Sexual harassment: The culture that everyone knows exists, but somehow just accepts as ok by Joanne Wilson

The sexual harassment suit that has played out in the public eye at Fox News is fascinating yet perhaps not surprising. What is mind-boggling is that once Gretchen Carlson had the guts to file a law suit for Ailes behavior how many other women felt empowered to do the same. For years each of these women, and I am sure there are more, decided to just either live with it, ignore it or leave the company.
My guess is if any of this actually gets to court that we will all be witness to a culture that everyone knew existed but somehow just accepted it as ok. Do we believe that Fox is the only company that allows their executives to behave that way? I doubt it.
In my senior year of college I was making the interview rounds at every top retail program. One of those programs was Bloomingdales. My last interview of the day there was with a male VP of all of ready-to-wear. He was one of the handful of top executives in the company. As the interviewed ended he cornered me in the door and made more than a few inappropriate comments. It is a bit of a blur now but it was about how I looked and having a drink.
It occurred to me the next day when I was back in Boston that this guy sexually harassed me. When Bloomingdales called to offer me a job in their program I declined. I also told the person who called me that the VP had made inappropriate comments to me in the interview and it was not ok. My guess is nothing ever came of that but I wasn’t going to let it pass.
Then many years later when I was running a company in the garment center, the guy who ran it made sexual comments to every woman in that company except me. He probably knew I’d kill him but I told him countless times that it was not ok what he was doing and he was going to end up in a law suit.
Even at Macy’s, where I did take my first job out of college, I saw sexual harassment right before I left. I was in a meeting where all the buyers were presenting the season to the head of the division and the VP who oversaw the division. All the buyers were women and the heads were men. The comments about women’s looks, bodies, boobs and more was beyond inappropriate. One of the men actually felt up one of the women’s legs up while she put her presentation up on the board. Everyone giggled like it was funny but I was disgusted.
I told the head of HR what had happened and I also told the head of HR that I was told that women do not move as fast as men. I am sure that I was blackballed after that because of the anger and tension that was being driven towards me from my immediate boss. Besides the fact that the company just went private and it was a complete mess and I was thoroughly bored in my job, it was the environment that really pushed me out.
I hear from too many women founders who go pitch men that say shit that you can’t make up. I am not sure if they are just ignorant or that this kind of behavior has just been ignored by their peers. As more men and women stand up and say we are not going to take it anymore such as the women at Fox did, we will see healthier company cultures and I bet more mutual respect across the board. Sexual harassment is real and it is NOT ok.
KINGSMITH.

How To Answer, "Tell Me About Yourself" By J.T O'Donnell

When we meet new people in our careers, we often get asked, "Tell me about yourself." While it sounds like a simple question, you may find yourself feeling stressed and thinking things like:
What do they want me to say?

Powerful Ways To Create Your Own Happiness By Travis Bradberry

Happiness comes in so many different forms that it can be hard to grasp. Unhappiness, on the other hand, is easy to identify; you know it when you see it, and you definitely know when it’s taken ahold of you.

8 Memorable Moments Of The 2016 Olympics From Which Every Leader Can Learn By Andreas Von Der Heydt

There are some aspects to criticize the Olympic Games about. However, there's been many inspiring, heart-warming and genuinely emotional moments and stories at Rio 2016. Here's 8 of the best from which every leader can learn. From which we all can learn!

The Single Most Poisonous Factor in the Workplace Today By Ben Judah

The most important commodity at any work environment is the people. Without a motivated, well trained and talented team behind it, even the best technology will falter and fail.

How To Survive A Difficult Boss By Travis Bradberry

Difficult bosses contaminate the workplace. Some do so obliviously, while others smugly manipulate their employees. The “bad boss” has become a comedic part of work culture, permeating movies and television, but when you actually work for one, there’s nothing funny about it.

How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity By Travis Bradberry

Research shows that most people complain once a minute during a typical conversation. Complaining is tempting because it feels good, but like many other things that are enjoyable—such as smoking or eating a pound of bacon for breakfast—complaining isn’t good for you.
Your brain loves efficiency and doesn’t like to work any harder than it has to. When you repeat a behavior, such as complaining, your neurons branch out to each other to ease the flow of information. This makes it much easier to repeat that behavior in the future—so easy, in fact, that you might not even realize you’re doing it.
You can’t blame your brain. Who’d want to build a temporary bridge every time you need to cross a river? It makes a lot more sense to construct a permanent bridge. So, your neurons grow closer together, and the connections between them become more permanent. Scientists like to describe this process as, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you.
And here’s the kicker: complaining damages other areas of your brain as well. Research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus—an area of the brain that’s critical to problem solving and intelligent thought. Damage to the hippocampus is scary, especially when you consider that it’s one of the primary brain areas destroyed by Alzheimer’s.

