - the international research and training company focused on internal communication. I requested the interview go get a better understanding of Melcrum’s research and their current publication: The Practitioner’s Guide, Essential Techniques for Employee Engagement.

Aside from the changing business environment, are there any other factors that you think have encouraged such an acceleration of focus on employee engagement since 2005?

I think that socioeconomic trends have had a colossal impact. Organizations have been understanding and adapting to the changing business environment, but they’ve also been understanding and adapting to the changes in employee attitudes, values and behaviors. Ten years ago, the Internet was beginning to give people more tools to question what they were being told. They could quickly and easily go online, get back all sorts of data and viewpoints, and develop their own, informed opinions. Since then, this has really mushroomed – not only access to more information, but also the ability to express themselves, to discuss and share views extensively through interactive social media – blogs, online video like YouTube, podcasting, wikis and social networks like Facebook and Second Life.

People use these technologies in their personal lives and they expect to use them at work. They aren’t going to accept traditional, ‘static’ communications and channels anymore. Even email has become old-fashioned and frustrating for them – their inboxes are totally overloaded with endless emails containing lines and lines of dry text. Organizations have really had to re-examine how they phrase, present and deliver their communications to employees. Quite simply, if communications aren’t engaging, employees won’t give them the time of day.

We did a social media survey in June 2007 for our report How to Use Social Media to Engage Employees and I think this really illustrates just how seriously organizations have been taking engagement and changes in employee behaviors and needs when it comes to technology. For example, half the respondents (communication and HR professionals) said their organizations were already using online video to engage employees and another 27% said they would be introducing it by June 2008. Meanwhile, a quarter of respondents said their organizations were already using online social networks, and another quarter were set to introduce them by June 2008. Organizations are definitely taking note of what people are doing in their personal lives. But, there again, it’s not totally surprising. A lot of the time we’re talking about “organizations listening to their audiences”, but it’s not “us and them” – a lot of these respondents have been using these technologies in their personal lives themselves.

Part 3 (next post): Key Drivers of Employee Engagement.

Join now to be a founding memeber. Monday 7 a.m. update: The network is less than 2 days old, we already have 7 members (make that 8 just as I was writing this) and many of them are leading experts on employee engagement, work, and leadership. I encourage you to be one of our founding members. You don’t need to be an expert or a blogger. You are an ideal memeber if you are interested in the topic, you want to learn more, or you want to enhance your own engagement.

I am extremely excited and enthusiastic to announce the launch of the Employee Engagement Network. I set up the network on January 26th., 2008.

Click here to visit the network. I have always believed that authentic employee engagement is based on connection and I have been reaching out to others involved in employee engagement to learn from them and to offer assistance.

It is very thrilling to now have a network that all of us involved in employee engagement can interact with each other at our own levels of comfort. We can share resources, offer perspectives, find speakers or presenters, learn about new authors, get practical advice, bring new tools to our organizations, and enhance our own levels of engagement.

Don’t just visit the network…JOIN! You do this by clicking on the SIGN UP link on the top right hand corner of the home page.

There is no charge and we need you. We need your questions, your contributions, and your engaging conversations. You get what you give and you will find that you will get a lot of value from our network.

I have just begun to extend some initial invitations and I look forward to people recognizing the value of this network, wanting to be a part of it, and joining in.

Engage along with me, the best is yet to be!

Visit Employee Engagement

David Zinger

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle begins with a key point from each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• Servant leadership is a powerful stance to care for both employees and their engagement.
• The pathway to passionate engaged customers is through fully engaged employees.
• Let’s really talk about employee engagement instead or pretending not to hear the fighting.

Performance - Managers must take care of their employees by Philip Mydlach pairs employee engagement with servant leadership:

Servant leaders tend to be very effective in today’s work world because they place a high importance on making sure the needs of their team members are being met. This is not to imply that the servant leader is not entirely focused on meeting the performance goals of the organization. The servant-leader simply understands that a happy team leads to employee engagement, retention and sustainable high performance over time. Simple concept isn’t it? Servant leadership is…More than anything, servant leadership is an attitude that says I am here to serve you, and to assist you in your personal growth and development in support of achieving the organization’s growth goals.

