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#Leadership : 9 Signs You’re Successful — Even If It Doesn’t Feel Like It…There’s No Sense in Feeling like a Failure Just Because you Think you Should Have a Better Job, a Bigger House, or a Nicer Car. Real Success comes From the Inside, & it’s Completely Independent of Circumstance.

July 4, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

If you’re ambitious, you’re bound to feel like a failure from time to time. Lofty goals lead to inevitable moments when you aren’t yet living up to your expectations.

We live in a world that reinforces this feeling. Though most people won’t admit it — other than the guy with the ‘He who dies with the most toys wins’ bumper sticker — in the back of our minds, we equate material possessions with success.

It’s a shame we fall prey to materialistic thinking because we certainly know better. A study by Strayer University found that 90% of Americans believe happiness is a bigger indicator of success than power, possessions or prestige. Digging a little deeper, 67% defined success as “good relationships with friends and family,” and 60% said it is loving what you do for a living. Only 20% stated that monetary wealth determines success.

But saying and doing are two very different things.

When it comes to success, our eyes often lead us astray. It’s hard not to feel like the most successful people are those with the biggest houses, the most expensive cars, and the most influential friends. Regardless of what you achieve, there’s always someone with more, and this can make you feel like you’re losing. The problem isn’t your lack of toys; it’s believing that toys indicate true success.

Real success is about who you are and how far you’ve come. If you ever worry that you’re not as successful as you should be, you may be evaluating yourself against the wrong criteria. Sometimes you just need a reminder as to what you’ve really accomplished in life. The success indicators that follow will help you do just that.

1. You’re no longer the center of the universe. We all know “successful” people who act like they’re the center of the universe. It’s their world and the rest of us just live in it…right? That’s not success. True success requires the ability to feel empathy — to realize that other people’s feelings and dreams are just as important as ours, and we cannot succeed without them.

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2. You stay positive. Hope and optimism are essential components of a happy life. If you dwell on the things that go wrong, you become bitter and resentful. When that happens, you fail — no matter what you may have achieved. Real success means always seeing the bright side and believing you have the power to make even the worst situations better.

3. You know that failure isn’t forever. You’ve learned that the only people who never fail are those who don’t try. When you fail, you don’t automatically assume that you’re a failure. Instead, you embrace each failure as an opportunity to learn something — and then you move on. If you still struggle with this at times, know that you’ll never experience true success until you learn to embrace failure. Your mistakes pave the way for your success by revealing when you’re on the wrong path. The biggest breakthroughs typically come when you’re feeling the most frustrated and the most stuck. It’s this frustration that forces you to think differently, to look outside the box and see the solution you’ve been missing.

4. You keep things in perspective. Sometimes bad things happen. It’s part of life. For most of us, however, our very worst day would seem like a vacation to somebody who has real problems — like not having enough to eat, or trying to survive a civil war. Locking your keys in the car — or even getting passed over for a promotion — aren’t that bad once you learn to develop perspective. If you’ve mastered the ability to keep your problems in perspective, mark it down as a huge success.

5. You ask for help when you need it. Refusing to ask for help, no matter how much you’re struggling, is a sign of emotional immaturity. Asking for help means that you no longer feel like you have something to prove by being perfect. It shows you aren’t afraid of people discovering your weaknesses and you understand no one succeeds alone.

6. You realize that life isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not a see-saw, either. Just because somebody else achieves a big success, that doesn’t mean you suffer a loss in equal proportion. You just didn’t win that particular time. One sure sign of success is the ability to celebrate others’ achievements with sincere enthusiasm.

7. You can tell the difference between drama and excitement. Remember the days when stable relationships were boring, and you quickly got tired of anyone who treated you as they should? If that kind of “drama” is a thing of the past, congratulations. If you prefer stability and depth to drama, you’re succeeding.

8. You no longer care what other people think. You only worry about what other people think when you still feel like you have something to prove. Conversely, you know you’ve “made it” when you don’t worry about that anymore — when you’re true to yourself and your principles, and satisfied with your life. You know you’ve made it when you understand that other people’s opinions are just that — opinions. They have no effect on reality. They don’t change who or what you are.

9. You accept what you can’t change and change what you can. There’s a difference between pessimism and practicality. If there’s a hurricane headed your way, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. But once you accept that the hurricane is coming, you can start working to mitigate its effects. If your company downsizes and you get laid off, every moment you spend in denial just delays whatever is waiting over the horizon. You’re able to move on only when you start exploring your options and making plans to change what you can. Taking responsibility for changing the things you don’t like about your life is one of the biggest indicators of success.

Bringing It All Together

There’s no sense in feeling like a failure just because you think you should have a better job, a bigger house, or a nicer car. Real success comes from the inside, and it’s completely independent of circumstance.

Entrepreneur.com | July 1, 2016 | Travis Bradberry

Your #Career : 5 Signs That Your Job is Wrong for You…You were Excited to Get the Job but Now you’re Miserable & Dread Monday Mornings. What Happened?

July 3, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

It’s possible you could simply be working at a job that’s a bad fit. Maybe you didn’t realize this was the wrong job for you, or maybe you didn’t care because you were desperate for work, but there comes a time when you need to decide whether it makes sense to stay.

Here are five ways to know you’re in the wrong job.

1. You’re undervalued

If you haven’t received a merit raise or promotion (or at the very least, acknowledgement of your hard work) and you’ve been with the company for a while, you should evaluate whether it is time to take your skills and talent elsewhere. If you feel undervalued by your employer, you’re not alone. Roughly half of employees say they feel undervalued at work, according to the American Psychological Association. Good work should be acknowledged and rewarded. You can start by having a discussion with your boss to see if there are any areas that need to be improved. However, if you have already had this meeting and you have successfully met your target, you may want to consider moving on.

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2. There’s a values clash

If you don’t agree with the mission of the company or there are ethical issues, it’s time to reevaluate your work situation. If there are practices at your company that don’t align with your moral values, it’s time to go. KateWendleton, founder of The Five O’Clock Club, says when your values are not symmetrical with your co-workers or managers (for example, there is illegal activity occurring on a regular basis), this is a clear sign you need to leave.

“[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][You should leave if] your values don’t match. The people you work with are uncouth, dishonest, focused on getting ahead regardless of legal or moral barriers. They win by cheating,” said Wendleton.

