Calling All Leaders to Lead With Love: Clarity

The word love is gaining in popularity in the workplace, from the board room to the water cooler, as well as the business media. I have heard love referred to as the newest corporate buzzword, most recently in an article entitled The Love Boat by Oregon Business magazine. When I hear this - love as a buzzword - I smile and picture a workplace where people are high fiving, helping one another solve issues and making plans for a happy hour ping pong tournament. It is difficult to argue with the concept of love, but what does love really look like in the workplace? As a management consultant who tackles the topics of culture and performance at all levels of an organization, I will unpack what I believe to be one of the most effective ways to demonstrate love in the workplace.

Clarity. It sounds so simple, yet is not easy. People want to make a difference, they want to be part of a shared purpose. Do you have a vision and values that drive your business? If not, set meaningful values and get crystal clear on your vision, mission, purpose - whatever you choose to call it - and specifically how you will get there. Lead your people with compassionate clarity and engage them in your mission.

Recently on an EntreLeadership podcast entitled Common Leadership Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, Executive Vice President at Dave Ramsey - Ramsey Solutions, Jack Galloway, spoke directly to compassionate clarity. He stated that "if I could only choose one mistake that I see most often that most negatively impacts the growth of a team, it is clarity. And we have learned here as leaders - it is kind to be clear and to be clear is to be kind." He goes on to say, "If I have to choose between airing on the side of kindness to a person when I'm giving them bad news versus being clear about the news, I have learned over the past 15 years that most people prefer clarity". Employees crave clarity. They use it to directly inform what they will focus on and how they can perform better.







Engage them in your mission by taking another loving step forward and -- simplify this vision. Make it resonate. A client of mine in the financial services industry whose mission was very traditional, which included "prompt, courteous service" and "achieving superior, long-term overall value" was simplified into "we're here for you when life happens". It is so much more meaningful for employees to get behind the idea of "we're here for you when life happens", like buying a house, a car and financing higher education than to think about prompt service and achieving value. Clarity that is simplified engages and excites people.

Once you have simplified your vision -- communicate it, again and again, because your employees are the people who will have the most impact on helping you to realize this vision. If you share your vision once a year, it will get fuzzy for most people after about 60 days. They really want to do the right thing, so be a great leader and continue to inspire them. Do your best to avoid mixed messages and course correct if you do.

Simple, but not easy. Leaders themselves aren't always clear on where they are going and how they will get there. And when they are, they can often be remiss in continuing to share the details with others because things are so clear in their mind that they assume everyone else is clear too. As leaders, the truth is that we are often the ones creating confusion in the workplace. It is done so unintentionally, but employees still find it frustrating and demotivating.

Be a loving leader and lead with clarity. Southwest Airlines is a great example of this. They focus on low fares, on-time flights and having fun. This focus drives everything in their business model and I have witnessed this on many flights firsthand. In the company's book Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, is a story about a woman who sent Southwest a complaint letter in which she bemoaned the lack of assigned seating, the lack of a first-class section and no meals. When Herb Keller, the then-CEO, learned of this he sent her the following note: "Dear Mrs. Crabapple, we will miss you. Love, Herb."





Inspire people. Paint the picture repeatedly. Ensure your employees know what is expected of them - individually and specifically. Be kind. Empower them to make decisions and let them do so. Trust them. Be compassionate when questions arise. Be clear on expectations - yours and theirs. Assume positive intent. Treat those that you work with kindness, respect and compassion. Hey, that sounds an awful lot like love, doesn't it?

So before you go out and buy ping pong tables to show your employees that you care, check yourself. Have you given your employees a clear blueprint for success? Have you over-communicated it? Have you created an environment that inspires and empowers them? Do this first and before you know it, you will be using the word love to describe your culture.

For simple tools to help you communicate your values and vision, go to www.eosworldwide.com.

Christy Clay is a business strategist and change leader for Enlightened Growth Technologies, specializing in conscious, creative cultures and peak performance.

Warning signs you are with the wrong fitness trainer

Your desire for a great physique often makes you desperate enough to settle for a bad personal trainer. The results of this compromise can be not just unsatisfactory, but also dangerous.

It had been a while since the concern over her bulging waist had slowly begun to plague her. Eventually, when her regular pair of jeans refused to button up, the alarm bells finally grew too loud to ignore. Shreya Jain, then a 27-year-old dentist, decided it was time she improve her health and hire a personal trainer. Her random assortment of exercises, she realised, was just not going to be enough. "Two months and 24 sessions later, I was a lot less rich and only a kilo or two lighter," says a still-grumpy Shreya. After this disappointing stint, for which she blames the undeniable incompetency of her trainer, she took control of her fitness again. Taking assistance from people more informed, reading fitness books and becoming more aware about the general science which informs training, all helped her control the damage done earlier. "The ability to empathise with a client must be of primary importance for any trainer. The definition of fitness is different for different clients, and trainers must be able to mould themselves in order to accept and understand that. They mustn't ever force their own opinion on the client," says Reebok Master Trainer, Vinata Shetty.She adds that in India, boundaries of the profession are not clearly defined and individuals specialising in one field, often teach multiple modules in other fields, without certifications.