Capturing Hearts and Minds at Human Resources Executive Online outlines some of Gallup’s Human Sigma work.

The answer is employee engagement or the ability to capture the heads, hearts, and souls of your employees to instill an intrinsic desire and passion for excellence. Engaged employees want their organization to succeed because they feel connected emotionally, socially, and even spiritually to its mission, vision, and purpose… More importantly, it’s hard to create passionate, engaged customers without passionate, engaged employees.

Three BC Christmas Wishes by Yvonne Grinam-Nicholson. Yvonne, writing in the Jamaica Observer, wrote about the importance of planned and powerful organizational communications. I loved her statements about communication and employee engagement:

In doing any analysis of ROI, executives should recognise that employees are their company’s chief ambassadors. They spread the word about you, your products or services no matter what your colourful and costly advertisements shout to the public. Furthermore, are your employees engaged? Are they plugged into what it is they are being paid to do or are they just going through the days, longing for Friday to come?, Worse yet, are they waiting for their ‘redundancy money’ so that they can invest it you know where? Have you formed effective alliances with you human resources department to find out where the problem areas in employee communications in your company are? Are your managers trained to communicate effectively with their staff or do you just throw everybody together, pretend not to hear the fighting and hope to God no one gets killed in any ensuing battle? And, sorry the e-mail alone won’t cut it for 2008. Think again.

Way to get them thinking Yvonne.

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can

leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter

for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

The Monday Morning Percolator is a regular feature of Employee Engagement: Results That Matter. The purpose of the percolator is to start your week off with a post that gets you percolating for the remainder of the week.

At the start of the new year it is a good time to review the principles you believe and follow in employee engagement. What are your principles of employee engagement?

What are the key beliefs or perspectives that influence and shape how you look at the topic and how you act at work?

Here are 10 principles of employee engagement. I encourage you to determine your own or to add yours in the comment section.

Employee engagement is a human endeavour. Engagement is depersonalized when we refer to employees as human capital or human resources. I manage capital or resources, I work with people!

Employee engagement must create results that matter. This means results that are important to the employee, manager, leaders, organization, and customers. There is little point in having engaged employees if they are not contributing and creating significant results. In addition, if the results only matter to the organization and not the employee - or the employee and not the organization - employee engagement will not be sustained over time.

Employee engagement is connection. Connection is the key. Authentic employee engagement involves connection to our work, others, our organizations and ourselves. When we disconnect we disengage. Read this short post on employee engagement and connection.

Employee engagement is fueled by energy. We must pay close attention to mental, emotional, and spiritual energy at work. In addition we need to enhance organizational energy through meaningful connection and high quality interactions.

Employee engagement is more encompassing than motivation. Employee engagement embraces our emotions about work, how hard we work, how much we care about the organization, etc. I think it is a richer and more complex concept than simply using motivation to look at work.

Employee engagement is specific. We cannot sustain engagement all the time and everywhere. When we talk about engagement we need to ask: Who is engaged, with what,  for how long, and for what reason?

Employee engagement requires purposeful disengagement. We need periods of rest, recovery, and rejuvenation to sustain engagement over the long term. Theoretically we may be able to work 24/7 but practically we work best when periods of full engagement are punctuated with periods of disengagement from specific work or tasks.

Employee engagement makes a difference. Employee engagement can improve organizational performance while also contributing to individual performance and satisfaction.

Employee engagement is vital in recruitment, retention, and satisfaction. I believe the majority of workers want to be engaged and look for work that will engage them. People will often leave organizations when they feel disengaged. It may even be worse for all if they remain when they are disengaged.

Employee engagement is now. Look to the now. Don’t wait for some survey results or diagnosis from a management consultant. Look at the work you are doing right now and determine how you can engage with it more fully. Look at who you are working with and determine how you can help them to be more engaged. In addition, look at what you are engaged with now and make sure the results matter!

I encourage you to leave a comment about the principles you follow for employee engagement.

Photo Credit: Web Directions North by http://flickr.com/photos/andallthatmalarkey/389326015/

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert committed to moving employee engagement into authentic and significant workplace engagement with benefits for all.

This video briefly describes the key components of energy management for leaders:

• Physical energy
• Mental energy
• Emotional energy
• Sprititual energy
• Organizational energy

When you think about leadership or managing do you think about managing your own energy?