3. You’re not good at your job

Are you doing a job that’s not a good match for your skills simply because you’re trying to pay the bills? One way to tell your job is a poor fit is if it takes you a very long time to complete tasks and you dread every assignment. The job just doesn’t come naturally to you and takes significant effort. Perhaps you were promoted too soon or you were hired for a position you knew was a bad match. Regardless of how you got where you are, it will only be a matter of time before you make a mistake that’s impossible to recover from. Get out now before the decision to leave is made for you.

“Perhaps you’ll realize [your boss] pointing out things in your work that you can/should change, and you can work on changing them. If this happens, let [your boss] know. Otherwise, you’ll realize [he or she] is pointing out things you can’t easily change (or don’t particularly want to change). If this is the case, the best thing you can do is to start looking for other work,” said Alison Green, management expert and author of the Ask a Manager blog.

4. Your career has stalled

If you have reached a point where there is nowhere else to move but out, you should start dusting off that resume. Perhaps your colleagues plan to stay in their current roles until they die or your company is structured in such a way that there are very few opportunities to be promoted. Either way, time to start looking.

“Careers can stall when your company does not have a position for you to grow into. There’s a ‘blocker’ above you—usually your boss—who’s doing a fine job and has no plans to retire, change industries, or move to Toledo…The main culprit is lack of growth; your company, industry, or the economy overall is in a hard place, standing still, or even contracting. In such situations, opportunities for upward mobility are necessarily hard to come by…. If you’re in a blocker situation, you really only have one choice, and it’s to decide how long you’re willing to endure stasis, and we mean, decide. Put an expiration date on your patience. ‘If something doesn’t change within a year, I’m putting out feelers, and within two years, I’m out of here,’ you might conclude,” said Jack Welch, executive chairman of Jack Welch Management Institute.

5. Your work-life balance is nonexistent

If all you do is work, go home, shower, and then do it all over again, it’s time to make a change. Jobs require a certain amount of dedication, but things are out of hand if you’re constantly working and rarely take a vacation despite efforts to bring some balance to your life.

“When your entire life revolves around your job and your work troubles start to follow you home, you have a problem. If you’re overdoing it, you might lose yourself along the way,” said career expert Arthur Joyce.

Follow Sheiresa on Twitter and Facebook.

CheatSheet.com | July 3, 2016 | Sheiresa Ngo

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Your #Career : 5 Tips To Help Women Work Longer…Women are Working Longer before Retiring, or Working Part-Time in Retirement, & That’s a Good Thing.

July 3, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Let’s start with the big picture and why I find this trend to be a silver lining for boomer women — both financially and spiritually. Then I’ll offer some advice on ways women can successfully stay on the job and use these bonus working years to strengthen their finances as they age.

A recent study, Women Working Longer: Facts and Some Explanations, presented by Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Women Working Longer conference last month, reported that women have been working longer for a long time. Their labor market participation increased decade after decade during the 20^th century, as more women entered the labor force.

The New Story About Working Women

But that’s an old story, they wrote. “The new story is that a large fraction of women are working a lot longer, past their sixties and even into their seventies,” said the report.

In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by the end of this decade, about 20% of women over 65 will be in the labor force.

“Women’s increased participation beyond their fifties is a change of real consequence,” according to Goldin and Katz. “Rather than being an increase in marginal part-time workers, the higher labor force participation of older women consists disproportionately of those working at full-time jobs. Women are remaining on their jobs as they age rather than scaling down or leaving for positions with shorter hours and fewer days.”

Four factors that have influenced the uptick: More women have been holding jobs with greater advancement, have been college graduates, were not currently married or were married to men who also extended employment into their later years.

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Working for the Money — or Not

Sometimes, the women aren’t working because they need to, financially.

“From my work with Katz, we find a strong increase in employment among the most highly educated of those women older than fifty-five and for those who are in managerial and professional occupations — even if their financial security appears to be reasonable,” Goldin told me. “Higher levels of employment for women older than fifty-five years also appear to be among those who are healthier and whose occupations are the most rewarding and least physically taxing.” (This echoes the survey conducted by Elizabeth Fideler for her book, Women Still at Work.)

In other cases, however, money is very much a factor.

Olivia S. Mitchell, executive director of the Pension Research Council at The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania Mitchell and Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of economics and accountancy at The George Washington University School of Business, report in their new study, Older Women’s Labor Market Attachment, Retirement Planning, and Household Debt:

“When we explore the reasons for delayed retirement among older women…household finances also appears to be playing a key role, in that older women today have more debt than previously…In large part this can be attributed to having taken on larger residential mortgages due to the run-up in housing prices over time and lower down payments as well.”

Other gauges of financial distress, they said: few women are able to easily cover their expenses in a typical month or have set aside emergency fundsto cover expenses for three months. Many women also said they didn’t pay off credit card balances in full, paid only the minimum due and were charged fees for late payments or exceeding the limits.

Catherine Collinson, president of Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and Transamerica Institute, recently told a U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing that her organization’s surveys found that only 42% of women workers say they are building a large enough nest egg to retire without financial worries, compared to 55% of men.

“Women age 50 and older — especially unmarried women — face extreme financial risks and potential poverty in retirement,” Collinson told me when I interviewed for a previous Next Avenue article. Many women Transamerica surveyed say they plan to work until age 70 or later — or don’t plan to retire at all.

The Financial Bonuses for Women Working Longer

Fortunately, when I touched based with Mitchell this week, she noted that there were a host of financial bonuses for women extending careers.

“Longer work reduces the drawdown on financial assets,” she told me. “Longer work could lengthen the time one is covered by employer-based health insurance, hence diminishing personal spending on health care costs. And a longer worklife can contribute to enhanced well being due to continued relationships with co-workers and social networks.”

And, as they say on late night TV infomercials, there’s more!

“Work can provide important resources for women — such as a sense of meaning and purpose, a positive identity, and a social network — in addition to financial benefit,” said Colorado State Assistant Professor Gwenith Fisher, who has been studying when and why people retire. Fisher was on a Future of Work and Retirement panel I recently moderated at Columbia University’s 2016 Age Boom Academy.

Moreover, added Fisher, “continuing to work is also associated with cognitive and health benefits: research that has studied patterns of cognitive functioning has shown that working in jobs that involve thinking, problem solving, and creativity is related to less cognitive decline, and retirement is also linked to earlier mortality, even among people who did not retire due to their health.”

Of course, men can enjoy these benefits by working longer, too.

(More: A Sneak Peek Into the Future of Work and Retirement)

Working Longer and Social Security

Working longer can provide women with a significant financial boost from Social Security, too.