Complaining Is Also Bad for Your Health

While it’s not an exaggeration to say that complaining leads to brain damage, it doesn’t stop there. When you complain, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol shifts you into fight-or-flight mode, directing oxygen, blood, and energy away from everything but the systems that are essential to immediate survival. One effect of cortisol, for example, is to raise your blood pressure and blood sugar so that you’ll be prepared to either escape or defend yourself.
All the extra cortisol released by frequent complaining impairs your immune system and makes you more susceptible to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. It even makes the brain more vulnerable to strokes.

It’s Not Just You …

Since human beings are inherently social, our brains naturally and unconsciously mimic the moods of those around us, particularly people we spend a great deal of time with. This process is called neuronal mirroring, and it’s the basis for our ability to feel empathy. The flip side, however, is that it makes complaining a lot like smoking—you don’t have to do it yourself to suffer the ill effects. You need to be cautious about spending time with people who complain about everything. Complainers want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. Think of it this way: If a person were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with complainers.

The Solution to Complaining

There are two things you can do when you feel the need to complain. One is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. That is, when you feel like complaining, shift your attention to something that you’re grateful for. Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the right thing to do; it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Research conducted at the University of California, Davis, found that people who worked daily to cultivate an attitude of gratitude experienced improved mood and energy and substantially less anxiety due to lower cortisol levels. Any time you experience negative or pessimistic thoughts, use this as a cue to shift gears and to think about something positive. In time, a positive attitude will become a way of life.
The second thing you can do—and only when you have something that is truly worth complaining about—is to engage in solution-oriented complaining. Think of it as complaining with a purpose. Solution-oriented complaining should do the following:

• Have a clear purpose. Before complaining, know what outcome you’re looking for. If you can’t identify a purpose, there’s a good chance you just want to complain for its own sake, and that’s the kind of complaining you should nip in the bud.
• Start with something positive. It may seem counterintuitive to start a complaint with a compliment, but starting with a positive helps keep the other person from getting defensive. For example, before launching into a complaint about poor customer service, you could say something like, “I’ve been a customer for a very long time and have always been thrilled with your service ….”
• Be specific. When you’re complaining it’s not a good time to dredge up every minor annoyance from the past 20 years. Just address the current situation and be as specific as possible. Instead of saying, “Your employee was rude to me,” describe specifically what the employee did that seemed rude.
• End on a positive. If you end your complaint with, “I’m never shopping here again,” the person who’s listening has no motivation to act on your complaint. In that case, you’re just venting, or complaining with no purpose other than to complain. Instead, restate your purpose, as well as your hope that the desired result can be achieved, for example, “I’d like to work this out so that we can keep our business relationship intact.”

Bringing It All Together

Just like smoking, drinking too much, and lying on the couch watching TV all day, complaining is bad for you. Put my advice to use, and you'll reap the physical, mental, and performance benefits that come with a positive frame of mind.
KINGSMITH.

The smartest things to do when we have a problem at work By Chester Elton

If you have millennials on your team, you know most don’t like speaking on the phone. As we interview twenty-somethings, many tell us voice calls are not only time-consuming but require them to give their full attention to a glacially slow form of synchronous conversation. Yawn. Not only that, but many believe that calls are actually rude—as if they are making a sudden demand for the other person to speak to them, now, versus allowing that person to respond when they can.
Such attitudes about voice calls have certainly trickled over into other generations. We can’t count the number of times a manager has told us of phone-phobia appearing with older employees too. One manager related a recent conversation she’d had with an employee who is a professional woman in her forties:
Boss: “Did you get a hold of the client? He seemed pretty upset.”
Employee: “I sent him an email. But he hasn’t responded.”
Boss: “Did you call him?”
Employee: “I figured I’d give him a while. It’s only been a couple of days.”
Boss (sighs): “Can you do me a huge favor? Hang up with me and call him right now. Leave him a message if he’s not there. Can you do that? Then report back.”
When did we collectively lose the knowledge that, when problems arise, we need to connect with people personally?