Click here to watch the video if the screen does not appear in this post.

They are my favorite articles out of a possible 84 articles I wrote since July. I chose them based on how helpful they can be to the reader and how they also express my specific perspectives on employee engagement.

As an extra, I included a bonus article on engagement and retirement.

9. The Employee Engagement Six Pack. This article uses the six pack of aircraft instruments to look at six ways to assess employee engagement.

10.  Zengagement. This was a series of over 35 very short posts/articles with an image and a quotation to foster your thinking or inspiration on employee engagement.

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Bonus Article: Blogging break…Retire Now. This article examines retirement less of a state and more as a way of approaching our work and our lives.

Photo Credit: Number 10 by http://flickr.com/photos/spilt-milk/164145237/

David Zinger is devoted to working with employee engagement

to foster results that matter for all.

Here is a 54 second  greeting from David - standing ankle deep in snow on a 20 below day in Winnipeg. Ho Ho Ho!

Click here to see the video if it does not load on this page.

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle begins with a key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• Even Einstein said, “make things as simple as possible but no simpler.” Does this apply to engagement?
• I can see clearly now…clarity as a key in employee engagement.
• Training in emotional connection facilitates talent retention and employee engagement.
• Be strategic in your employee engagement efforts.

Is the corporate world cutting its own throat? It can be helpful to make things simple but when it comes to work, flexibility, social interaction and performance feedback wins out over job simplification. Carmine Coyote summarizes some research from the University of Florida: The results of this research clearly show that organizations which focus on providing job flexibility, opportunities for social interaction and performance feedback can produce highly performing, highly satisfied workers who have low levels of stress, anxiety and burnout, and who are uninterested in searching for greener pastures. However, organizations that move toward the simplification and independent completion of work will find that workers will be dissatisfied with their work and will perform at a lower level over time, with higher levels of stress.

Clarity - A Key to Employee Engagement. Be Excellent is a blog devoted to helping the best small businesses get even better. Summarizing Watson Wyatt’s research we are reminded: Managers who can clearly communicate where their company is going and why everyone is doing what they are doing are generally much more successful when it comes to engaging their staff.

Managers to be trained on the art of talent retention. This article outlines a program to help in talent retention. Of course, employee engagement is key and here is a snippet from one of the learning modules: Emotional connect between the manager and the employee is critical for employee engagement. iCare focuses on helping the participants explore and enhance their emotional competence and leverage the same at the workplace, effectively. This module will provide opportunity to the participants to be better equipped to relate with their team members at a personal level leading to the employees feeling cared for.

Succesful Employee Engagement Strategies. I highly recommend reading this post if you are in search of some varied and powerful strategies to empower employees. Here is the conclusion after the strategies are outlined in the post: High engagement really means helping your managers engage their staff. The HR department can’t engage every single worker but they have the greatest influence over facilitating processes and systems which will. 

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

Crucial Conversations can improve employee engagement. When employees feel safe because of mutual respect and mutual purpose they are more likely to engage in work.

I have been fortunate over the past year to teach numerous Crucial Conversations courses.

Crucial Conversations is a great approach to getting results and building relationships when the stakes are high, there are differing opinions, and there are strong emotions.

The method is not designed specifically for employee engagement but I have seen what a strong tool it can be to reach out to disengaged workers and to work with conflicts that may begin to sow the seeds of disengagement if they are not dealt with candidly and respectfully.

There are many tools to work with employee engagement and I believe Crucial Conversations is an exquisite tool in the tool-belt of managers and leaders who foster high levels of employee engagement while getting results and building relationships.

Here are 4 actions you can take right now to improve your results and relationships:

1. Read the book: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes Are High.
2. Visit the Vitalsmarts website to learn more about Crucial Conversations and the newest book, The Influencer.
3. Subscribe to the Crucial Skills newsletter. This is one of my top 5 newsletters - I always look forward to it appearing in my inbox.
4. Enroll in a Crucial Conversations workshop to really develop your skills.

Photo Credit: Lattice by http://flickr.com/photos/oddwick/1039909856/

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

I received John Miller’s newsletter on Selection: Hiring Character. John is well know for his work on the book, The Question Behind the Question (QBQ).  I believe when we have people who act with full accountability we have fully engaged people working with us.