Women are more dependent on Social Security than men and their average Social Security income is roughly 77% of that of men, according to research by Aine Ni Leime of Case Western Reserve University. Moreover, said Ni Leime (who recently presented research at the Work and Family Researchers Network annual conference in Washington, D.C.), women are 56% of all Social Security beneficiaries age 62 and older and 66% of all beneficiaries age 85 and older.

The potential gain in Social Security benefits alone from working longer is enough to place married women on equal footing with married men in terms of Social Security wealth at age 70, according to research by Harvard economist Nicole Maestas, an expert in the study of aging who was also on my Age Boom Academy panel.

“Working beyond the Social Security early retirement age until age 70 would make a sizable increase in the magnitude of lifetime Social Security benefits to which married women are entitled,” she found. “The gain in years worked at older ages would be sufficient to offset early gaps in the earnings record, and would place women on par with men in terms of lifetime resources available to them in the latter part of life. This is because the additional years of earnings at these ages replace earlier years of low or zero earnings in the retirement benefit computation formula.”

5 Tips for Women Who Want to Work Longer

So for women who’ve been persuaded that it’s worth staying on the job beyond the traditional retirement age, here are five tips to make sure youdon’t burn out, do stay employable and can use the bonus years to prepare for a financially secure retirement:

(More: How to Love Your Job Even If You Don’t Like It)

1. Never stop learning and adding skills. It’s crucial to keep your skills sharp if you want to stay on the job. Sign up for continuing education, or professional development programs offered by your employer.

2. Keep up on trends in your industry. Then, when attractive opportunities arise at work, you’ll be ready to raise your hand for them. One suggestion: set up a Google Alert to alert you about the latest news in your field.

3. Ramp up your financial literacy. Learn all you can about investing, retirement savings and Social Security strategies. Mitchell and Lusardi found that women who were more financially literate were more likely to plan for retirement, were less likely to have excessive debt and were less likely to be financially fragile.

4. Calculate your retirement savings needs and save at a level to achieve them. Among women who estimated their retirement savings needs, 62% say they “guessed,” according to Transamerica. Only 7% had completed a worksheet or done a calculation and just 3% consulted a financial adviser for the figure.

5. Continue participating in your employer’s retirement plan. The longer you work, the longer you can keep contributing and stave off dipping into those funds, allowing them to grow tax-deferred. That way your money works longer, too.

Forbes.com | July 3, 2016 | Next Avenue

#Leadership : 7 Ways To Re-Think Performance Management…The Following 7 Topics are Fundamental when Re-Thinking any Performance Management Process & Culture.

June 29, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

The concept of Performance Management sounds simple, but of course it isn’t. Humans have a lust for control and have developed quite a few mental concepts to ‘control’ performance management; processes, ratings, manuals, competency frameworks, forms, collective labor agreements, etc. While all these things once had a purpose, the sum of it is not fit for duty 16 years into the 20^th century.

People connecting and leaving each other valuable feedback to improve the way you work? That will drive performance.

The following seven topics are fundamental when re-thinking any performance management process and culture.

1. Workforce Alignment is fundamental

Aligning the employees to the right set of objectives remains the success factor. Showing employees thepurpose of the company and what is expected of him/her is the most important factor in performance management.

Without workforce alignment, any performance management process – annually or instantly – has no frame of reference and is entirely useless.

If your mission and strategy is sound and your workforce is connected and engaged, then all they need is real time meaningful feedback, peer coaching and mentoring.

Ask yourself: How is goal alignment incorporated in your new Performance Management process?

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2. Feedback is magic

Feedback is essential for people to connect and learn from each other. The better people can exchange feedback, the stronger their network and its outcomes in terms of collaboration and cooperation. This feedback needs to be constructive and authentic to become meaningful and instrumental in animating teams and corporate culture.

And it needs to be real-time! Why? Well if there is one thing our multitasking social media world is messing with, it’s our ability to remember. If I make mistakes helping out a client, then immediate feedback is needed. Not 11 months later in my performance review. You have to make hay when the sun shines! This has nothing to do with generations Y (Millennials) or Z (iGeneration). It’s the world turning faster.

Ask yourself: How have you integrated real time, continuous, open feedback in Performance Management?

3. Space for mistakes is crucial

Everybody knows that people learn from mistakes. That’s how children grow up and how we evolve as a species. But how many performance management processes allow employees to make mistakes? They are often constructed to do the opposite. Employees covering up mistakes, because their sole focus of the performance management meeting is to get a salary increase. And managers are breaking their minds on how they should apply the mandatory forced rankings. Both are not helping to create an environment for healthy mistakes.

Ask yourself: How do you allow people to make errors and learn?

4. From judging to mentoring

Too many performance conversations are one way traffic where the manager is ‘judging’ the employee. Stop managing. Start leading. Don’t tell employees what to do. Involve them, explain things to them and demonstrate how it’s done. Not annually, but constantly and empathically.

Coaching and mentoring programs are often separated from the performance management process. While rethinking the performance management process it’s worth to rethink a tighter integration between them. Coaching and mentoring are the real-time components that drive the effectiveness and productivity of teams. A crucial component of performance.
Ask yourself: How are protégé, coach and mentor relationships incorporated in your new performance process?

5. Time to rethink performance vs compensation

This might be the biggest paradigm shift for organizations, their work councils and the trade unions. Let’s rethink the way that performance and compensation are connected. Yes, money can stimulate performance, but it remains an extrinsic motivation. It’s theintrinsic motivation that deserves more attention, because that is what really motivatesus in a deeper and sustainable way.

And if it’s the intrinsic motivation we need, then we can ask ourselves to what extend we can decouple the compensation from the performance ‘cycle’, without losing a performance culture.

Why not decouple remuneration from tenure and yearly performance cycles and move towards compensation based on certain gigs, projects and/or roles that are performed by the employee? Trusting people to do their job and only act if they don’t. And then coach them to better performances and keep on giving them other challenging gigs. Preferably even connected to customer satisfaction ratings.

The biggest naysayers are usually work councils and trade unions, responsible for complex collective labor agreements, that have the lion’s share in HR’s attention span. The focus should be on creating an open, authentic and constructive feedback culture. Only such a culture will enable the company to progress and that will be the most significant contribution to employee happiness and engagement, which ultimately drives revenue. A disrupted bankrupt company pays no compensation at all.

Ask yourself: How is customer satisfaction connected to compensation?

6. Time to rethink the purpose of ratings

If you don’t pay based on performance ratings, do you then still need them? Well… ratings have a purpose on its own. Ratings can drive performance, but also the opposite.

There are studies that show big benefits of using ratings in a competitive way, utilizing the competitive nature of people and driving performance in that way. Other studies show reverse results; using ratings in the wrong way can also demotivate people.

