You'll read about productivity, but do you really understand it? In nature, overspecialisation leads to extinction, so, much of what you read about right and wrong is going to lead you to extinction... Too specialised. 

If you change one thing in your business change the others too. Then it's called evolving. Evolve means grow. Change means cause problems in other areas by too much specialisation in one

The consequences of half change, not evolving are demonstrated in this article.. a smart excerpt from a post on Fast Company - At Innerwealth we coach our business clients to take a broader view than this instead of chasing your tail.

Here are five ways process can kill production: 

1. Empowering with permission--but without action:It’s not empowering when people are given more responsibility, yet must still obtain an unreasonable number of approvals and sign-offs to get anything done. This signals a lack of trust.
2. Leaders focused on process instead of people: In an effort to standardize and sanitize everything we do, nothing at work is personal anymore. Leaders look to processes, not people, to solve problems--and it doesn’t work. Where’s the inspiration, the vision? This signals a lack of humanity.
3. Overdependence on meetings: “Collaborative” and “inclusive” are corporate buzzwords, but productive teamwork does not require meetings for every single action or decision. People become overwhelmed and ineffective when they are always stuck in meetings. This signals that politics have taken precedence over productivity.
4. Lack of (clear) vision: Great companies need a grand vision and important goals. Too often, companies have vision or mission statements laden with jargon but devoid of meaning. This signals a lack of purpose.
5. Management acts as judge, not jury: If the purpose of a meeting is to think, create, or build, management has to stop tearing people down when they propose new ideas or question the status quo. This signals a lack of perspective and openness.

The Best of FC's Productivity TipsGet more done with less hassle:

--3 Proven Strategies To Keep The Internet From Killing Your Productivity 

--Hack Your Productivity: A Time-Management Geek's 10-Minute Solution 

--9 Simple Productivity Tips You Can Do Right Now

Over the years I’ve encountered organizations, large and small, that have essentially allowed process to becometheir culture. I’ve also seen businesses suffer when they assumed that if a process worked well for one division, it would work well for the company overall. Good processes can turn especially dangerous when they creep from manufacturing lines and finance departments into brainstorms and research labs. Some of the worst offenders have been companies that implemented overarching processes like Six Sigma, a rigidly data-driven quality-management program originally designed to tackle manufacturing problems. Fifty-three percent of the Fortune 500 have deployed it and of the Fortune 100, 82 percent have used it. Despite its manufacturing origins, Six Sigma has been used across many industries and sectors, and proponents claim it saved Fortune 500 corporations nearly a half-trillion dollars since its inception. If so many successful organizations are using it and saving money, what’s the problem, right?
Bilbiomotion. Excerpted from Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution, copyright 2012 Lisa Bodell. All rights reserved.

Helen Ogilvy and Vicky Ellam-Dyson's study performed semi-structured interviews with 18 coachees (those receiving coaching) and 12 of their line managers, then coded this content using content analysis, separating ideas into meaningful categories. They found that managers that valued coaching and understood how it worked were seen as more likely to be involved in the process, either by bringing up the coaching in conversation (formally or informally) or through general focus on development steps. The ways in which they were seen as helpful included

•  supporting - such as listening, encouraging and offering reassurance
• informing - in particular, providing feedback on performance that could then be discussed within a coaching setting
• being open and giving the coachee space
• demonstrating a coaching style that reinforced the scheduled coaching sessions
• challenge - of limiting beliefs, and pressure to experiment and take risks

Conversely what was seen as unhelpful included

• passive behaviours, such as a disinterest in coaching, or lack of feedback
• restrictive behaviours such as being critical or not allowing time

Note the fine line between the helpful and unhelpful behaviours: challenge vs criticism, or giving space vs disinterest. Indeed, the interviews identified instances where managers, despite their interest in the process, held off from broaching the topic in the interests of privacy, leaving the coachee feeling neglected. The sense that coaching is a personal process was common to most managers, but shared by only half of the coachees. One takeaway is that it's worth managers asking how they can be involved (if at all) rather than assuming they aren't wanted.Ogilvy and Ellam-Dyson make other recommendations, including that coaches make an effort to educate managers and coachees of the benefits of management involvement - as well as how to best approach it - and that coachees seek performance feedback ahead of the first coaching session.A final point: coaching has been charged with producing goals are not tightly enough tied to organisational objectives. It's often assumed this is due to line managers being too hands-off, but this isn't borne out by these data, where regardless of the varied level of management involvement in goal setting, the majority of goals tended to be only indirectly related to business needs, for instance boosting personal effectiveness and aiding career progression. Perhaps this is the outcome of the reflective, non-coercive structure of coaching? 