The aggregate of traits that form the individual nature of a person including moral or ethical qualities such as honesty, courage, integrity.

Here are the 4 qualities or characters to seek out:

1. Coach-ability
2. Work Ethic
3. A Heart of Service
4. Accountability

I believe these 4 characters will contribute to a very high level of employee engagement. Accountability leads to an enriched level of employee engagement.

Click here to visit the QBQ website.

Photo Credit: Pick a Color, Any Colour by http://flickr.com/photos/stephenliveshere/488233599/

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

Click here if the video does not load on the page you are viewing. 

The Engaging Points of the video are:

• Loving the term employee engagement
• Employee engagement is not just a new word for motivation.
• When we engage fully at work we may also fully engage at home.
• Employee engagement is not sucking more discretionary effort out of people.
• Employee engagement must be for the benefit of all.
• To be successful employee engagement will need to transform into workplace engagement.

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David Zinger is commited to helping employees, leaders, and organizations ensure that employee engagement is for the benefit of all. For more information contact David dzinger@shaw.ca or (204) 254-2130.

David Zinger’s Employee Engagement Chronicle is your primary source for current news, views, reviews, and research on employee engagement. Each entry includes a link to an article or post with a short verbatim tidbit from the article. If you are intrigued, click on the author or source name at the start of each summary to study the full article.

The Chronicle beings with a key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• What is the bonus to having employee engagement part of management’s bonus factors?
• Recognize and leverage the power of story to achieve higher levels of engagement.
• Employee engagement is not a management fad, it is worth the time and effort.
• Let employees know how they are doing and how they fit in.

Non-financial measures have growing influence on executive pay was a recent article at Management Issues. Tom Gosling offers some encouragement and warning in the article. This will put employee engagement into focus yet, incorporating non-financial targets into bonus plans isn’t necessarily guaranteed to deliver the type of benefits that might be imagined. If a target is set, managers will often find a way of meeting it in a way that was not envisaged and with unintended – and often negative - consequences.. Once these measures start being linked to pay, there is always the risk that they are met in ways that are detrimental to the business as a whole.

Work-Life Balance and Full Engagementoutline a free profile on energy and engagement. Jim Loehr has done fantastic work on sports psychology then moving to full engagement. He has now fully developed the power of story on engagement: We get energy for sustained performance when we manage our energy resources effectively,” says Dr. Jim Loehr, CEO of the Human Performance Institute and coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement. “It’s a process that’s not always intuitive, but it can be done when we take control of the stories we tell ourselves through our private, inner voices.” Dr. Loehr’s new book, The Power of Story, shows the essential relationship between full engagement and the stories we tell ourselves. “Put simply, energy follows our stories,” says Loehr. “We give life to something with every story we tell.” He adds, “The first step for many individuals is to face the truth about their current stories and how those stories affect their energy management habits.”

Mike Hager in Green Bay wrote that engaging employees proves beneficial.  A lot has been written about creating an “employee engagement” culture in the workplace. Is this just another management fad or is there something here of real value to an organization? The answer is yes. It’s worth the time and effort to create a fully engaged organization! The results of at least two recent studies are absolutely dramatic; companies with a highly engaged work force have a significantly stronger bottom-line than those who don’t engage workers.

Ken Cook wrote that effective leaders engage employees in Hartford Business.com. Summarizing some of the work of Dick Adams Ken provided these type of suggestions: Share operational and performance data with employees. If they do not know how they are doing in meeting goals or how the company compares to the competition, how can they help — and improve their own view of themselves as contributing parts of company success? In working towards whatever goals you are trying to accomplish, tell the employees how they fit in. This is critical. The employees are the ones who have to implement any solution, and they will know what works or doesn’t work. Effective leaders encourage and spur commitment on the part of employees.

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Contact David Zinger to learn about how you can leverage employee engagement to produce results that matter for everyone in your workplace.

Email: dzinger@shaw.ca ~ Phone 204 254 2103 ~ Website: www.davidzinger.com.

Don’t gamble on employee engagement? When work becomes a mindless addiction, employee engagement loses the power to enrich the person working.