The problem of trainers being downright inept is made more acute by the fact that many a time fitness enthusiasts are not aware if the time they are spending at the gym is aiding or hampering their growth. To know if you're struck with the wrong trainer, you'll have to try and spot these tell-tale giveaways.

TRY DIGGING FOR DEGREES

History has perhaps been witness to the many exceptions who disprove the rule that education is an essential prerequisite for success. But given that we place our health in the hands of the trainers in a manner similar to the faith we place in doctors, we should perhaps come to expect a minimal qualification that ensures an instructor isn't a quack.Fitness, as earlier stated, is a process driven by science, and those who believe they can do it without caring for basic knowledge, are inarguably not suited for this role.

Highlighting the hiring processes prevalent in gyms, Ritesh Shaiwal, senior fitness manager at Fitness First India, reveals, "Trainers attend a foundation course on the lines of international certifications, and are given three attempts to pass an internal exam. Meanwhile, they're kept on the floor to assist members generally," he says. "Permission to train clients individually is granted on passing the exam, failing which they're asked to leave," adds Ritesh, admitting that though the preferred choice is to hire a certified trainer, the nascent field doesn't attract many applications that meet the desired requirements stated.

TELLING BACKS FROM ELBOWS

A popular gag, which recently became quite the rage on social media, had to suggested that people who exe cute only half-range squats with a should give up training and do the Zumba instead. The joke, equisite which obviously did not go down well with Zumba-lovers, iner actually intended to highlight a 'lazy' form of squatting. But the inability to execute a complete TTY squat isn't merely a matter of willingness or lack of strength. It could be attributed to factors like inflexible hips and legs, or a weak back, and no amount of high pitched rants from your trainer, like 'Squat deeper ... Go lower ... Don't bend your back' can fix those more inherent issues. It might, in fact, exacerbate them. What can help is a well-crafted programme that works on increasing flexibility or strengthening the assisting muscles. Do you think your trainer recognises these limitations? A personal trainer must be able to design a programme exclusively for you after having studied your short comings. He or she can, after all, only help you overcome a weakness they are able to spot. "Trainers are recommended to conduct a func tional movement screening for clients where basic movements are analysed to identify weak points," says Ritesh, while stressing the importance of structured workout plans. "Fitness doesn't follow a one size fits-all policy. Trainers need to create programmes keeping in mind the individual's lifestyle. It is their life style which always determines the need of clients," adds Vinata. The ever-evolving field of fitness introduces new researches frequently. A fact that was once the holy grail of training can be reduced to nothing more than a myth tomorrow. If your trainer's education stopped with his or her mastery of the crunch, you probably haven't been exposed to newer methods. If you think your trainer uses the same training format with 24-year-old and 60-year-olds, you have reason to worry. "We have professionals whose sole intention is monetary gain. They choose to freelance with limited experience and their disinterest in educating themselves limits the profession's growth," says Ritesh.






You also want to be wary of mindless repetition. "My trainer gave me an insightful explanation on the importance of isometric workouts for abs during our first session, and that left me mighty impressed. But then, he repeated the same thing during every other session. It was the only meaningful message he ever gave me. It seemed like he'd heard about it in a passing conversation and set it on record," says 26-year-old Varun Jaisingh, who has been training for two years, and is dismayed by the fact that trainers are never held accountable for the lack of results they produce.

As human beings, we are all naturally driven by curiosity. What is the purpose of a high-intensity workout? Can you skip it altogether if you dislike it? Why do you need to weight-train if you simply love running? These questions have answers which only good trainers can ably explain to their clients. Much like great doctors who teach patients about their condition, a trainer should be able to motivate clients with reason.

A FINE BALANCE

Trainers with little knowledge will make you execute the same exercises day after day. Trainers with far too much exposure to YouTube can, on the other hand, experiment with something new every day. Neither of the two methods is appropriate. A well-drafted fitness programme stretches across months, and every individual training session should bring you closer to the programme's ultimate goal. To get better at exercise, a movement must be repeated often, not daily. So, if you happened to do a unique exercise with a kettle bell as long as three weeks ago, you've probably lost the benefits of that individual session by now.These are some basic fitness essentials that all instructors and trainers must always keep in mind. If you have three training sessions per week, you still have i another three days of exercise to fit in on your own, all of which are extremely vital when you are aiming to achieve a fitness goal. To ensure you make the most of them, your trainer must spell out the required exercises you should be carrying out. Of course, even a great fitness trainer can do little to help you if you fail to be sincere with your diet. Yes, you are on your own for the 23 hours you're out of the gym. There's no reason for you to feel alone when in it.