As part of our day jobs, the two of us are asked to deliver keynote speeches to conferences around the world on culture and employee engagement. Keeping the calendar straight can get a little tricky, and recently something fell through the cracks and Chester ended up getting double booked on the same date. We can’t remember the last time this happened, but there we were with egg on our faces.
So, what did we do? We sent an email. Rookie mistake.
But hey, it was a great email, we thought. It offered a sincere apology to one of the conference organizers explaining how we’d messed up, asked for understanding, and offered some compelling alternatives that would allow Chester to fulfill the other promise while still delivering a wow to their attendees.
The response: No thanks. We sent another email; this one was even better—Shakespeare would have been jealous. We waited, prayed. The same response. The situation became tenser; Chester was losing sleep.
Finally we realized we were making the same mistake we were hearing about from our consulting clients. So we got the number of the conference organizer and decided to not only call her, but make the assumption she was a good, reasonable person who only wanted the best for her conference. So did we.
Sure enough, once we actually talked on the phone and had a chance to walk through the options, we came up with a great solution together. We ended up accommodating their conference, throwing in extras for the inconvenience, and still being able to live up to the other obligation.
In short, we assumed the best and picked up the phone, and good things happened.
And not only did we find a solution, but we began to develop a connection. Everybody messes up now and then, it’s the response to the mistake that will make or break a relationship. We got to know each other on that call, worked together through a dilemma, and we know will have the chance to work together again.
There’s an old saying that Chester’s dad passed onto him, it goes something like: “Assume the best about people, and 99 percent of the time you will be right.”
And yet there can be a lot of reasons we might not assume good intention in others. It might be a remnant of early man in us. On the Savannah, after all, it was not smart to indiscriminately trust others—they might have spears hidden in their loincloths. But in modern business, we accomplish much more by assuming the best, that people are reasonable and good, until proven otherwise.
Just imagine your place of work if everyone assumed the best about their teammates, suppliers, bosses and customers. Heck, imagine what would happen in politics if each side would assume the other side had good intentions, even if they didn’t agree with their policies.
Of course there some bad people out there, but not as many as we might be led to believe by watching the news. The vast majority of people want to do a good job. Yes, they face challenges, pressures, internal ambitions, and they have made promises of their own. But if we give them the benefit of the doubt when things get tense, and talk things through personally—versus communicating only electronically—in most cases we can reach positive outcomes.
KINGSMITH.

