To effect change, you must do something differently.

It starts with you. Do it right, and you’ll enjoy a snowball effect that helps your team, direct reports and even family members implement change.

While many books have covered organizational change, business school professors Chip and Dan Heath cover the patterns all successful change efforts have in common in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010).

The Heaths avoid looking at the history of failed changes. Instead, they share stories of spectacular changes that worked because execution built upon prior achievements.

In researching significant social, educational, governmental, marital and organizational changes, what are the patterns that emerge that anyone can apply in real-world business situations?

In many ways, the first small steps you take to change your behavior are the most important. Once you initiate change, it seems to feed on itself.

Perhaps the famous Stephen Covey maxim, “Begin with the end in mind,” needs to be revised: Start with the beginning and the end in mind.

Here’s how to get started and unleash the snowball effect.

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The complete 1,000 word article includes these important concepts:

•    First Steps
•    The Snowball Effect
•    The Problem with Problems
•    Follow Your Bright Spots
•    Start with the Beginning in Mind
•    Unleash the Snowball Effect

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Snowball Effect – Start Change Now

Four basic drives are common to all human beings, but which ones affect your daily life and behavior? How do they influence the choices you make?

At the start of the 20th century, psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud proposed that people are driven by sex and power—but there’s much more to it than that. By the 1950s, psychologist Abraham Maslow identified our “hierarchy” of basic needs, which include shelter, food, clothing, ego and belonging. After these needs were met, he said, we’re driven toward self-actualization—a state very few achieve.

In the 1960s, MIT management professor Douglas McGregor applied Maslow’s ideas to the business world. He asserted that once basic salary needs were met, workers had higher drives that weren’t contingent on rewards or punishments. If managers could tap into people’s inner motivations by granting more autonomy and respect, they would spur greater performance.

Harvard psychology professor David McClelland later identified three motivators in leaders: drives to achieve, attain power and affiliate with others.

Despite all of these studies, businesses continue to use monetary incentives instead of tapping into employees’ intrinsic motivations. Perhaps one can chalk this up to fuzzy, anachronistic notions about what motivates people.

A new theory suggests each of us has four basic drives that have existed since our cavemen days. These drives, which have allowed us to survive, are embedded in our DNA and actively chart the course for our daily behaviors.

We are driven by human nature to acquire, bond, learn and defend.

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The complete 1,000 word article includes these important concepts:

•    The Drive to Acquire
•    The Drive to Bond
•    The Drive to Learn
•    The Drive to Defend
•    The Balancing Act
•    The Dark Side of Drives

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Click HERE: Four Drives that Motivate You

Most business leaders have lost sight of what motivates people at work. In fact, some companies haven’t updated their management practices in years, which means they’re incapable of creating high-performance teams.

Companies continue to ignore the obvious: Offering incentives and rewards is less effective than tapping into truly meaningful intrinsic motivation. Leaders operate on old assumptions about motivation despite a wealth of well-documented scientific evidence.

The old “carrot-and-stick” mentality may actually inhibit employees from seeking creative solutions, partly because they focus on attaining rewards instead of solving problems.

So, how can you successfully tap into workers’ inherent motivation and creative drive? How can you boost the number of actively engaged employees from the paltry 33 percent reported by the Gallup Organization? And how can you sustain employees’ enthusiasm after their first 30 days on the job?

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, former U.S. Department of Labor aide Daniel H. Pink says businesses are out of sync with what scientists have been telling us over the last 50 years.

The hackneyed carrot-and-stick approach, now dubbed “Motivation 2.0,” encourages poor leadership practices, including Pink’s “seven deadly flaws”:

1. Extinguishing motivation
2. Diminishing performance
3. Crushing creativity
4. Crowding out good behavior
5. Encouraging cheating, shortcuts and unethical behavior
6. Becoming addictive or obsessive
7. Fostering short-term thinking

In fact, Pink holds Motivation 2.0 partly responsible for the economic chaos of 2008. Mortgage brokers, for instance, were so hungry for commissions that they made questionable loans, which helped bring the nation’s banking system to its knees.

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This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 & 1000-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:

• Seven Deadly Flaws
• The Hawthorne Studies
• Scientific Management
• Freud, Skinner & Maslow
• The Third Drive
• Negative Impact of Rewards
• Open Source Innovations
• Unleashing Motivation
• Creating Flow
• Rethinking Management
• Rethinking Human Nature

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Click HERE: RethinkingMotivation -  Apr10-100a,  2000-word article

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Click HERE: Rethinking Motivation -  Apr10-100b  – 1000 word Article

Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.

