The word enlighten implies to gain understanding or insight that reveals information and knowledge previously unknown. Most people use the word enlightened to refer to a time, knowledge or experience that transformed their views of the world.
Tom Hood's insight:
If there is ever a time when organization’s and individual’s need to be enlightened it is today and then again tomorrow.
Great post and very appropriate given last week's DigitalCPA Conference at Gaylord National Harbor where we are working on building a community of "enlightened" CPAs working to seek and create new ways of providing value to businesses and dismantling old ways of working. And to help "enlighten" others to join the movement.
I especially liked the definition in your post,
"The word enlighten implies to gain understanding or insight that reveals information and knowledge previously unknown. Most people use the word enlightened to refer to a time, knowledge or experience that transformed their views of the world. However, enlightenment itself is not about merely changing the way one looks at the world, as the Age of Enlightenment philosophers set out to do, it is also about destruction. Enlightenment is the dismantling and discarding of old, deep-seated beliefs in exchange for new ideas which are better supported by the available evidence..."
I also like your perspective on how the worlkd is changing. From me to we, from ego-system to ecosystem. I would add from independent to interdependent, from hierarchy to network, from command & control to connect and collaborate.
Reminds me of our favorite saying, "insight without action is either useless or destructive."
The best time to be enlightened and to enlighten others is today, and then again, tomorrow, and then again tomorrow...
Narrative and passion are becoming increasingly central to performance at all levels – individual, institution and ecosystem. But are they completely separate topics or are they related in some way?
Via Kenneth Mikkelsen
Tom Hood's insight:
Narrative if two-way can ignite passion, increase engagement, and lead "buy-in"
Even as recently as twenty or thirty years ago, the people with influence were relatively easy to spot: the President or Prime Minister of a nation, religious leaders, CEOs, and probably your parents.
Their influence was based on a combination of position, experience, knowledge, wealth – and most importantly control of the channels of communication to the “people,” for to have power influence must be spread.
No longer – the influence landscape has already shifted dramatically and will continue to evolve.
Great visual of the modern leader and to quote Jim Collins,m"we are moving from organizations well managed to networks well led." Essentially, the leaders of today will be more like association executives than command and control CEOs of the past. What do you think about this?
I think the opeining quote says it all, "Emotions are some of the main drivers of engagement" - Dale Carnegie.
The bottom-line is are you successfully connecting your team (and that incudes strategic partners, suppliers, customers and prospective customers to your purpose and vision?
Are you working to maximize the strengths of your team on the best opportunities facing your business or firms?
Are you working together to turn your flywheel or are your efforts spread out in all directions?
This article sums it up nicely...
Generally, employee engagement is known as the emotional commitment an employee has to the company and its goals, the positive attitude or behaviour of someone at work. Truly engaged employees are attracted to and inspired by their work and they are willing to give their best as an integral part of their daily activity, experiencing job satisfaction along with organisational commitment and job involvement.
After hosting dozens of these conversations, I realize one thing: We just don't listen enough to our students. The tradition in education has been not to ask the students what they think or want, but rather for adult educators to design the system and curriculum by themselves, using their "superior" knowledge and experience.
This is true for learned of all ages from kindergarten to adult learning. We all learn best when we can participate in the learning, rather than just passively consume it. This was major conversation at our BLI (http://www.blionline.org) on-site collaboration session earlier this week. All of our work on competencies and curriculum has been based on learner collaboration sessions and look for new participation models and tools to enrich our work with adult learners.
It is a tough time to be a leader today. In a world that is increasingly coomplex and changing rapidly, it is both full of danger and opportunity for leaders who can see beyond the Horizon and inspire their teams to keep moving forward...
Author and minister Frederick Beuchner summed it best when he wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.”
I like the analogy of "Into Thin Air" where expert climbers died in an Everest expedition because they failed to see the weak signals of disruptive change...
The difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing.
Tom Hood's insight:
Rossabeth Moss Kanter is one of the leading thinkers on leadership and her points about the need for resilience (we like the term "bend without breaking" are spot on. I like her definition, "Resilience is the ability to recover from fumbles or outright mistakes and bounce back. But flexibility alone is not enough. You have to learn from your errors. Those with resilience build on the cornerstones of confidence — accountability (taking responsibility and showing remorse), collaboration (supporting others in reaching a common goal), and initiative (focusing on positive steps and improvements)."
This is also a core principle in our Leadership Academy work.
Return on Attention! This caught my attention - Studies show that we are interrupted every three minutes during work and it takes us 23 minutes on average to get back to the original task. The real kicker is that more than half of the distractions were completely self-inflicted.
Some simple, easy to implement tips to help stay focused on the work that matters most. Easy to say, harder to do everyday, but I am going to try...
A transformational leadership style—valued for stimulating innovation and worker performance—is also associated with increased well-being among employees, reports a study in the July Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official...
Transformational eadership and increased employee well-being. Four traits of transformational leaders are: 1) leading by example, 2) making employees feel they are contributing to a common goal, 3) providing intellectual stimulation, and 4) giving positive feedback for good performance.
"A leader's job is to provide hope and inspiration" - Gretchen Pisano & Tom Hood
I think this article captures these well. The three leadership traits that most mattered were 1) the ability to focus intensely on customer needs, 2) the ability to collaborate with colleagues — and 3) the ability to inspire.
And this article debunks the myth and proves "leaders can learn to be inspirational."
I am a fan of Gardner and his Five MInds for the Future. This new work is needed and I like the emphasis on designing learning to work with these multiple intelligences. In this world of rapid change and increasing complexity, learning is THE competitive advantage we can control.
Great insights to a great article. I was on a panel with Steve at the Association DigitalNow Conference a few years back and he was inspiring and full of great insights about curation and content marketing.
