Writing about Life in the digital age

There might still be some professionals and executives out there who long for the "good, old days" of workplace management. The days when you told your employees what to do and expected them to just get on with it. Assuming they didn’t want to suddenly find themselves unemployed.

But obviously that’s not you is it? You understand that leadership in the modern world is about engagement, about winning hearts and minds across your team. Above all, about being "authentic."

Authenticity has become a favorite buzz-word in management circles and research suggests it is an important characteristic for leaders to have. In these days of galloping cynicism about leaders of all types in organizations big and small, in business or politics, being seen as someone who actually aligns the values they propound with their actions seems to be highly motivating. And this, in turn leads to better staff retention, closer team cohesion and improved performance.

Are you one of the never satisfied strivers?

The type of person who, despite having some obvious successes in life--a solid career, a modicum of financial security, the respect of your peers--just never feels like you've quite made it?

Are you always a little worried you could be accomplishing more?

If so, you probably feel kind of crummy sometimes compared to your more easily contented competitors, but according to new research out of Stanford, all your ambition has a serious upside (hat tip to Science of Us for the pointer).

Perpetually feeling like you're a bit unsuccessful, it turns out, is a pretty good sign you're going to go on to achieve even greater things.

Why do people complain? Not to torture others with their negativity, surely. When most of us indulge in a bit of a moan, the idea is to "vent." By getting our emotions out, we reason, we'll feel better.

But science suggests there are a few serious flaws in that reasoning. One, not only does expressing negativity tend not to make us feel better, it's also catching, making listeners feel worse. "People don't break wind in elevators more than they have to. Venting anger is...similar to emotional farting in a closed area. It sounds like a good idea, but it's dead wrong," psychologist Jeffrey Lohr, who has studied venting, memorably explained.

OK, so complaining is bad for your mood and the mood of your friends and colleagues, but that's not all that's wrong with frequent negativity. Apparently, it's also bad for your brain and your health. Yes, really.

Can you imagine working for someone in a high-level leadership role, perhaps a CEO, and suddenly it dawns on you: This person isn't leadership caliber.

Your next thought may be, How in the world did he (or she) make it this far up the ladder?

It's a fair question. People are promoted into leadership roles every day who have no business belonging there.

Sometimes it's political; other times it's the easier choice--promote from within and avoid the high cost of recruitment--but a bad choice, nonetheless.

The biggest challenge leaders face is performing to the set standards of the best in the business. This means raising the bar really high--as the ten hugely successful CEOs I wrote about recently have done.

In the end, you'll find the leadership journey is predicated on two things that drive success: Results and relationships. You can't have results at the expense of people. And serving your tribe well without getting results is merely putting lipstick on a pig.

How you spend your night can have a huge impact on the day that follows. Do you spend your time ruminating over issues? Or maybe you stress over something that didn't quite go right during the day. There's no doubt, how you think affects how you feel. This is particularly important at night as you try to unwind and prepare for rest. This sets you up for sleep which serves many vital purposes. When I look at my clients who achieve the most during their days and are happiest, they are the ones who have a healthy routine at night. They set themselves up for success the following day by thinking and acting in a particular way.

Imagine you want to design a robot that can get through a maze by itself. How might you go about it? First, you would probably define the robot’s objective: Find the exit of the maze. Then you would create a mechanism to reward the robot for moving toward that goal and to punish it for moving farther away, so that over time it finds its way out. But what if the robot comes to a dead end right next to the exit? It’s geographically as close as possible to its objective but it can’t get there. And it won’t want to turn around because that would mean moving away from the goal and getting punished. Your robot would be stuck.

Kenneth Stanley is a professor in artificial intelligence who has studied this problem, the stagnation that can result from dogged pursuit of a prescribed goal. Eventually he and his colleagues arrived at a simple solution. What if instead of rewarding the robot for getting closer to the maze exit, they rewarded it for trying new and interesting directions? They found that this shift in programming significantly improved the robots’ ability to solve mazes — a successful result in 39 out of 40 trials, versus 3 out of 40. Testing objective-less challenges in many other AI contexts, Stanley got similar results. When made to seek novelty, his robots developed surprising and creative solutions to problems they could not previously solve.

Many years ago, I applied for a promotion I desperately wanted. At the time, I was the highest performer in the department and so everyone, including me, unwisely expected the big fancy job to be mine. It wasn't. Despite going for three interviews and enduring one of those excruciating psychometric tests, I was duly informed my application had been unsuccessful. What was most intriguing, however, was the reason the executive gave for rejecting me:

"James," she said, "you need to realise that sometimes it's not how well you perform a job that matters; it's how well you understand office politics." She then proceeded to write down the name of a book on the topic, which I was required to obediently read before applying again in the future.