What’s needed, specifically?

Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.

In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the economy’s overwhelming demands. Your leaders can’t go it alone. You can’t, either.

Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. In fact, there may be no such thing as natural talent. It’s certainly not something you want to rely upon to help solve current problems.

Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.

“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do, “ according to Fortune Senior Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).

The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it.

The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?

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This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 & 1000-word article suitable for coach/consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations.

It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:

Crisis or Opportunity?
Is Talent Irrelevant?
Talent or Hard Work?
10,000 Hours or 10 Years
What Is Deliberate Practice?
Why We Avoid Hard Work
What About Passion?
Talent Is Never Enough

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Debunking the Talent Myth Apr09- 2000 word Article

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Debunking the Talent Myth Apr09- 1000 word Article

Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D.

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4 Uncommon Leadership Qualities & 5 Common Myths

Everyone agrees great leaders have vision, energy, authority and good strategic direction. Leaders must also have enthusiastic followers; leadership requires skills in persuading others to commit to company goals and embrace initiatives determined by others.

In today’s environment of Gen-Xers and Millennial workers, it isn’t that easy to engage “empowered” people.

For all the leadership training workshops—and despite the thousands of business books published every year—very few people can confidently explain how they take charge, engage others and develop their leadership skills.

To be inspirational, leaders need four essential qualities besides vision and energy. These traits are probably not what you’d expect, but they can be honed by those willing to dig deeply to find their inner values.

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This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences.

The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:

Reveal Your Weaknesses
Refine Your Sensors
Practice Tough Empathy
Dare to Be Different
Leadership in Action
Five Popular Myths About Leadership

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Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D.

If you watch closely, you can see successful people exercising these laws everyday. In fact, one way to be successful is to do just that: find a successful person you admire, watch carefully, observe what works, and do it as well.

Here are 11 ways success comes about.

The Law of Experience

Success comes from good judgment; good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. The more ‘at bats’ you get, the more experience you get, the more successful you can be.

The Law of Hunger

In the words of motivational speaker Les Brown, in order to be successful, “you have to be huuuuuuuuungrrry!” You have to want it so bad that you can taste it. You have to want it so bad that you are willing to pay the price to get it.

The Law of Balance

While you’re paying the price for success, it’s crucial to keep your life in balance. No one who is a success in their chosen profession and a failure in their personal life is a success.

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These are a few universal laws of success. The complete 700 word article discusses 8 more including small successes, momentum, clarity, and modeling among others.

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You know you have a talented group of people working for you. You may have personally hired some of them or seen their excellent work in other teams. But all of this talent is meaningless if you cannot raise the bar and motivate people to produce their best work ever, for you and your team, right now.

When people feel inspired to live up to their full potential, companies thrive. There’s a positive shift in the work environment, and the resulting culture boosts morale and productivity.

When you inspire motivation, you’ll see the following advances at work:

• People come up with new ideas about how to solve your company’s most pressing problems.

• People get along well and collaborate in teams to create new ways of doing things that can revolutionize the marketplace for your products and services.

• People work with boundless energy, giving their time, enthusiasm and drive to forward the company mission.

• Even during challenging times, your people remain steadfast and loyal.

• People take pride in their work and feel responsible for the company’s future.

If you’re a manager or team leader whose employees exhibit such behaviors, you work under ideal conditions. When such energy is evident, truly great things can happen.

But what if, like the results of the Gallup Organization’s study of engagement at work, some of your people are not fully dedicated to their jobs? What if one-third of your team members are simply going through the motions, showing up but withholding energy?

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The full 2000 word article is based on the book Motivating People for Improved Performance, a collection of timely articles from Harvard Management Update and Harvard Management Communication Letter, part of the Results-Driven Manager Series (2005, Harvard Business School Publishing).

Here are the concepts discussed in the full article:

A Paycheck Isn’t Enough
Is Motivation an Inside or Outside Job?
Helping People Find Meaning at Work
8 Career Anchors: What Matters Most
Strengthening Personal Qualities
Fostering Commitment Beyond the Job
Open-Book Management Style
9 Steps to Creating a Alibata Great Workplace

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All word lengths are approximate.