The Secret To Staying Productive And In Control By Travis Bradberry

TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that the upper echelons of top performance are filled with people who are high in emotional intelligence (90% of top performers, to be exact). The hallmark of emotional intelligence is self-control—a skill that unleashes massive productivity by keeping you focused and on track.
Unfortunately, self-control is a difficult skill to rely on. Self-control is so fleeting for most people that when Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed two million people and asked them to rank order their strengths in 24 different skills, self-control ended up in the very bottom slot.
And when your self-control leaves something to be desired, so does your productivity.
When it comes to self-control, it is so easy to focus on your failures that your successes tend to pale in comparison. And why shouldn’t they? Self-control is an effort that’s intended to help achieve a goal. Failing to control yourself is just that—a failure. If you’re trying to avoid digging into that bag of chips after dinner because you want to lose a few pounds and you succeed Monday and Tuesday nights only to succumb to temptation on Wednesday by eating four servings’ worth of the empty calories, your failure outweighs your success. You’ve taken two steps forward and four steps back.
Since self-control is something we could all use a little help with, I went back to the data to uncover the kinds of things that emotionally intelligent people do to keep themselves productive and in control. They consciously apply these behaviors because they know they work. Some are obvious, others counter-intuitive, but all will help you minimize those pesky failures to boost your productivity.
They focus on solutions. Where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on the problems that you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions which hinder self-control. When you focus on the actions you'll take to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy that produces positive emotions and improves performance. Emotionally intelligent people won’t dwell on problems because they know they’re most effective when they focus on solutions.
They eat. File this one in the counter-intuitive category, especially if you’re having trouble controlling your eating. Your brain burns heavily into your stores of glucose when attempting to exert self-control. If your blood sugar is low, you are far more likely to succumb to destructive impulses. Sugary foods spike your sugar levels quickly and leave you drained and vulnerable to impulsive behavior shortly thereafter. Eating something that provides a slow burn for your body, such as whole grain rice or meat, will give you a longer window of self-control. So, if you’re having trouble keeping yourself out of the company candy bin when you’re hungry, make sure you eat something else if you want to have a fighting chance.
They forgive themselves. A vicious cycle of failing to control oneself followed by feeling intense self-hatred and disgust is common in attempts at self-control. These emotions typically lead to over-indulging in the offending behavior. When you slip up, it is critical that you forgive yourself and move on. Don’t ignore how the mistake makes you feel; just don’t wallow in it. Instead, shift your attention to what you’re going to do to improve yourself in the future.
Failure can erode your self-confidence and make it hard to believe you’ll achieve a better outcome in the future. Most of the time, failure results from taking risks and trying to achieve something that isn’t easy. Emotionally intelligent people know that success lies in their ability to rise in the face of failure, and they can’t do this when they’re living in the past. Anything worth achieving is going to require you to take some risks, and you can’t allow failure to stop you from believing in your ability to succeed. When you live in the past, that is exactly what happens, and your past becomes your present, preventing you from moving forward.
They don’t say yes unless they really want to. Research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression, all of which erode self-control. Saying no is indeed a major self-control challenge for many people. “No” is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it’s time to say no, emotionally intelligent people avoid phrases like “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them. Just remind yourself that saying no is an act of self-control now that will increase your future self-control by preventing the negative effects of over commitment.
They don’t seek perfection. Emotionally intelligent people won’t set perfection as their target because they know it doesn’t exist. Human beings, by our very nature, are fallible. When perfection is your goal, you’re always left with a nagging sense of failure that makes you want to give up or reduce your effort. You end up spending your time lamenting what you failed to accomplish and what you should have done differently instead of moving forward excited about what you've achieved and what you will accomplish in the future.
They stay positive. Positive thoughts help you exercise self-control by focusing your brain’s attention onto the rewards you will receive for your effort. You have to give your wandering brain a little help by consciously selecting something positive to think about. Any positive thought will do to refocus your attention. When things are going well, and your mood is good, self-control is relatively easy. When things are going poorly, and your mind is flooded with negative thoughts, self-control is a challenge. In these moments, think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, or will happen, no matter how small. If you can't think of something from the current day, reflect on the past and look to the future. The point here is that you must have something positive that you're ready to shift your attention to when your thoughts turn negative, so that you don't lose focus.
They avoid asking “What if?” “What if?” statements throw fuel on the fire of stress and worry, which are detrimental to self-control. Things can go in a million different directions, and the more time you spend worrying about the possibilities, the less time you’ll spend taking action and staying productive (staying productive also happens to calm you down and keep you focused). Productive people know that asking “what if? will only take them to a place they don’t want—or need—to go. Of course, scenario planning is a necessary and effective strategic planning technique. The key distinction here is to recognize the difference between worry and strategic thinking.
They sleep. I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and maintaining your focus and self-control. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present, which are a major productivity killer. Being busy often makes you feel as if you must sacrifice sleep to stay productive, but sleep deprivation diminishes your productivity so much throughout the day that you're better off sleeping.
When you're tired, your brain's ability to absorb glucose is greatly diminished. This makes it difficult to control the impulses that derail your focus. What’s more, without enough sleep you are more likely to crave sugary snacks to compensate for low glucose levels. So, if you’re trying to exert self-control over your eating, getting a good night’s sleep—every night—is one of the best moves you can make.
They exercise. Getting your body moving for as little as 10 minutes releases GABA, a neurotransmitter that makes your brain feel soothed and keeps you in control of your impulses. If you’re having trouble resisting the impulse to walk over to the office next door to let somebody have it, just keep on walking. You should have the impulse under control by the time you get back.
They meditate. Meditation actually trains your brain to become a self-control machine. Even simple techniques like mindfulness, which involves taking as little as five minutes a day to focus on nothing more than your breathing and your senses, improves your self-awareness and your brain’s ability to resist destructive impulses. Buddhist monks appear calm and in control for a reason. Give it a try.
They ride the wave. Desire and distraction have the tendency to ebb and flow like the tide. When the impulse you need to control is strong, waiting out this wave of desire is usually enough to keep yourself in control. When you feel as if you must give in, the rule of thumb here is to wait at least 10 minutes before succumbing to temptation. You’ll often find that the great wave of desire is now little more than a ripple that you have the power to step right over.

Bringing It All Together

The important thing to remember is you have to give these strategies the opportunity to work. This means recognizing the moments where you are struggling with self-control and, rather than giving in to impulse, taking a look at these strategies and giving them a go before you give in.
KINGSMITH.