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Archive for the ‘personal change’ Category

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What Do Positive Deviance, Motivation, The Middle-Aged Brain, and Positive Leadership Have to Do with One Another? Plenty

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

By William Seidman


I’m excited about some of the reading I’ve been doing — in diverse areas — because it reinforces some of the most exciting ideas we’ve been talking about for so long, and working on with our clients.

Daniel Pink’s research on motivation, detailed in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Barbara Strauch’s findings, reported in her book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain (hear her “Fresh Air” interview here ) combine nicely with what we know about positive deviance and, also, the impact of positive thinking on positive leadership (Kim Cameron’s Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance to come together in exciting ways.

Positive deviants are invaluable to organizations.  They are rarely found among the youngest, but often among the middle-aged. It’s hardly a coincidence that Barbara Strauch reports — refreshingly — on good studies that show that while processing speed may decline with age, wisdom and a host of other positive human attributes increase in middle age and continue to increase for many years.

Motivation, Pink shows, is key to improving performance.

Cameron shows that positive thinking enables positive leadership, which in turn improves performance.

Organizational performance and personal brain function improve with great coaching. It’s gratifying to see that good scientific studies validate these interrelationships — because this is what we’ve been doing.

Posted in leadership, motivation, neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership | No Comments »

Good News About the Middle-Aged Mind — from Barbara Strauch

Monday, June 21st, 2010

By William Seidman

I just finished a great new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind by New York  Times Health and Medical Science editor Barbara Strauch.

Strauch examines the latest neuroscience research on brain function and comes up with some fascinating results:

The human brain continues to develop and grow well into our 70s.

Some people’s brains develop a “brain reserve” that buffers them from some of the effects of aging and disease.

Brains also become more bilateral - meaning both left brain (analytic) and right brain (emotional) work together more.

People become more skilled at handling big complex problems (even as they forget names).

Several things tend to be clearly associated with increased brain reserve: 

  • Educational levels — higher equals more reserve
  • Intensity of intellectual stimulation — people who do more complex work develop more reserve
  • Physical exercise — intense exercising seems to create new neurons

There is still much debate about the role of food, with nothing proven yet.

This is definitely a great read, grounded in good science, and relevant to personal change, organizations, and organizational change.

Posted in neuroscience, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement) April Conference

Friday, March 19th, 2010

By William Seidman

The International Society for Performance Improvement  (ISPI) San Francisco  conference is April 19th through the 22nd at the Marriott Marquis.  We’re presenting on  Persuasive Technology  Wednesday, April 21st at 10:30 AM.  The following day, Thursday April 22nd at 8:30 AM, we’ll be talking about the need for Courageous Leadership in Change.   

We went to ISPI last year; it was a great conference and we hope to see you there next month.

Posted in best practices, leadership, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, personal change, persuasive technology, positive leadership | No Comments »

When Same-Old, Same-Old Needs a Transformation: Changing Company Culture

Monday, March 15th, 2010

By William Seidman

I’m working with a group of very competent, smart managers now. I’m coaching them to unlearn certain practices that, frankly, aren’t working anymore.

Our challenge: to change the culture of the company from one that fills orders and generally meets customer expectations — a transactional approach — into one that anticipates future needs and can propose new and creative solutions that please customers and energize managers. (And can still fill those orders!)  This new approach can be called transformational.

While the managers I’m working with may talk about making the organization transformational, like so many of us they tend to return to their comfort zone and stick with same-old, same-old business processes that are fundamentally transactional.

They’re constantly surprised when they don’t achieve their objectives.

Do you want your company to merely meet needs — or to be a vitally important resource?

Fortunately, these managers are learning the Cerebyte approach and to think and to function like positive deviants –  transformationally. We coach managers to think like their best positive deviants: that’s where the creativity is.

Managers who are empowered to think freshly are happier and more productive. We know that fresh thinking is an art and a craft that can be taught and learned.

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, leadership, organizational change, organizational culture, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, story-based learning, training | No Comments »

Intrinsic Motivation: Doing Things Because They Matter

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

By William Seidman

I’m excited about Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Pink thinks “there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”  Intrinsic motivation, according to Pink, is what really motivates people. He calls autonomy, mastery, and purpose THE motivating forces, and the old carrot-and-stick approach “a lazy, dangerous ideology.”

Numerous good studies have shown that people want autonomy at work, and that it’s a better motivator than money.

Drive is consistent with Cerebyte’s approach. We focus on the knowledge of an organization’s positive deviants. Social good is a powerful motivator for these workers. They’re driven from within and by the pleasure of doing things they care about — and that really matter, both to them and to their organization.