I was at the casino in Halifax Nova Scotia this past weekend. It was amazing to walk around the casino and see people so engaged in gambling. They can sit at tables or in front of slot machines for endless hours. And we all know this is going on in thousands of casinos around the world.

You don’t have to be a keen observer to notice that so few of the gamblers are happy or enjoying themselves, unless they win big. Some of this demonstrates the addicting power of random intermittent reinforcement.

I know some workplaces would love to have people show up and sit at a machine for hours at a time pushing buttons and monitoring the screen. The employer wouldn’t even have to pay the person, the person would pay them!

Don’t gamble with your work. What I mean is, enjoy work and don’t let it become a mindless addiction. You might be working all the time but if work is not a source of pleasure or satisfaction I don’t believe you are truly engaged in what you are doing.

I say, to heck with letting the chips fall where they may – make a conscious deliberate craft of staying engaged with your work. When we are fully engaged at work we gladly chip in and that “chipping in” is a source of contribution to others, our organization, and a source of satisfaction for us. JACKPOT!

Photo Credit: Slot Machine by http://flickr.com/photos/kubina/347687569/

The Chronicle beings with the key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• Emotional engagement and human bonding energize employees and catalyze productive energies.
• Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work
• Employee engagement is money in the bank
• Have you heard the communication “secrets?”

Engage your employees to reduce attritionis from the Deccan Hearld. this article outlines a number of presentations related to HR and employee engagement. The following section outlining the points of Jyothi Menon really caught me eye: In a scathing indictment of the indifferent ways corporates function today in pursuit of their toplines and bottomlines growth and address the “deadly disease of attrition”, Standard Chartered Bank Vice President — HR Jyothi Menon, in her impassioned presentation on Emotional Engagement at the Workplace maintained that HR is no longer human resource but human relations. Pointing out that corporates, in their efforts to tackle attrition have not been able to connect with their employees, Ms Menon said, it was high time corporates did a reality check and emotionally engaged and bonded with their staff. “Only through emotional engagement and human bonding can organisations energise employees and catalyse their productive energies towards human excellence.”Well said Jyothi.

Engagement vs. Hierarchy – Well-Being in Chinese Workplaces  is in Positive Psychology New Daily. The article discuccses Gallup’s 4 elements of employee engagement - (1) Clarity of expectations and basic materials supported (2) Encourage employee contribution & fulfilment (3) Sense of belonging (4) Intellectual resources. Timothy So concludes the article: As Aristotle said, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” I wish my friend, as well as every employee, could leave his office with the biggest smile everyday after engaging in his work

Anne Moore Odell  wrote about Engaged Employees Equal Increased Earnings in Social Funds.This is yet another article looking at Towers Perrin engagement work. The difference between what companies need employees to do and what employees want to do has been named by Towers Perrin the “engagement gap.” Only one fifth (21%) of workers in the study are engaged in their work while 38% of polled workers are partly to fully disengaged. In one three year study of 40 global organizations, for example, we found that ‘high employee engagement’ companies enjoyed significantly better financial results on measures such as operating margin, net profit margin, revenue growth and earnings per share growth than ‘low employee engagement’ companies,” said Max Caldwell, Managing Principal of Towers Perrin.

Watson Wyatt Study Reveals Six Communication ‘Secrets’ of Top-Performing Employers. This article outlines the six communication secrets:

1. Focusing managers and other employees on customer needs
2. Engaging employees in running the business
3. Helping managers communicate effectively
4. Leveraging the talents of internal communicators to manage change effectively
5. Measuring the impact of employee communication
6. Branding the employee experience

In every human endeavor there are two arenas of engagement: the outer and the inner. The outer game is played on an external arena to overcome external obstacles to reach an external goal. The inner game takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses in focus, and limiting concepts or assumptions. The inner game is played to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent an individual or team from accessing their full potential.   Tim Gallway

Photo Credit: basketball court by http://flickr.com/photos/mioi/68561164/

The Chronicle beings with the key point for each of the sources listed:

Get The Point:

• Target your most valuable employee with your engagement efforts.
• High levels of employee engagement means higher levels of financial results
• Are you sick or sick from disengagement?
• The moment of truth has arrived in employee engagement.