Reference: Ogilvy, H., & Ellam-Dyson, V. (2012). Line management involvement in coaching: Help or hindrance? A content analysis study International Coaching Psychology Review, 7 (1), 39-53

Original Article here
Carter is at a formal drinks for a colleague back from secondment, part of a fast-track management scheme. he remembers opting not to apply for the scheme five years ago and wonders how things would be now had he taken that plunge: the overseas experiences, the pressures, the opportunities. What would that Carter be like? In subsequent months he finds himself returning to this idea, finally setting up a meeting with his manager, who is surprised to hear him reveal that he feels dissatisfied and wants to reinvigorate his career.

Carter has encountered an alternative self: a version of him that could have been. This concept, unpacked by Otilia Obodaru in a recent Academy of Management Review article, can be contrasted with most theories of self that work within a temporal framework - the actual past and present, extrapolating the future from an actual now. The idea of an alternative self integrates research on counterfactual thinking – 'if I had gotten that bus, I would be there by now' – into the psychology of self.

Developing an alternative self and integrating it with identity requires a few steps. First, you need a turning point, a fork in your life where you took one road over another. As the 'job for life' has given way to more boundaryless careers, there are more work-related turning points to reflect on than ever. Secondly, you must undo that turning point, imagining 'what if?', easiest to do when the event was controllable, like Carter's choice not to apply for a role. Finally, the alternative self must have opportunity and motive to be rehearsed mentally or to an audience. Identity research suggests a self-narrative tends to be taken up when relevant to ongoing desires or fears; perhaps Carter has been tiring of his fixed location and wondering if he will ever get out of the city.

Not everyone has an alternative self, the article quoting one interviewee from previous research, confessing "I'm a priest... I can't imagine not being one. I have no idea what I would do if I wasn't a priest." But many do: Obodaru cites research that reports of long-term regrets have increased fairly linearly decade on decade from around 40% of people in the 1950s to close to 100% in the last decade. Note that this measures only 'better alternative selves'; worse ones are also possible, such as those that Alcoholics Anonymous encourage their members to reflect on - the active alcoholic they chose not to be. Having an alternative self means you can compare them to your actual self, generating emotional responses, affecting satisfaction, and leading to better self-knowledge about strengths or weaknesses.

As the AA example makes clear, organisations can encourage or dampen the formation of alternative selves, by drawing attention to turning points, inviting the undoing, or giving space for rehearsing what that alternative would look like. At its best, this can lead to insight and greater resolve, such as collectively considering 'what if we had never dared to start the business together?' It can also lead to the 'crystallization of discontent' and a motivation to change circumstances. In this sense, the road not taken doesn't always vanish: it can live on in our minds, affecting our present and shaping our future.


Obodaru, O. (2012). The Self Not Taken: How Alternative Selves Develop and How They Influence Our Professional Lives The Academy of Management Review, 37 (1), 34-57 DOI:

Sometimes our work flies in the face of convention. We are not ashamed of this challenge nor do we fight and argue to be right, we just feel that what is happening in the way of lifestyle management in the world doesn't work and that it's time for a new perspective.

After 50 years of psychology and self-help the divorce rate is increasing, suicides are increasing, depression is increasing, economic hardship is increasing, poverty is increasing, violence is increasing, sale of alcohol and drugs are increasing, television is proliferating and education is suffering. If nothing changes nothing changes. If all adjustments that are being made to the system in which we live based on a foundation that is unbalanced in the first place then with all good intention we might be making things worse.