It ultimately comes down to thinking carefully about what you like to rate and why. And in which way to create transparency in those ratings. If you measure rating, you better do it right, otherwise it will backfire on your ultimate goal: increasing performance.

Ask yourself: How are performance ratings contributing to a performance culture?

7. Performance of contractors needs to be managed too

Teams deliver results, not individuals. This aspect is often addressed with a team target that is rarely motivating the individuals of a team to step up their game. What’s really needed is a collaboration platform where the entire team can monitor its own performance. Where they can instantly give feedback to each other to steer the team in the right direction.

The rise of the freelancer is adding a layer of complexity. This group of contractors is growing exponentially (globally), but are often excluded from performance management, because presenting contractors with a yearly performance form is like asking Kanye West to spend a year in a silent monastery.

Presenting a yearly form is not the goal . Improving performance is the goal. If you want to manage the performance of the entire team, then flex workers are part of it and the ability to share instant feedback should go beyond employees on the payroll.

The ‘simple’ compensation model of freelancers is an blueprint of how we can deal with compensating performance as discussed earlier (point 5). Free lancers have a job for which they get paid. They receive feedback and gain experience to improve their skill set, which they use to take on other gigs, for which they get paid a different compensation.

Ask yourself: How is your new performance model supporting team output including contractors?

Where to go from here?

A new performance management ‘system’ can only be applied in a new paradigm. I do not believe that you can have a hierarchical management structure/culture and then move to team based feedback. This would be a step back from traditional performance rating as most of us have today.

There is no way around it: to be successful you have to animate the culture, management style and attitude that propels performance management to the next level.

This story originally appeared on the SAP Business Trends community.

Forbes.com | June 29, 2016 | By Patrick Willer, Workforce Innovation Consultant, SAP

#Strategy : How To Cut Your Email Time In Half…Would you Like a Simple Way to Dramatically Cut the Time you Spend on Emails?

June 28, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

According to a survey conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, office workers spend 2.6 hours per day reading and answering emails. This equates to 33% of a 40-hour workweek.

What’s worse is that smartphones, laptops, and other mobile devices have many checking their email constantly: while commuting (yes, I see you checking your phone while driving), waiting at the doctor’s office, at mealtimes, and every other situation imaginable.

But is there a better way to manage your email? Over the years, I’ve found out that the key to mastering email (instead of letting email master you) is to have a system.

Ergo, seven steps to master your email:

1. Unsubscribe from email newsletters.

Do you really need to subscribe to all those fashion websites? Those flash deals-of-the-day offers? Those viral clickbait “news” headlines? Don’t give permission to all those companies to intrude on your day, to interrupt your flow, and to tempt you with their offers. They’re trying hard to get into your head, but they can’t if they’re not in your inbox to begin with.

Just go into your email and search for “unsubscribe” and then unsubscribe from all the email newsletters that you find. There’s also a great website called Unroll.Me that will let you easily unsubscribe from the newsletters you want to trash. It will then consolidate the newsletters you want to keep into one big daily email.

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2. Turn off all email notifications.

Email is not intended to be an urgent form of communication. Nowadays, when most of us are getting 50 to 500 emails a day, getting email notifications is a sin. Notifications interrupt your concentration, your work sprints, and your ability to be present during meetings and conversations.

Whatever notifications you’re using, whether an audible ding, a phone vibration, or a little window that pops up with every new email–turn it off.

3. Think twice before you forward, cc or bcc.

As reported in an August 9, 2013, article in the Wall Street Journal, London-based International Power reduced total email traffic by 54% just by encouraging their top executives to “think twice” before they forwarded an email or added anyone to the cc: line. Too often we forward or cc someone in the spirit of keeping them “in the loop,” but in reality we are contributing to the information overload problem.

Remember, every email you send and every cc you include means you are likely going to get a reply back into your own email box. If you send less email, you’ll also receive less email.

4. Use the subject line to indicate the action required.

An ideal subject line doesn’t just indicate the subject of the email, but also the type of action it requires. This helps email recipients to process your email in less time. And they’ll learn to reciprocate. The idea is to preface your subject line message with some meta-information. I like to use all caps to make this part of the subject stand out from the message. Here are some examples:

“FYI: [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][subject]”—Use the FYI designation when you are just passing info along as a courtesy.

“ACTION REQUIRED by [DATE]: [subject]” or “TO DO by [DATE]”—Use ACTION REQUIRED when your recipients should take an action, but they don’t report to you; use TO DO when you are giving a directive to someone who reports to you.

“NRN: [subject]”—NRN stands for “no response needed” and can be used to eliminate the polite response emails that people often send like “Thanks” or “Looks interesting” or “I’ll take a look at this next week,” etc.

“[subject]–EOM”—My personal favorite, EOM stands for “end of message” and lets you put super short messages right in the subject line. EOM tells the recipient, don’t bother opening this one because all the content is in the subject line.

5. Keep emails short—really short.

Realize that being brief isn’t rude; it’s a sign of respect for the other person’s time (in addition to your own).

There is even a movement that suggests we consider email messages to be similar to text messages. The website five.sentenc.es suggests you limit all your emails to five sentences or fewer and then add a footer message that directs people to the website for an explanation.

6. Use the 321-Zero system.

I’m a firm believer that you should only process email three times a day.

Schedule three times to process your email (morning, noon, night), set the timer on your phone for 21 minutes, and try to get to inbox zero in that time. Make a game out of it—21 minutes is typically not enough time to get to zero, and that’s intentional. But this goal will keep you focused, ensure that your responses are short, and keep you from clicking links out onto the wonderful world of internet distractions.

7. Immediately apply the 4 D’s.

Every time you open an email, you should be ready to Delete it (archive), Delegate it (forward), Defer it (move to your calendar), or Do it.

• Delete: When you think “delete,” in most cases you should really just archive. These days, with virtually unlimited storage space, it’s easy to just hit the Archive button on most things, knowing that you can use the search function to get it back again in the future.

• Delegate: If someone else should be handling this, forward it immediately.

• Defer: If you defer an email, in most cases that means immediately adding an entry to your calendar—“moving” the email to a calendar entry.

• Do: If you can handle this in five minutes or less, do it right away.

After each of first three actions, either archive the email or delete it.

In addition to the 4 D’s, consider F for File it. In my opinion, this is just another form of archiving, but it can be helpful especially if you’re nervous that you might not be able to find something again. Just create folders for all your projects, clients, or even something like “Respond to Someday,” and then drag emails related to those topics into the folders to keep your inbox nice and clean.