Posted in best practices, business, company culture, knowledge workers, leadership, organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership | No Comments »

Changing Attitudes and Opening Closed Minds: Leaders Who Need Leadership

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

By William Seidman

We’re working on several leadership programs right now, leading an organization through a transformation.

We have built decent best practices that are different from the usual. We’ve been emphasizing “authenticity.”

When we talk about deploying the best practices, though, we get stuck.

After a lot of conversation and thought, we realized that the leaders who most need enhanced leadership capabilities are executives most convinced they are already great leaders. This mindset  is a good part of why they are powerfully resistant to considering their own need to grow and change.

Ironically, the best leaders are those who seek  out —  and are open to –  growth opportunities. They’re easy to work with but don’t need the development.

How do you you engage “leaders” who are so resistant to learning from others?

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, leadership, management consulting, organizational assessments, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

Experiential Learning and Conventional Learning: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us

Friday, December 11th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working with a company that is asking traditional instructional designers to develop experiential learning activities - which are different in conception, design, and actual practice from what these designers are used to doing. There’s an inherent struggle: it’s difficult to be learner-focused if you are sticking to traditional design.

In experiential learning, everything begins with the learner experience.

New ideas and new stimulation are useful only if they connect with the learners’ current abilities and ways of doing things - with who they are, right now.  A student isn’t a vessel into which the instructor pours knowledge.  In addition, the learning must have enough of the right types of repetition to be internalized.

Traditional instructional design is much more about telling people what they should know — and telling them very specifically what they will do — to learn something.

In my view, there’s an unspoken inherent mistrust of the learner in the process, and in any “teaching” in which the course designer and instructor are in charge.

The neuroscience of learning proves over and over again that experiential learning, in contrast, is all about providing learners with activities,  and trusting that they will learn the “right” lessons, and also trusting that they will continue to learn the right lessons often enough to produce long-term change.

The difference in perspective between a trusting and a not-trusting teaching method is where I’ve found great opportunities for learning, creativity, and growth.

Posted in best practices, getting change to "stick", neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, training | 1 Comment »

Training for Learning and Real-World Application

Monday, October 12th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working in two settings now where there’s a tension between traditional classroom instruction and experiential learning.

Most training organizations like to train, which means classrooms, instructors, and - sometimes -elearning.

Most people prefer to learn, and they learn better when they can immediately apply what they’ve learned.

The art of training is to make classroom content tie tightly to real experience.

The art of experiential learning is to ensure that the right content is learned.

The trainers often want to drive the program, but this really doesn’t work.

Experiential learning is more powerful and effective, though it absolutely needs formal classroom instruction for specific skill building

Most of the people we work with stop talking about training and start talking about “learning activities” that include many forms of experiential learning as well as classrooms and elearning.

This broader definition is a good idea - the best idea - because it leads people to retain what they’ve learned and to be able to apply it to their real world.

Posted in best practices, mentoring, optimization, organizational change, personal change, team learning, training | No Comments »

From Transactional to Transformational: Teaching People to Think Big

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

By William Seidman

I’ve been working  on trying to make a transformation inside two organizations that are focused on the transactional.  In fact, they’ve been completely transactional: driven by tactical, daily transactions - daily orders, daily service requests. They quite literally have been pedaling as fast as they can.

One is a sales organization, the other is a service organization. Each would like to change its culture to one that emphasizes sustained client relationships.  

Organizational psychologist Ron Riggio’s distinction between the transactional and the transformational applies to organizations, too.

The direct customer contact people like the idea of becoming transformational because transformational jobs are much more interesting than transactional jobs.. The managers are having a hard time; most became managers because they were better at transactions than their peers.

Now they are being asked to lead a transformation - and they don’t know what to do; they keep trying to convert things back to transactions, which block the change to a transformational environment.

Our challenge is to help transactional people to become transformational people, because only then can lasting change occur.

Posted in best practices, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

Why There’s No Twitter Version of Successful Leadership

Monday, August 10th, 2009

By William Seidman

More on the issue of instant gratification versus “grit”: determination and consistent hard work:

Recently I was working with a VP of sales who wanted to train his 11 regional vice-presidents (RVPs)  how to lead through a significant change initiative.

The regional VPs had mixed feelings: they were under real and immediate pressure to make their numbers,  and recognized that leadership couldn’t happen without grit.

I asked them if they thought there was a Twitter version of leadership — 140 characters and instant leader. They laughed and realized that - like so many things worth doing - this was a long-term project.

But one of my colleagues thinks we should simply give up and stop trying to get people to move beyond instant gratification.

What do you think?

Posted in Middle management, best practices, management consulting, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

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