We are not social anthropologist's nor marketing gurus and therefore we don't lay claim to predicting what best on a global economic scale. Instead we start with the individual. We believe our role is to help one person at a time find inspiration and then allow that to spread and change the world.

"Nothing affects the child more then the unlived life of the parent" so, we work with parents. We help parents find their VIP vision, inspiration and purpose. By doing this we believe we make the greatest impact on youth that's possible.

In business, there is an error in human development. Corporate and business training focuses on productivity but rarely introduces the concept of a holistic individual. Therefore much of the corporate training that takes place causes unmeasured damage at home. An example of this is that goalsetting at work raises expectations and sets standards for success while the same goal setting and increased expectations at home causes disaster in relationships. The business community has for too long isolated work practice from humanity and the impact on the individual outside of the workplace. That practice has been convenient for both the organisation and the individual. We do not accept this boundary in our work with corporate culture development. People are people 24/7 and a person is a holistic individual with seven areas of life all of which influence their work performance and productivity.

Nor are we afraid to introduce the concept of spirituality in our philosophy. Feeling good, confident, thankful, certain and having a love for what we do are essential ingredients for success and good community. People who are embittered about any aspect of their life cause trouble both to themselves and to others. So this spiritual component becomes for us a vital ingredient of living a healthy lifestyle.

Finally, we do not isolate the concept of wealth, spirituality, relationship and career success. We firmly believe that they are compatible and in fact support each other. So, by building spirituality we create wealth, by building career success we create great relationships as long as the mind and the body are in balance.

It goes without saying that we base all of our work on nature. It is our intent to reintroduce is the universal laws of nature to everybody in the world. We are, without these laws that are so obvious and tangible and real, vulnerable to too much manipulation by those who understand the psychology of desperation and who are motivated to cause an outcome that is not always in the interest of good human development.

Our work is presented in books, blogs, training retreats, trekking in Nepal, keynotes and podcasts. It has not been easy to transcribe the laws of nature and weave our way through the challenges of resistance from those who currently hold the keys to social conditioning. But we have made progress and those who have come to understood the nature of our work have celebrated the breakthrough that makes for both themselves as an individual, their family, their business and those that they care for in community.

“A leader is only as good as the team they lead - a cow is a cow no matter what you think”

Know People

When you look out into a field of cows in notice that as a herd they all look the same. In a sense that is true however it is better to see reality. 80% of the cows will follow the herd, 20% are renegade. Of the 20% that a renegade 10% are infatuated with you and always want to be at the front, and 10% want to run the other way. People are the same.

The delusion that a team is built from people that are not like cows leads to many stresses and conflicts. 80% of your team will follow the herd and are happy just to be led anyway. 10% are infatuated with you and this 10% will eventually cut your throat, infatuation leads to resentment. The other 10% want to run in the opposite direction. It's not their fault that they run in the opposite direction it's just natures law of balance.

Sometimes you luck out. Sometimes you get 90% of the people who want to follow the herd. That doesn't mean a change in the statistics really. Of the 10% remaining 5% will infatuated with you more extreme than before and 5% will resist you more extremely than before. It's just a law of nature so don't take it personally.

Trying to gain the engagement of 100% of the team is ridiculous. It's far wiser to simply know that you need to be careful of those who infatuated with you “blow smoke up your backside" and also not to resent or take personally the fact that a bunch of people will resist.

The degree of resistance is only determined by the degree of infatuation. One time when I was doing a keynote presentation to an audience, it's similar to leading a team, they were hecklers in the room making a nuisance of themselves. Instead of doing the usual putdown I looked for the person or persons in the front row who were looking at me with starry eyes and fed them some information they didn't like. Instead of bringing up the hecklers I simply brought down the infatuated group.

The Bell curve of human behaviour seems to shock some people who think idealistically. However, as a leader of a team, idealism has a place in projecting the future but it has a very damaging effect if it is applied to behaviour.