There they are—seven simple steps to master your email. Try using these to keep your email under control, and you’ll suddenly discover hours per week that you didn’t know you had.

–

Kevin Kruse is the author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and “The Millionaire Day Planner: A Free 1-Page Planning Tool.”

Forbes.com | June 27, 2016 | Kevin Kruse

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#Leadership : This is How you make Better Decisions, According to Science…Yeah, it Can Really be that Simple: Thinking about How you Would Help Others is Often the Best Way to Help Yourself.

June 27, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Life would be a lot easier if we just knew how to make good decisions. Research shows we all make a lot of bad ones, according to Chip Heath’s “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.”

With careers:

“More than half of teachers quit their jobs within four years. In fact, one study in Philadelphia schools found that a teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.”

In our jobs:

“A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves ‘completely certain’ about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time.”

And in our personal lives:

“… an estimated 61,535 tattoos were reversed in the United States in 2009.”

We get a lot of sketchy tips based on unreliable sources. So what does the scientific research say about how to make good decisions?

For starters, you might think you would be better off if you just had more information about the choice at hand.

And you’d be wrong …

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You don’t need more info, you need the right info

In the past 20 years we went from a world where information was difficult to come by to a world where we can’t get away from the stuff. The phrase “TMI” is now more true than ever.

When doctors are diagnosing heart attacks, the glut of information isn’t just a nuisance — it can be deadly, according to “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”:

“What Goldman’s algorithm indicates, though, is that the role of those other factors is so small in determining what is happening to the man right now that an accurate diagnosis can be made without them … that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.”

Solution?

Spend less time trying to amass all the information and more time better defining the problem so you can find the right information.

As Dan Pink explains in his bestseller, “To Sell Is Human“, research shows one of the hallmarks of great advances in both the arts and sciences is spending more time on clarifying problems.

Via “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others“:

“‘The quality of the problem that is found is a forerunner of the quality of the solution that is attained…’ Getzels concluded.”

And people who focus on the problem instead of the answer end up more successful in their careers.

Via “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others“:

“In 1970, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels tracked down these same artists, now out of school and working for a living to see how they were faring. About half the students had left the art world altogether. The other half was working, and often succeeding, as professional artists. The composition of that second group? Nearly all were problem finders back in their school days.”

(To learn what Harvard research says will make you more successful and happier, click here.)

Alright, you’re clarifying the problem and focused on getting the right info. Good. So now you need to be ultra-rational and logical, unswayed by emotion in order to make a good choice, right? Wrong again …

Feelings are your friends

Being calm definitely helps when trying to make good decisions — but ignoring emotions is silly.

As Stanford professor Baba Shiv explains, choices can’t be made without feelings.

Via “The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive“:

“In the late ’80s and through the ’90s, says Shiv, neuroscientists “started providing evidence for the diametric opposite viewpoint” to rational-choice theory: ‘that emotion is essential for and fundamental to making good decisions.'”

And not only do we need feelings to make decisions, engaging them also leads to betterdecisions.

Professor Timothy Wilson, author of “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change“, says feeling beats thinking when it comes to relationship predictions:

“It was the people in the ‘gut feeling’ group whose ratings predicted whether they were still dating their partner several months later. As for the navel gazers, their satisfaction ratings did not predict the outcome of their relationships at all.”

And matters of the heart aren’t the only place where feelings help. Empathy can be a big positive when trying to make good choices. Research shows doctors who feel empathy make better decisions for their patients.

Wharton professor Adam Grant, author of the bestseller “Give and Take“, told me:

“There is a great study by Turner and colleagues showing that when radiologists saw a photo of the patient whose x-ray they were about to scan, they empathized more with the person. They saw that person as more of a human being as opposed to just an x-ray. As a result, they wrote longer reports and they had greater diagnostic accuracy, significantly.”

Certainly there are times when we need to think things through and be very rational. So how do you know whether to go with your gut or not?

For simple decisions without many factors involved (What soda should I buy?) be rational.
For very complex or weighty decisions (Am I in love?) trust your gut.

Via “How We Decide“:

As Dijksterhuis demonstrated, when you ask the prefrontal cortex to make (complex) decisions, it makes consistent mistakes… It might sound ridiculous, but it makes scientific sense: Think less about those items that you care a lot about. Don’t be afraid to let your emotions choose.

Now what about when you’re tired and it’s hard to think? Don’t worry — research says go with your gut.

And what about when you’re really really tired? Just go to bed. Studies show the old saw is true: “sleeping on it” works.

(To learn the #1 decision-making secret of astronauts, samurai, Navy SEALs and psychopaths, click here.)

Okay, you’ve defined the problem, got the right info and you’re not ignoring your feelings. What’s a key tool most people ignore that will let you know you should trust your decisions?

Know your strengths

Modern science is awesome but here you may wanna take a lesson from the ancient Greeks: “Know Thyself.”

There are few things that can truly guide powerful decisions more than knowledge of who you really are and what you’re good at. And the research agrees.

Definitely trust your gut on a subject — if it’s something you’re an expert at:

A new study from researchers at Rice University, George Mason University and Boston College suggests you should trust your gut — but only if you’re an expert… Across both studies, participants who possessed expertise within the task domain performed on average just as well intuitively as analytically. In addition, experts significantly outperformed novices when making their decisions intuitively but not when making their decisions analytically.

I know what some of you are thinking: But I’m not sure what my strengths are.

No sweat. All you need is a pen, paper and time. Keep a “decision diary.”

Peter Drucker, author of “The Effective Executive“, and one of the most influential thinkers on the subject of management, recommends monitoring what you do and noting what gets results over time:

“Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations… Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years, where your strengths lie — and this is the most important thing to know.”

Don’t trust your memory. Write it down. Make it a game. See where you score highly and not so highly.

Good at work decisions but bad when it comes to your personal life? Now you’ll know when you can trust your gut and when you may need some help.

(To learn the 4 lifehacks from ancient philosophy that will make you happier, click here.)

All the ideas so far are great but there’s one critical thing that’s missing: when do you stop deciding? When is it time to pull the trigger?

Make a ‘good enough’ decision

Don’t sweat making the absolute 100% best decision. We all know being a perfectionist can be stressful — and neuroscience backs this up. Trying to be perfect overwhelms your brain and makes you feel out of control.

Via “The Upward Spiral“:

“Trying for the best, instead of good enough, brings too much emotional ventromedial prefrontal activity into the decision-making process. In contrast, recognizing that good enough is good enough activates more dorsolateral prefrontal areas, which helps you feel more in control …”

As Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz said in my interview with him: “Good enough is almost always good enough.”

