A five-step process to achieve and sustain peak performance

As Edward M. Hallowell explains in his most recent book, Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People, published by Harvard Business Review Press (2011), “Many people need help in getting rid of the obstacles in their way. In the workplace, this is the challenge that managers face: to help people overcome these obstacles and enter into [what Hallowell characterizes as ‘The Cycle of Excellence’]. While I have made many suggestions on how to do this, my concluding suggestion is this: do it your way. Ultimately, neither I nor anyone else can tell you what to do more skillfully than you can tell yourself.”

Hallowell does share his own thoughts about how to achieve and then sustain peak performance. He suggests a five-step process.

1. Put people into the right jobs so that their brains light up.

2. Overcome the potent forces that disconnect people in the workplace both from each other and from the mission of the organization, and restore the force of positive connection which is the most powerful fuel for peak performance.

3. Effectively use play – imaginative and improvisational collaboration – to catalyze advance work, and help people tap into this exceptionally productive but yet undervalued activity of the creative mind.

4. Create conditions in which people can “grapple and grow” because they want to work hard, making progress completing a task that is challenging but exciting as well as highly valued and appreciated.

5. Doing well – shining — feels so good. Therefore, be sure to recognize and praise anyone within the organization because “a culture that helps people shine inevitably becomes a culture of self-perpetuating excellence.”

Hallowell adds, “Each step is critical in its own right and translates into actions a manager or worker can [begin do and do now. [end]. Each step builds upon the other. [begin] The most common mistake managers make is to jump in at step 4 and ask people to work harder, without first having created the conditions that will lead workers to want to work harder [end].

“Whatever you do, your goal as a manager should be to minimize feelings of alienation and falseness within your organization, while increasing feelings of openness and honesty. You want to make sure people feel permission to be real.”

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Edward M. Hallowell, MD, a psychiatrist, served as an instructor at Harvard Medical School for twenty years and is director of the Hallowell Centers in New York City and Sudbury, Massachusetts, and is the author of two Harvard Business Review articles and 18 books.

Redesigning Today’s Graduate Classroom

Credit: Brian Taylor

Here is an excerpt of an article that caught my eye, written by Leonard Cassuto and  recently published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 20, 2011).  With uncommon clarity, Cassuto addresses many of the issues that continue to generate divided opinions (sometimes sharply divided opinions) about the mission of graduate school education and the extent to which it now fulfills that mission.

To read the complete article, please click here.

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No one should deny that graduate education is in a bad way at the moment. But apart from loosing rivers of blood and bile about this online, exactly what are we doing about it? In the next couple of columns I want to examine a few notable and very different efforts to deal with the most pressing problems before us, and consider what the reforms might mean for graduate teachers.

When I first started writing this column, I thought that I’d be offering practical suggestions for how to structure and teach graduate seminars and how to advise dissertation students. I still intend to do that, but the urgency of the concerns facing graduate programs in these straitened times—and the changes that those trends are already forcing in programs—have made clear that we can’t separate what happens in graduate classrooms from what’s happening in graduate programs around the country. And as the high unemployment rate for new Ph.D.’s illustrates, we can’t separate what’s happening in graduate programs from the troubles faced right now by universities generally.

It was with those thoughts in mind that I attended a meeting last month of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, a program financed by the Teagle Foundation and directed by Peter T. Struck, a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sarah E. Igo, a historian at Vanderbilt University. As its title suggests, the forum looks forward. It’s a concerted attempt to seed the clouds with thinkers who are also doers.

The forum is sponsoring 30 fellows in fields across the liberal arts as disparate as French and brain science. A number of fellows hold appointments (or joint appointments) in education. Nearly all are junior faculty members. They will meet five times over a three-year period (two meetings remain).

Igo and Struck have worked on the principle that talented thinkers should go beyond coming up with ideas, which is the easy part for academics. They should also design and model their ideas. Indeed, “design” is the keyword here. “Instead of taking conundrums that we might chew our cud over,” said Struck, “we want to design tasks.”

That emphasis on design makes the project stand out for me. I’ve seen a lot of grant money get spent by groups of people who talk to one another and then stage a conference where they talk to one another some more. The problems facing academe today demand concrete plans for trial and testing. Accordingly, the mission of the Teagle forum is for its participants to “carry [their] conversations back to their home universities, to policy circles, and to the broader society.”