Coach up or coach them out

One of the debilitating circumstances of a team leader in an organisation is that they don't get to handpick their team. As a result they end up with a huge mediocrity of that middle ground and they also end up with radical extremes of infatuated and resentful individuals. Infatuated people are great as long as you know they will eventually knife you. Resentful people usually go about recruiting support. Pity loves a party so resentful individual who is putting the handbrake on will typically try surreptitiously to recruit the middle ground of the 80% of the herd to follow them in the opposite direction that you wish the team to travel in. So, turning a blind eye to this equation is not an option.

Given the fact that in corporate environments team leaders are handcuffed by HR policy and corporate rules governing hiring and firing of individuals the freedom to choose the team based on a healthy balance of infatuation and resentment is not available. So the leader is left with no choice but to 1st try to coach people up rather than out.

There is a range of human behaviour from the got to level of desperation to the inspired level of love to. Those people who come to work in the got to level of life have no choice but to either infatuate or resent the leader. They don't know the middle ground. So in any engagement surveys those that are of a higher level of motive, inspired, don't perform well because they will both engage and be disengaged as is healthy for an individual in a team. Those that are in a desperate state of got to thinking will score very highly on the engagement survey because they only have one of 2 options, it's black-and-white, engage or disengage.

My policy of coach them up or coach them out seems harsh. But desperate people in it got to mindset are dangerous both to themselves and to the team. Above the got to level of motive there is the should level, above that there is need to, and above that, and the minimum but I accept in any team that I lead is want to. It's pretty simple, anybody in a got to, should do, or need to mindset needs coaching. It's not a matter of eliminating resistance or resentment in a team, it's about creating healthy team dynamics and culture where healthy debate is encouraged. A person in a got to, should or need to headspace is beyond negotiation and usually has planted their heels into the concrete regardless of the health of their debate.

Motive is not limited to the team. A person gravitates down to the lowest of all the 7 areas of their life in their choice of motive. For example if an individual is in a love to state of mind in relationship, financial, social, career, mental and spiritual but their health is in a got to state then that got to state becomes the lowest common denominator of their motive. In other words the lowest level of motive infects all areas of life emotionally. So coaching a person up is not just about teamwork at work. And this is where corporate governance is Neanderthal.

There are many people struggling in their worklife and receiving coaching by well-meaning organisations who are afraid, because of corporate governance principles, to address matters outside of the workplace. Instead, they apply psychological testing and teach people about how to be better in the team, when really it's a lifestyle issue.

Actually, the real change is not just in addressing got to desperation mindsets in a team. The real change is in educating people to know when they are in and got 2 states of mind and so they can trigger intervention in their own life rather than wait for the team leader to kick their but. My estimation is that 99% of work related emotional conflict is caused by things outside of the workplace that for one reason or another are excluded from the scope of intervention of the leader. Until a team leader recognises that the problems they are dealing with in a team are just the tip of an iceberg, the team leader is taking far too much responsibility for stupidity in the team.

Tolerance is not compassion.

In 90% of all organisational leadership roles that are not entrepreneurial and have not had direct control of the choice of the team, tolerance replaces good leadership. Tolerance is mistaken for compassion. Many people think that by shutting up or applying some kindness principle to a person in got to desperate head state that they are actually doing good things. The reality however is far different. The reality is that an individual who is in got to headspace is doing damage both to themselves and the organisation. Tolerance simply magnifies the damage. Asking for compliance at work simply sends home the problem. A desperate person who cannot be coached at work may decide to be engaged at work and this will simply multiply their reactions and desperation is at home. Compassion in this case might be better focused on the children and spouse at home who end up being at the back-end of the brunt of this individuals desperation.

Know how to motivate People

Everybody wants something. (If they don’t they’re either enlightened or suicidal and in either case, they can't be led) The key to motivating people is to find out what they want and promise it. Somebody once wrote: all people want is

1. Something to do
2. Someone to love
3. Something to look forward to

That's motivation. There are 2 levels of motive in a team. The 1st is what an individual wants for themselves. The 2nd level is how being part of the team gets an individual what they want for themselves. In other words people are driven by what they want and if they think they will get what they want by accomplishing team goals they become team players. If they think getting what they want is not have anything to do with being a team player they know will be an individual operating within the realms of a team but without association toward team goals.