Sound too easy? Too simplistic? Okay, let’s look at a real world example of how people at the highest levels make decisions.

James Waters was Deputy Director of Scheduling at The White House. (Word on the street is they make some pretty big decisions there.) What did James tell me?

“A good decision now is better than a perfect decision in two days”:

“Being able to make decisions when you know you have imperfect data is so critical. I was always taught that ‘A good decision now is better than a perfect decision in two days.’ Many people I know in business recoil at that statement. Many colleagues in graduate school had come from places where they were analysts at a company and their job was to analyze and analyze and analyze. They couldn’t believe somebody would say that you should actually encourage people to make a decision with imperfect information — but I firmly believe you should. I think that’s really important for leaders to incorporate. It’s something that the White House has to do all the time. It’s great to analyze things but at some stage you’re just spinning your wheels.:

So focus on “good enough” instead of overthinking the problem. And if you do, you get an extra bonus: research shows your decisions are more likely to be ethical ones.

(To learn the four rituals that neuroscience says will make you happy, click here.)

Alright, we covered a lot. Let’s round everything up — and learn the one simple question that can help you make solid decisions when you’re crunched for time …

To sum up

Here’s how to make good decisions:

You don’t need more info, you need the right info: Clarify the problem and get relevant data, not all the data.
Feelings are not the enemy: For simple choices, use raw brainpower. For complex choices, trust intuition.
If you’re an expert in the area, trust your gut: Not sure if you’re an expert? Keep a decision diary.
“Good enough is almost always good enough”: Trying to be perfect makes your brain miserable.

And if you forget everything above, what one thing should you remember?

In my interview with Duke professor Dan Ariely (author of “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions“) he said you’re more likely to make a good decision if you “take the outside perspective.” What’s that mean?

Just ask yourself, “What advice would I give to someone else in this situation?”:

“If I had to give advice across many aspects of life, I would ask people to take what’s called ‘the outside perspective.’ And the outside perspective is easily thought about: ‘What would you do if you made the recommendation for another person?’ And I find that often when we’re recommending something to another person, we don’t think about our current state and we don’t think about our current emotions. We actually think a bit more distantly from the decision and often make the better decision because of that.”

Yeah, it can really be that simple: thinking about how you would help others is often the best way to help yourself.

Businessinsider.com | June 27, 2016 | Eric Barker

Your #Career : Networking- This Is What You Do When You Want to Own The Room Within 5 Minutes…When Applying these Steps, it Can be Hard to Know How Well you Did. Don’t Succumb to Doubt. Believe in Yourself & What you Have put Forward

June 27, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Owning a room is a quintessential skill when navigating both the professional and social worlds. It’s more than looking someone in the eye, having a firm handshake and bringing enough business cards.

These are the cornerstones of creating a rapport with others, but there’s so much more to presenting the best version of yourself. When you’re on your game, you’ll project charisma, command attention, and inspire trust with your confidence, openness and versatility. It’s about doing your homework, asserting leadership and connecting in a way that will leave an impression long after you’ve left.

Sound like you? If not, don’t worry. These things can be learned. Follow these nine easy tips, and you’ll be prepared to walk into that room as if it always belonged to you.

1. Be prepared.
You’ve heard it over and over, because it’s true — knowledge is power. Who are you meeting, and what is important to them? What are their interests, and what do you have to offer that might catch their attention? Giving yourself the time to formulate a strategy that’s targeted to your audience can make all the difference. To quote another aphorism, “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

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2. Walk in with a firm (yet flexible) goal.

Know why you’re there and what you want. Bruce Lee once said, “a goal is not always meant to be reached; it often serves simply as something to aim at.” Think of your goal as a direction, rather than a destination, and you’ll have a much easier time finding your way. And on the way, to take another suggestion from Lee, learn to be like water. There are no perfect fits, but combining adaptability with a clear sense of your goals will allow you to find common ground. Still, water doesn’t mix with everything. In your search for common ground, know when you’ve hit a dead end. If your goals simply can’t align with who you’re talking to, don’t waste your time — or theirs. Walk with purpose.

3. Dress the part and enter strong.
British author Thomas Fuller said, “good clothes open all doors.” Dress to impress for a good first impression when you stride through that door. If you’re having trouble determining the dress code, go back to step one. Your research should provide you with a sense of what your audience will expect when they first see you. Then make sure that your ensemble is clean and pressed. This is the first impression you’ll be making, and you want to begin the race with a head start. That said, don’t be afraid to let a little personality show. Dressing professionally is all well and good, but think of it as a nice picture frame presenting you.

4. Put the phone down.
According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of people check their phone for messages or alerts, even without the prompt of a ring or vibration. Dividing your attention when it should be focused on the people in front of you is a major no-no. Unless you’re using it in your presentation, keep your phone in your pocket. You are there for the people you’re meeting, and if you’re checking your phone, it communicates that you’re not interested in them. Do yourself a favor, and turn the phone off. Your messages can wait. The people in front of you shouldn’t have to.

5. Smile and gesture.
If dressing the part is the cake, a good smile is the icing. Researchers at Harvard University and the University of California concluded that smiling is contagious. Your smile really can light up a room! Be the pleasant, friendly person they want to talk to. Make them want to engage. And gesticulate, using body language to draw others in. This magnifies your presence and joy, making you a bright personality that they won’t want to look away from.

6. Pay attention to what they’re saying, and what they’re not saying.
Like checking your rear view mirror, it’s vital to take stock of what isn’t in front of you in a conversation. What are they avoiding talking about? How are they holding themselves? Are they leaning forward? Are they drawing back or folding their arms and legs? Take these factors into account when you respond. And remember that this advice goes double for you. Like your expression and your gestures, your body language will communicate wordlessly with your audience.

7. Don’t commit until you’re convinced.
Research published by the Journal of Consumer Research found that rejecting projects that conflict with your core wants and beliefs leads to more productivity. Don’t say yes unless you can say it with confidence, because the people you bring into your life, and the projects that occupy your time, should be worthwhile. Networking and working for their own sake won’t make you look impressive. In fact, you might end up looking desperate. Don’t overcommit, and don’t accept just anything. Let them want to impress you.

8. Avoid complaining and criticizing.
“People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining,” says Stephen Hawking. Instead of looking for problems, find out what other people want and try to be their solution. Be that answer everyone has been looking for. Even if you don’t have a complete solution, look for ways to move toward one, as opposed to bashing the opposition. Presenting an understanding, positive viewpoint is better than being antagonistic.

