When you are overwhelmed, overworked, and overinvested in maintaining the status quo – when you find yourself resisting change even though what you’re doing right now isn’t really working – that is a sign you are not fully in charge of your life. You are letting things happen to you by accident.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
How leaders & employees can power up happiness at work.
Luc Levesque, of TravelPod & TripAdvisor, on how to lead your team to excellence and how he uses iDoneThis.
The science of shower creativity.
Why Steve Jobs never listened to his customers.
5 ways to standout performance.
When leaders don’t have time to lead and fear accountability.
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Hey iDT team users, have you noticed that links are now clickable? Include links in your dones to show ALL the things!
Women face tough challenges in accessing leadership opportunities. Just look at the numbers. While women make up 51.4% of middle managers, they account for a mere 4.2% of Fortune 500 CEOs.
During law school, I participated in a clinical program where students work in the field while receiving practical training and guidance. While discussing a self-evaluation written after a client interview exercise, I noted that I’d been pretty hard on myself, commenting lightly, “Well, who thinks they do everything great?”
“Plenty of people do,” my supervising professor replied. “And they’ll say so, even when they’re not.”
While the extremes of egotism can be awfully distasteful, there is something to tooting your own horn. Among the complex reasons for the self-promotion paradox that women face, including harmful gender stereotypes and perceptions, is a lack of confidence in communicating achievements, in saying so even when they actually are awesome at what they do.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
How we help Crashlytics work so that mobile developers can focus on the things that matter.
Breaking down the science of productivity.
Overcoming the bias against creatives as leaders.
Are you a daydream believer? We are.
Happy Weekend! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week! (And apologies for the hiccup with yesterday’s post.)
Our sprawling guide to content marketing.
How to get in the habit of writing.
We’ve written about the awkward leader. Now read about the generous leader.
The dark side of charisma.
Did you take part in Small Business Saturday? Here are some small businesses that have cracked the code of their success.
Being a manager is difficult because it feels unnatural. Your job isn’t actually to get work done. You’re doing your job as a manager when what you’re doing doesn’t resemble work at all.
To Andy Grove, legendary CEO of Intel, a manager’s fundamental work of information gathering can be among the most unnatural and that awkwardness is a necessary part of being a leader. Information gathering is the bread and butter of a manager’s work, but doing it effectively can mean making yourself vulnerable to looking and feeling like you’re doing nothing.
Grove instructs managers that “[t]here is an especially efficient way to get information, much neglected by most managers” that is underutilized “because of the awkwardness that managers feel about [it].” That is, be out in the open in your company, doing nothing.
From looking at the time logs of extremely successful people, I’ve learned that they focus on three categories: nurturing their career, nurturing their family and nurturing themselves.
“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
– Admiral James Stockdale [1]
Fundraising is distracting because much of it is about framing facts about your reality rather than confronting the brutal facts of your reality. For us, that meant coming up with a plausible story for not sucking when we did mostly suck. [2]
Some startups try to handle this by juggling two different stories: the one they tell investors and the one they know to be true. That sounds easy enough, but it can get very confusing and that confusion results in friction.