What is the opportunity for CPAs in this? Given the proliferation of content and the constant cries of information overload by CPAs and their companies and clients. Can CPAs become curators for their specific industries and areas of interests? What do you think?
Have you ever watched someone play Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, or World of Warcraft? They are totally absorbed in the moment. What are they playing for, you might ask? Often, it is just the sense of personal accomplishment in reaching a new level.
Tom Hood's insight:
Jeanne makes eome great points about the future of learning incuding engagament. While gamification is a major trend and future opportunity, there are some ways even average size companies can increase learning effectiveness and engagement. Things like the flipped classroom, structured collabroation technology tools and facilitation techniquescan greatly increase the effectiveness of learning. See http://cpa.tc/32f for some examples.
Love this post and agree 100%. The challenge is to make in-person training more valuable to organizations and participants. Collaborative learning supported by technology, linking learning to vision and purpose in the organization, and most importantly building relationships and networks up and down (with leadership) and across the organization (across silos). And closing with brainstorms or ways of capturing insights all support learning that makes a difference.
See our announcement about a "new era in talent development and learning" http://cpa.tc/32f and how we are introducing new collaborative technology tools (conferences.io, ThinkTank), refelctive learning tools like our i2a: Insights to Go, and facilitated group learning with our soon-to-be-famous #MBSN approach - managament by sticky notes.
Tie the learning to your vision, mission and purpose, connect with your top leaders and you have "learning that matters".
While just 30% of U.S. employees are engaged in their jobs, top companies boast double that engagement. Here's what they're doing right.
Tom Hood's insight:
Are you engaging your team? Discretionary effort requires you to connect the hearts, smarts and ingenuity of your team.
Gallup shares some great tips here:
1) Strategy & leadership philosophy - connecting the people to the organizational strategy and vision, purpose, values. We call this line of sight throughout the organization. "They take a strategic top-down approach to engaging leadership teams and then make sure engagement cascades through the ranks of managers to employees on the front lines."
2) Accountability and performance - conversations about performance and learning to improve.
3) Communication and knowledge management - alignment and linking up and down the organization lead to better communication and knowledge sharing. We would add #MBSN (management by sticky notes) as a tool to support this.
4) Development and ongoing learning opportunities - The best of the best use their leanring plans to engage and develop their talent. At our Business Learning Institute, this is our entire approach with curriculum design, learning plans, and new tools to increase learner engagement. (See new era in learning and talent development http://cpa.tc/32f)
"Engagement doesn't happen by accident; it takes intentional execution, hard work, and perseverance to master the integration of each of these four critical components."
Editor's Note: This is a guest post for the #learningtolearn series. Finding and collecting inspiration from unexpected places is an integral part of staying motivated and expanding the scope of your knowledge.
Tom Hood's insight:
What a great idea! #MBSN Management By Sticky Notes for personal learning and keeping your L>C.
Few people would question HR’s role as champion and keeper of learning and development within the organization. Training programs and learning initiatives have traditionally been in HR’s wheelhouse...
Tom Hood's insight:
Thought provoking post that coincides with our recent experience in Maryland (Maryland Association of CPAs) with a forum of public company finance & accounting officers. They identified learning and talent development of their finance teams as their # 1 issue and specifically cited a need for innovation and insight as competencies to develop. They asked for our help in forming a collaboration structure whereby they can connect people inside their organizations with others across other public companies and beyond.
Which seems to be spot on with your basic premise and the founding purpose of our organization (in 1901) - connecting CPAs to each other to learn and improve their Profession. The group then asked for us to help them facilitate this group and a collaboration was born.
I plan to use your three ideas to help solidify and expand this collaboration and you would be pleased to know that the next meeting will include the HR/Learning professionals to have this conversation. I will use this post as a conversation starter.
Which brings me back to an obvious, but often overlooked resource for HR and companies. That is professional associations, like ours. We exist and have core competencies in collaboration and facilitation and are all about connecting professionals across companies, whether it be committees or chapters or events, these are all ripe for innovation and learning. They are also places for "planned serendipity" which you talk about in your book, "The Power of Pull". I would encourage HR departments to encourage membership with participation in professional associations a way to jump start "outside" connections, provided they have a way of bringing back that knowledge (we try to help our "groups" by capturing output and sharing back (see slide deck in this post http://cpa.tc/2un).
An IBM 2012 Global CEO Study identified collaboration as the # 1 skill needed for the future and your post seems to confirm this with the notion of collaboration outside your organization can help you increase your rate of learning.
When you think about the business environment we find ourselves in, volatile,uncertain, complex, and uncertain (VUCA), it resembles competitive sports more and more, yet we seem to invest less and less in training, practice, and techniques like resilience. I would argue that teamwork and collaboration can contribute to resiliency as a team learns the power of 'we' versus 'me'. There is strength in numbers, provided it is focused on the same goal. How are you building resiliency in your team?
Life, as we all know, is a series of games of many forms. It is a game of will, a game of speed and a game of wit as well. One thing is for sure, neither of these are in any way simple to understand or overcome. If only we were informed of this abundance of compromising situations earlier.
Throughout our young lives we have always been sheltered by school, lied to by our older peers and were always told that if we do x y and z that everything will just work out with no resistance whatsoever.
Of course, as we get older and graduate from college, we soon realize that the real world bears some harsh truths that some of us are no necessarily ready for. The real world is a cold place that can crumble a person and break them down within seconds.
It’s there to work against you, not with you. Still, it is ultimately up to you as to how you handle this clash of wills and how to make sure you and only you are in charge of what happens to you. Accepting these harsh truths and formulating a game plan to adapt to them and end up on top will greatly assist you in your ability to roll with all the punches life throws at you, we assure you that much.