Personalized Nutrition Better Than Popular 'Healthy Diets'

There is no "healthy for all" food type. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel explain that responses to food can differ from person to person. Hence, what is healthy for one is not necessarily so for everyone.

So far, the glycemic index (GI), is a standard that has placed food types at different blood glucose levels, in order to make up healthy diets for patients. However, those who showed diverse blood glucose responses to food showed gaps in the use of GI grading system.

The Personalized Nutrition Project  showed the researchers focusing on the effect of foods in the blood glucose levels of 800 participants for a week. They could analyse the effects for 46,898 meals, finding that the participants showed different responses to the same food, although the individual responses were the same everyday.






"Most dietary recommendations that one can think of are based on one of these grading systems; however, what people didn't highlight, or maybe they didn't fully appreciate, is that there are profound differences between individuals - in some cases, individuals have opposite response to one another, and this is really a big hole in the literature," study author Eran Segal from Weizmann's Department of Computer Science and Applied Math said in a press release.

For instance, a woman who suffered from pre-diabetes and obesity ate tomatoes as part of a "healthy diet," but then found that they led to a rise in her blood glucose. The different responses to food was shown to be due to the "uniqueness" of her gut bacteria.

"In contrast to our current practices, tailoring diets to the individual may allow us to utilize nutrition as means of controlling elevated blood sugar levels and its associated medical conditions," Eran Elinav, study coauthor from Weizmann's Department of Immunology, said in the press release.
To customise the food to different persons, the researchers developed an algorithm predicting a person's blood glucose response to specific food types, factoring each person's lifestyle, gut bacteria and medical background. They then tested the accuracy of the algorithm in a subsequent study that involved 100 volunteers. The algorithm was discovered to accurately predict the blood glucose responses to various food types.







"After seeing this data, I think about the possibility that maybe we're really conceptually wrong in our thinking about the obesity and diabetes epidemic," Segal said. "The intuition of people is that we know how to treat these conditions, and it's just that people are not listening and are eating out of control - but maybe people are actually compliant but in many cases we were giving them wrong advice."

Read more: http://www.counselheal.com/articles/16023/20151124/personalized-nutrition-better-popular-healthy-diets-study.htm#ixzz3sS7SxP1h

Apple could surprise with higher iPhone and watch sales

Forecasting Apple's (AAPL) holiday quarter sales has been more of a dark art than a science on Wall Street the past few years. Analysts look to everything from supply chain clues and consumer surveys to the number of Google searches mentioning iPhones, but there's been no reliable method yet discovered.

This year there's a new contender, as IBM (IBM) decided to throw the mighty weight of its Watson data analytics software service at the holiday prognistication problem.

Data scientists at IBM have set Watson loose reading millions of posts on thousands of social networks, blogs and web sites ahead of Black Friday in an effort to predict the hottest gifts of this gift-giving season. The big surprise so far? The top gift by far appears to be not a cute Star Wars robot or a talking Barbie doll but the Apple Watch, left for dead by analysts and panned by most reviewers.






If Watson is correct, Apple's holiday quarter could be a lot better than Wall Street expects. Analysts see Apple selling 76.5 million iPhones, up a paltry 3% from last year, along with an almost irrelevant 6 million of the new Apple watches, according to FactSet. At that level, the watch, which starts at $349, would bring in only about $2 billion to $3 billion, or maybe 5% of total revenue for the quarter.

Whether Watson hits the mark or not, the debate has been roiling Apple's stock price as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach.


The kerfuffle started back on Nov. 10, when Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha said he was hearing of reduced orders from Apple's Asian suppliers. "Apple has lowered its component orders by as much as 10%, according to our teams in Asia," Garcha wrote. He also slashed his estimate of iPhone sales over the next year and reduced his earnings forecast. Apple's stock fell 8%, from $120.57 to a low of $111, over the next five days.

Predictions based on the supply chain have a shaky track record, however -- Apple CEO Tim Cook went out of his way to deride the method in April. And since Garcha's report, other signs have emerged that maybe Apple's holidays won't be quite so glum, helping the stock recover somewhat. The shares were almost unchanged in midday trading on Tuesday at $117.91.






UBS’s Steve Milunovich noted that interest in Apple products as seen in Google searches is high, especially in China. Brian White of Drexel Hamilton looked at surveys of consumer buying intentions for the holidays. Tablets, where Apple's iPad is the leader, were the second most popular category and smartphones were fourth. Smartwatches were far behind, but up 50% from last year. White said Apple watch sales would be much bigger than expected.

If that turns out to be the case, there may be a lot more interest in Watson on Wall Street next Christmas.