9. Don’t just think it — know it.
I can’t stress it enough — be prepared. It is essential to be able to talk the talk and walk the walk. Come off as an expert, speaking confidently and fluently about what your goals are, what you know about them and why you’re there. And don’t fake it! The point isn’t to pretend you know what you mean, but to effectively translate that you do know your stuff, and you’re not afraid to step up.

When applying these steps, it can be hard to know how well you did. Don’t succumb to doubt. Believe in yourself and what you have put forward. Follow this advice, and you won’t need a receipt to prove you owned the room. The messages waiting when you turn your phone back on will be enough.

entrepreneur.com | June 2016 | Jennifer Cohen

Your #Career : 10 Middle Class Jobs That Will Be Gone Soon…Unemployment May have Returned to Pre-Recession Levels, But the Middle Class Jobs Americans Used to Rely On to Get by are Nowhere to Be Found.

June 23, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

A significant number of new jobs added since the 2008 economic meltdown are in low-paying industries like food service and home health care, a recent Wall Street Journal analysis found. At the same time, many traditional middle-class jobs, like those in construction and manufacturing, have vanished

The news isn’t all bad. The U.S. economy has also added well-paying jobs in information services, management and consulting, and software development, the WSJ’s research found. But there’s no doubt that many of the jobs that once provided a secure middle-class income to millions of Americans no longer exist. Some – especially government jobs – have vanished due to budget cuts, while others have been shifted offshore or eliminated when technology made workers obsolete. And the worst isn’t over yet, at least in some industries.

Though the job market is expected to grow by about 7% between 2014 and 2024, according to data from theBureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the growth won’t be shared equally across all industries. While certain fields, such as nursing and accounting, are looking at double-digit job growth, others are expected to shrink dramatically. The endangered jobs include many that pay enough to push someone into the middle class. (A family of four needed a household income of at least $48,000 to qualify as middle income in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center.)

Here are 10 middle-class jobs that are quickly disappearing.

10. Bank tellers

Expected employment decline: 8%

When was the last time you waited in line to talk to a teller at your bank? ATMs and online banking have eliminated many of the functions bank tellers used to perform. While there will still be an estimated 480,500 people working as tellers in 2024, it’s significantly fewer than the 520,500 people currently working in this field.

Declining employment is another blow to bank tellers, whose jobs no longer offer a reliable middle-class income. About 30% of tellers rely on public assistance to supplement their wages, a 2014 study found, and some have called them the “fast food workers of Wall Street.”

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9. Home economics teachers

Expected employment decline: 12%

As recently as 2002, about 5.5 million high school students were enrolled in a home economics course (or “family and consumer science,” as it’s now officially known). By 2012, that number had fallen to just 3.5 million. The number of jobs for people willing to teach young people about cooking, budgeting, and other life skills is expected to continue to shrink. Today, there are 4,300 home economics teachers. By 2024, there will be 3,800.

8. Travel agents

Expected employment decline: 12%

Now that you can book a flight, hotel, and activities online in a matter of minutes, fewer Americans feel the need to call a travel agent when planning a vacation. The industry has already shrunk considerably, from 34,000 retail travel locations in the 1990s to 13,000 by 2013, according to CNN, and more contraction is on the horizon. The number of travel agents is expected to drop to 65,400 in 2024, down from 74,100 in 2014. Travel agents who work with luxury and corporate travelers or who specialize in booking specialty trips will likely still have a niche, though.

7. Printing workers

Expected employment decline: 14%

As people shun paper in favor of digital options, jobs in the printing industry have declined. In Illinois alone, a center of the printing industry, the number of jobs fell by 45% between 2001 and 2013, according to the Chicago Tribune. Jobs in the printing industry will continue to vanish, falling by 14% by 2024. Prepress technicians will be especially hard hit, with the number of jobs in this field falling from 36,500 to 27,500, a drop of 25%.

6. Parking enforcement workers

Expected employment decline: 21%

Parking enforcement workers earn an average salary of $36,530 for patrolling city streets and issuing tickets to illegally parked cars. In 2014, about 9,400 people worked in parking enforcement. By 2024, their ranks will shrink by 2,000, to 7,400. In times of tight budgets, many cities, like Chicago and San Francisco have laid off parking workers and shifted their responsibilities onto other workers.

5. Manufacturing jobs

Expected employment decline: About 20-25%, depending on specific job

Manufacturing jobs once provided a path to the middle class for many American workers. But these jobs are disappearing. The BLS provides data for a variety of different manufacturing and factory jobs, and the outlook is bleak for nearly all of them. The number of forging machine setters, operators, and tenders will shrink by 21% by 2024. Cutting machine jobs will decline by about 21% as well. Jobs for model makers and pattern makers will fall by 22%.

Not all manufacturing jobs are vanishing, though. In the next decade, companies will need to hire more people for highly skilled manufacturing jobs, including those who can operate and program computer-controlled machines. The number of jobs in this area will grow by 18%, to 204,700.

4. Watch repairers

Cell phones have replaced watches for many people, which means less demand for watch repair. Jobs in this highly specialized industry are already scarce – there are just 2,700 watch repairers in the U.S., according to the BLS. By 2024, there will be only 2,000, a drop of 26%. Trained horologists will still be needed to fix expensivedesigner watches, so this field, while shrinking, isn’t quite dead yet

3. Postal service workers

Expected employment decline: 28%

Landing a job for the U.S. Postal Service was once a route to the middle class for many Americans, but no more. The number of people working as letter sorters, mail sorters, and clerks has plummeted from 797,795 in 1999 to 491,863 in 2015. Employment at the USPS is expect to drop another 28% by 2024, to a little less than 350,000, about the number of employees the postal service had in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

2. Telephone and switchboard operators

Expected employment decline: 42%

Pre-Google and Siri, locating a telephone number often meant dialing 0 or 411. Now, telephone operators, who also help disabled callers and assist with emergency calls when you can’t reach 911, are a dying breed. In 2014, there were about 13,100 telephone operators, but by 2025, there will only be about 7,500, a drop of 42%.

Switchboard operators, who help relay calls in offices, hospitals, and other settings, are also disappearing. About 37,000 jobs in this field will vanish by 2024, a drop of 33%. The average switchboard operator makes $26,440 per year.

1. Locomotive firers

Expected employment decline: 70%

Locomotive firers – sometimes called assistant engineers — monitor equipment, watch for train signals, and look out for obstacles on the tracks. Back when freight trains ran with five-person crews, the job was more common, but as railroad companies have scaled back to two- or three-person crews, locomotive firer jobs have all but disappeared. In 2014, only 1,700 people were still working as locomotive firers, and their numbers are expected to fall to 500 by 2024.