Craving that link between what an individual wants and team results is important in leadership. If we say to an individual “if you do really well I will reward you" then we're linking their behaviour to what they want as long as the reward we offer is aligned with what they want. If we say to an individual “if the team does really well I will reward you" then we are linking their behaviour to the team and then the results of the team dictate how they get what they want personally.

In many organisations teams can fail but individuals can get promoted. In this example the individual has blamed the team for their poor performance but the organisation has done something far worse. The organisation has said we want to give lipservice to teams and team leadership and yet, in spite of the fact that the team has not done well we will single out individuals who have performed well and reward them. This contradiction makes it very difficult to lead any team.

Sporting teams have the same problem. Sometimes and individual from a Third World country is promoted to the sporting glory of being in the world of professional sport and the question for them would obviously be whether they would be rewarded best for the teams glory or for being the hero. Egos fight when this confusion surfaces.


Most Important - don’t be hogtied

If you went into a field of cows and started working very hard to turn them into sheep somebody would surely intervene and give you medication. And yet, in team leadership people get dealt the responsibility to lead a team and to turn them into champions when in reality there is no possibility of doing so. We've mentioned corporate governance law which prevents selection by skill or participation or even mind space so you get left with a motley bunch of individuals and then subduction by pleasing people becomes the definition of good leadership. If you upset somebody in one of these Motley teams you are considered to be a bad leader because the objective becomes keeping everybody comfortable. There is no condition to exit those people from the team and if they get upset they will recruit others and make life hell on earth you and your family because you will take that stress home to them.

All I can say to a team leader who is faced with this difficult challenge is to find a purpose greater than yourself, and specifically greater than the team you are leading. Don't get sucked down into seeing the world through the eyes of your role as a team leader. Maintain a big picture and deal with what you've got in line with that big picture. Don't run away from it simply learn how best to manage and how you can use that learning in the future for your big picture purpose.

You can't Give What You haven't got

As a member of the team your duty is to burn the candle at both ends. You are part of the herd and its wires to stick in that 80% so that you can serve the team and your own long-term aims. As a leader the team your duty is to make sure you never burnout.

You can't give what you haven't got and if you come to leadership with the perspective of a team member and you start burning the candle at both ends you will quickly lose the respect of those you are leading. You need to spend time making sure that you bring to the table fresh ideas, inspired visions, product innovations, new insights and you are prepared to debate and stimulate others by being already inspired yourself.

If on the other hand you turn up and try to become inspired by leading a team they will see your dependency and recognise your incompetence. That's why homework is really important for a leader. Home work involves getting your house in order. That house is not the physical house it's your mental house, your financial house, your health house, your relationship house, your social house and your spiritual house. It's all about making sure that you get your wife in order so that you can turn up in a healthy love to space as a leader.

If you're bored out of your mind outside of your worklife then work is going to become more than a passion it's going to become a desperate attempt to escape your life. That desperation stinks and turns you into an unproductive desperate individual and people smell that and what works for you.

I want to finish this with a story.

I went to a party with my first wife an eternity ago at which many men flirted with her. I was so pissed off and in the car on the way home I've vented my mind, my jealousy, my anger and my insecurity all came to the surface. “You only Hang around those men because they make you feel good” I said thinking that I was making a good argument against what she had done. She replied “yes of course." It's so easy to lose that prospective. People love to feel good and as a leader you need to remember that you can't give what you haven't got. If you don't feel good about yourself and your life people will hang around you to get what they want but they won't enjoy it and they'll be thinking the whole time how can I get what I want someone else that does feel good. The sequel to the story about my wife at the party was that I suddenly realised I was taking a whole mechanical perspective of our relationship. Just because she was in my team or actually leaving my team didn't make it any less important to make her feelgood about being with me. I guess that's called taking people for granted and that leads to the inevitable 7 year itch over which many relationships don't survive. At least ours did for the next 13 years.

Addendum .....