Each of us tends to focus on the 2 or 3 most important things affecting our lives, be they personal or professional in nature. It helps to step back from your day-to-day activities, to see the big picture and one I find very challenging is the changing nature of the people around me.
Be they friends, employees or customers ... their social character is different from mine. When you're with these people every day, you can learn the difference more easily than when you're running a small business with short, intermittent interactions with 10s to 100s of people each month.
Pepperdine's (where I got my MBA) newsletter had 2 fascinating articles which I've included excepts from with links to full text. The world is changing, and I hope we're up to making personal changes to keep up.
- The Trybaby Syndrome by Charles D. Kerns, PhD
Trybabies focus on tasks and actions they can do well, but that have little or no relation to their success within an organization. This article identifies the Trybaby Syndrome as a performance challenge and introduces a "Performance Influence - Importance Matrix" to help managers identify the differences between so-called Trybabies, Spinners, Pass-Timers, and Corperformers.
- The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow by Michael Maccoby ... a book review
... the industrial age was rooted in a domestic model of the traditional family with a father as principal breadwinner and authority figure. This model privileged disciplined, bureaucratic leaders who set clear goals. Business was structured hierarchically with a well-defined pecking order where everybody took orders from the person above and gave them to the one below. The highest value was stability. That model faded in the 1970s.
The 1980s privileged "The Gamesman," a politically savvy leader who treated work as a game to win. Corporations downsized and people worked "at will." The social character was team-based with short-term objectives and a focus on transferable skills.
Maccoby calls the new millennial interactives. Raised on twitch-and-click video games, their relationships are fluid and diverse. They are optimists raised to regard parents as "friends" with whom they align laterally as with siblings, creating an affectionate bond tempered by a freedom to critique. They want to collaborate with their leaders for the "common good" and are happy doing so in a virtual sphere.
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