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CheatSheet.com | June 23, 2016 | Megan Elliot

#Leadership : LinkedIn’s HR Chief says the Best Managers Exhibit these 7 Behaviors… The Best Managers Exhibit All of the Behaviors they Demand of their Employees.

June 22, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Microsoft may have recently announced that it is acquiring the professional social network LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, but LinkedIn will continue operating independently.

Its management culture has been shaped by its founder and chairman Reid Hoffman, its CEO Jeff Weiner, and its head of HR, SVP of Global Talent Organization Pat Wadors.

Wadors spoke with Business Insider earlier this year, and she told us that there is a set of criteria that every manager at LinkedIn is judged on. They apply to any leader at any organization.

These are the behaviors the best managers at LinkedIn exhibit.

1. They support their employees’ professional development

In his 2014 book “The Alliance,” cowritten with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, Hoffman rethinks the relationship between managers and employees, explaining how employers can attract and retain the best employees through the formation of alliances where everyone wins.

Key to this approach is managers recognizing that the days of lifetime employment are long over, and that their employees won’t stay with them forever. At LinkedIn, Wadors said, the best managers push their employees to constantly grow and develop with new challenges and learning opportunities.

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2. They continually review performance

Rather than waiting for the annual review to reveal insights into an employee’s performance, managers constantly keep a dialogue open with their team members.

“Reviews should not come with any surprises,” Wadors said. “They should be actually quite boring.”

3. They clearly set expectations

The best managers ensure that their employees know what is expected of them, and communicate them through discussions rather than a list of demands.

4. They foster an entrepreneur’s mentality

The best LinkedIn managers empower employees, telling them that they should always be thinking of new and better ways of doing things.

5. They encourage measured risk-taking

Wadors said that all employees should be able to say, “I have the autonomy to use my own judgment in getting the job done, within a framework. I’m encouraged to take intelligent risks for the better of LinkedIn and learn from my mistakes.”

LinkedIn’s culture incorporates the Silicon Valley ethos of not being afraid of failure, in the sense that if an experiment fails, it should be evaluated for lessons that can be immediately acted on, without stopping to mourn the loss.

6. They explain the company’s direction

The best LinkedIn managers are transparent, communicating the direction of the company to their team and explaining how they fit into its overall mission.

7. They walk the talk

And finally, the best managers exhibit all of the behaviors they demand of their employees.

Wadors said that employees have the best possible role model with their CEO Jeff Weiner, who is a strong and supportive presence within LinkedIn.

6. They explain the company’s direction

The best LinkedIn managers are transparent, communicating the direction of the company to their team and explaining how they fit into its overall mission.

7. They walk the talk

And finally, the best managers exhibit all of the behaviors they demand of their employees.

Wadors said that employees have the best possible role model with their CEO Jeff Weiner, who is a strong and supportive presence within LinkedIn.

Businessinsider.com | June 18, 2016 |

Richard Feloni

#Leadership : 5 Signs You’re Much Smarter Than Average…If a Lot of These Items Do Apply to You, you Just Might be Smarter Than the Average Bear.

June 22, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Intelligence, or IQ, isn’t what you know, but rather the pace at which you acquire new information. Longitudinal studies have shown that IQ is fixed at an early age, so you’re stuck with what you’ve got.

While IQ is far from being the only thing that determines success in life — research shows that it isn’t even the most important factor — a high IQ still isn’t a bad thing to have. In fact, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t mind having one.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” — Albert Einstein

Most of us move through life never knowing exactly how smart we are. IQ is a difficult thing to measure, and unless you’re willing to fork over several hundred dollars to a trained professional, you’ll never know for certain what your IQ is.

New research provides some interesting clues linking early life experiences to, among other things, high intelligence. If any of the following apply to you, you just might have a high IQ.

1. You’re anxious. It’s hard to think of anxiety as a good thing, but evidence suggests that it might not be all bad. Psychiatrist Jeremy Coplan studied patients with anxiety disorders and found that the people with the worst symptoms had higher IQ scores than those with milder symptoms. Other studies have found higher verbal IQ scores in people with higher levels of anxiety. And then there was a more complex experiment conducted at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.

Researchers asked participants to evaluate artwork presented by a software program and then triggered a fake computer virus, making it look as if it was the result of something that the participant did. They then sent the participants on an urgent mission to get tech support, only to throw yet another series of obstacles in their way. They found that the most anxious participants were also the most focused and effective at executing tasks. The next time somebody tells you to stop worrying so much, just tell them it’s your oversized intellect getting in the way.

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2. You were an early reader. A British study of 2,000 pairs of identical twins found that, despite their identical genes, the children who started reading earlier had higher IQ scores (both verbal and nonverbal) than their siblings. On the surface, this one seems easy enough to explain away: the kids who learned to read early did so because they were smarter. But that wasn’t the case. The researchers concluded that learning to read early actually had a developmental impact — it made the kids smarter. So, if you were an early reader, it might not be because you’re smart. It may be that you’re smart because you were an early reader.

3. You’re left-handed. It turns out that all of those teachers who tried to force lefties to write with their right hands may have had it backward. While there is a small and, as of yet, unexplained correlation between being left-handed and being a criminal, there are some intellectual benefits to being a southpaw. One large study demonstrated that left-handedness is associated with divergent thinking, all the more so in males. This unique ability to combine two unrelated objects in a meaningful way is a sign of intelligence.

4. You took music lessons as a kid. There are a number of studies demonstrating that musical training enhances verbal intelligence and executive function, a skill that’s critical to focus and self-control. In a study conducted by psychologist Sylvain Moreno, 48 children between the ages of four and six participated in a computerized training program that was led by a teacher. For one hour per day, five days a week for four weeks, half the students completed a musical program and the other half completed a visual arts program. At the end of the experiment, 90% of the children who received the musical training showed improvements in verbal IQ. So, if you took music lessons when you were a kid, that’s a good sign.

5. You’re funny. Class clowns rejoice! Research shows a strong connection between being funny and having high scores in both verbal intelligence and abstract reasoning. It appears that your witty banter is the product of a sharp mind. Now, you just need to come up with a joke about that.

Bringing It All Together

This list is far from exhaustive, so if none of the items above apply to you, it doesn’t exclude you from having a high IQ. But if a lot of these items do apply to you, you just might be smarter than the average bear.

Entrepreneur.com | June 2016 | Travis Bradberry