Design is the designated vehicle to turn ideas into policy. “Great design,” said Zachary First, one of the 30 fellows and managing director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, “is feasible (can it work?), viable (can it spread?), and desirable (do people want it?).” At one of their earlier meetings, the group members created a series of “design challenges” that now serve as collective prompts. Many of the prompts reflect continuing national conversations, such as, “Design a way to deliver a liberal education such that it is not just a luxury for the affluent.” Related to that prompt is another one that speaks directly to the anxieties roiling graduate education right now: “Modify the academic labor market such that it will better support a liberal education.”

The emphasis on practical planning makes the forum unlike any other group of its kind that I’ve seen. Struck and Igo emphasize that they are looking for inspiration from successful business models ranging from health care to religion. The goal of such case studies, says Igo, is “concrete action, to think about institutional structures.” And, she adds, “to unthink them too.”

One group prompt is to “design graduate training to produce professors who will make the organizational changes we envision.” Those changes are not yet articulated, of course, but I’d like to focus on that very lacuna as a space that we can all try to fill. It’s too early to tell what the results of the Teagle initiative will be, but the hope is evidently that these young and talented fellows will take their heightened sense of “can do” and become campus leaders who will be able to foster new ideas from the top down.

But why can’t we all start doing what the forum is doing, from the bottom up? Let’s start with the classroom. As professors, we design what goes on in our courses. It’s easy to design a graduate course around a chunk of disciplinary content: We need look no further than the graduate seminars that we took ourselves. But the new realities of graduate education in this country require new designs.

In particular, how can we design graduate courses that aren’t just for future professors and other academic researchers? We need to adjust our goals in the classroom to accommodate different kinds of students.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Leonard Cassuto

Author’s note: Writing a column offers the privilege of an evolving relationship with one’s readers. A number of mine have noted that certain observations I’ve made about graduate education don’t fit the sciences so well. That’s true. I want to write about the sciences along with the humanities and social sciences, including a focus on some of the specific problems encountered in scientific graduate education. But in order to do that, I’ll need some education myself. So consider this a special request to my readers in the sciences: Please send ideas, referrals, or simple advice to my e-mail address below.

Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, writes regularly about graduate education in this space. He welcomes comments and suggestions from readers at lcassuto@erols.com or at http://www.lcassuto.com/biobiblio.

What Separates the Extremely Successful from the Pack?

Marcie Schorr Hirsch

Here is an excerpt from an article written by  Marcie Schorr Hirsch for Harvard Business Review’s “The Conversation” series. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and sign up for a free subscription to HBR emsil Alerts, please click here.

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Most people dream of succeeding. What success means is highly personal, but as a veteran career coach, I can honestly say that no one has ever come to see me with a goal of anything but success. The vast majority of my clients want “extreme success” — that is, a career that advances them to the most senior echelon of an organization. Obviously there are more people aspiring to those top slots than there are opportunities. Some individuals will make it; many won’t.

To better help my clients reach their goals, I wanted to understand what differentiates those who succeed in attaining senior executive status from those who do not. A review of the literature on success revealed myriad correlations between particular variables and success in the workplace. These variables were discipline-linked — the educational researchers explored the relationship between academic choice and career achievement; the psychologists looked at the connection between personality types and success; the sociologists’ inquiries examined issues such as the impact of family birth order on career achievement — but this seemed limiting. Real lives are multidimensional. Each career will include elements related to many different disciplines, and individuals pursuing success will make choices in many areas that may influence their careers.

What’s more, the research tended to treat success as a monolithic entity. It did not define success by degree, but rather as a binary phenomenon: success or failure. For my purposes, I was not seeking to understand simply why some people succeed and others fail; my clients are not likely to be total washouts. They are generally intelligent, hard-working, and highly motivated — in short, likely to succeed in a broad sense. What I wanted to understand was “the secret sauce.” What was operating in the careers of those who made it to the top versus those who got stuck in the middle ranks?

So I embarked on researching this issue myself. Using a matched-pair design, I worked backwards to examine the careers of a dozen sets of executives: Each set was comprised of two individuals who had started at approximately the same time in the same organization and shared the same educational achievement, as well as being of the same age, sex, race, and education level. (Note: all pairs were made up of white males; at the time of the research, I was unable to find people of color or women in top-level roles with identical matches in the mid-level roles in their organizations.) The main difference was that, after the same number of years in the same organization, one member of the pair had reached “extreme success,” while the other rose only to the middle of the executive ranks.

Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from these participants on over 60 variables frequently cited as relevant to career success members. Every man was asked whether a particular variable was present in his background, and, if so, to rank it in degree of importance in creating his success. Interestingly, with regard to the “facts of the case” — the simple presence or absence of various success-variables — the groups remained indistinguishable. And even in their assignment of importance to these different variables, no separate pattern emerged. In other words, highly successful executives did not appear to be distinguished from moderately successful ones based on visible events or explicit strategies.

But a difference between the two groups did emerge when participants were asked to say how each variable had affected their career outcomes. It seemed that extremely successful participants understood the value of individual elements of their careers in different ways than their only moderately successful counterparts. Take, for example, their marriages. Fully 22 of the 24 participants reported that they were married, and all 22 put “being married” in the category of factors that were highly important to their career achievement. But when asked to explain why being married had been helpful, moderately successful participants offered responses such as, “I always have a clean shirt in the closet,” or “I never have to interrupt my work to take the kids to an appointment.” They expressed appreciation for the contributions made by their partners by offering examples of the ways in which their wives functioned as helpmates in coping with the logistical demands of life.

The highly successful group’s answers had a different character. “My wife taught me everything I know about interpersonal skills” and “I never make an important business decision without consulting her” are representative of the explanations offered by the participants from the top group. They valued their wives for educating them in important areas, or for helping them see different angles on complex issues. This tendency to see beyond efficiency leverage in the value of a spousal relationship is just one way in which the highly successful executives thought differently about working in partnership. Instead of defaulting to generic, role-based expectations, they recognized particular talents or strengths in their partners and identified opportunities to benefit from them.

Time and time again, the qualitative responses suggested that the two executives in each of my sample’s matched pairs held different understandings of the meaning of comparable situations, decisions, and people in their careers. And they differed in consistent ways. The members of the extreme talent group — from their optimizing of other relationships without adhering to the limits of job descriptions (why couldn’t a comptroller offer creative ideas?) to their continual reinvention of their career path as unexpected opportunities came along — showed a propensity for creating value in non-obvious ways. They seemed to have a different lens through with they viewed what was going on around them. Perhaps this is why they made different choices that led to different outcomes.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Marcie Schorr Hirsch, EdD, is a principal at HirschHills Consulting, a boutique management consulting firm in Newton Centre MA. She consults and writes on workplace strategy and career dynamics. Marcie’s private career coaching practice is in Belmont MA. She is also is a prolific writer on workplace issues and has co-authored and contributed to several books including: Roads Taken, Workplace Diversity: A Manager’s Guide to Solving Problems and Turning Diversity into a Competitive Advantage, Educating Managers, and Managing Your Maternity Leave. She has been a regular contributor to People Management (a UK publication) and a writer for the management column in Working Women magazine.

Drucker’s Lost Art of Management

Here is a recent article from the Drucker Exchange (the Dx), an online resource that hosts an ongoing conversation about bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance and build on the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. To learn more about the Dx and the Institute as well as to check out their resources and sign up for a free subscription to its online newsletter, please click here.

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Nobody is saying that numbers-crunchers’ days are numbered.  But the idea that having people with a strong background in the humanities — what Peter Drucker termed “Management as a Liberal Art” can provide companies with a great advantage is gaining some real momentum.

Last week, Harvard Business Review ran a piece by Tony Golsby-Smith, which asserted that humanities majors can offer insights that are beyond the grasp of those who’ve focused primarily on business or economics or computer science. “People . . . who study Shakespeare’s poetry, or Cezanne’s paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can’t be analyzed in conventional ways,” he wrote.

Among the areas in which liberal arts graduates are poised to provide major contributions, Golsby-Smith suggested, are helping corporations puzzle through complex or ambiguous situations; innovating; communicating; and understanding the customer through the power of “observation and psychology—the stuff of poets and novelists.”

Meanwhile, just about to hit bookstores is Drucker’s Lost Art of Management, a new title from the Drucker Institute’s own Joe Maciariello and his co-author, Karen Linkletter. They not only see an embracing of the humanities as a way for companies to be more effective; they also believe that lessons from the liberal arts are essential to making business more responsible.

“Fueled by corporate scandal and the behavior of out-of-touch executives who seem to have no moral compass, popular sentiment has turned against management as a profession,” Maciariello and Linkletter write. “Perhaps the only hope for redemption for management as a true profession is to practice management as a liberal art: to ground it in an understanding of shared cultural values that are inculcated through education and modeled through executive behavior.”

What do you think: Should businesses be hiring more people with a background in the humanities? If more companies do go in this direction, will it make them more effective? Will it make them more ethical?