Employee engagement strongly linked to business success is an article from the Manila Times. Engaged employees are those who have internalized the organization’s business goals, the steps required to achieve those goals and further understand how their contributions drive results, according to James Matti, Managing Consultant of Watson Wyatt Philippines. “They have a strong desire to participate in the company’s success… The Work-Asia study tells us that forward-looking organizations are replacing one-size-fits-all offerings with programs that target their most valuable employees. These efforts enable them to create a more productive and stable workforce.

Engaged Employees Boost Financial Performance is a post from Growing Wealth: Companies with the highest levels of employee engagement achieve better financial results and are more likely to retain their most valued employees  Only 10 percent of employees report that senior management treats them as if they are the most important part of the organization. More than half feel that senior management “treats us as just another part of the organization to be managed” or “as if we don’t matter.”

Bill Catlette wrote about Calling in Sick, Sort Of…part 2. Here is his conclusion to an interesting article on the link between calling in sick and employee engagement: If it’s your job that you’re sick of, for your own sake, do the right thing by finding another job, and leaving. Don’t just “kinda leave.” Got it?

Carolyn Hirschman at Human Resource Executive Online wrote moments of truth. This is a well-written and extensive article to assist you with employee engagement if your focus is customer-service workers: Business minds have long studied “what works” in employee engagement, but it can be an elusive concept to put into practice. In high-turnover customer-service industries, the challenge is even greater to hire, train and recognize the best employees. For HR executives who get it right, the results — from outstanding service to higher sales to better retention — can be substantial.

During the previous 5 weeks I engaged in leadership strength development through the application of StrengthsFinder 2.0. I encourage you to read the past 5 Monday Morning Percolators to follow the development and progress of this project.

Here was the schedule of my strength focus:

1. Maximizer (Week 1)
2. Strategic (Week 2)
3. Positivity (Week 3)
4. Ideation (Week 4)
5. Empathy (Week 5)

The process of working on strengths included:

• Complete the StrengthsFinder 2.0 inventory.
• Scan your top 5 strengths
• Study your first strength
• Outline strength based actions for the first week.
• Implement your action plan
• Review your progress
• Repeat the the process with the next strength on your list.
• Click here to download a one page PDF form to assist in your strength work.

Here are 10 leadership strength applications and methods I encourage you to apply based on the experience of the past 5 weeks:

1. We must go beyond listing our strengths to living our strengths. Many people have completed strength assessments but what happens after the assessment? Do your strengths get lost in the shuffle of daily demands?
2. The conscious application of strengths gives more power to projects and enthusiasm to efforts.
3. It is helpful to focus on just one strength a week rather than trying to apply all the strengths all the time.
4. In a future project I will dedicate each day to a strength: Monday - Maximizer / Tuesday - Strategic / Wednesday - Positivity / Thursday - Ideation / Friday - Empathy. You could even do this on an hourly basis during the day.
5. A powerful questions to leverage your strengths to specific tasks and encounters is to ask yourself: How can I use my signature strengths right here and right now?
6. Even with a conscious focus on strengths I believe that there were literally hundreds of times that my strengths would have helped me with situations that I simply overlooked.
7. Do whatever you can to be mindful of your strengths: write them down, study them, or make a commitment to yourself and others. Without being mindful of our strengths we can experience strength resource myopia - we have this resource but we fail to see it and leverage it.
8. I believe there is a huge untapped resource of strength application that lives within us  and between us calling for more focused and mindful application on a daily basis to help us achieve results that matter.
9. Strength focus and application is not a fluffy extra. I think conscious strength application is vital, especially for leaders who feel exhausted or demoralized by the constant and growing demands of leadership.
10. Focused strength application may be a strong prevention against a possible employee engagement implosion that is occurring in middle management. We must strengthen the middle of organizations before organizations topple over due to top heavy demands, decreasing levels of employee disengagement and a middle that feels they can’t hold it together.

Photo Credit: Backbone Rock by http://flickr.com/photos/pfly/201161868/

What might it be like to awaken each day into an increasing sense that being loving is even more important than being loved? ~ Stephen Levine

Photo Credit: i heart u by http://flickr.com/photos/littlegoldwoman/860925091/

Click here to view the video if the video does not load below.