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#Leadership : 11 Signs You Have The Grit You Need To Succeed…There are a Ton of Qualities that Can Help you Succeed, & the More Carefully a Quality has Been Studied, the More you Know it’s Worth your Time & Energy.

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There are a ton of qualities that can help you succeed, and the more carefully a quality has been studied, the more you know it’s worth your time and energy.

Free- Focus on Work

Angela Lee Duckworth was teaching seventh grade when she noticed that the material wasn’t too advanced for any of her students. They all had the ability to grasp the material if they put in the time and effort. Her highest performing students weren’t those who had the most natural talent; they were the students who had that extra something that motivated them to work harder than everyone else.

Grit is as rare as it is important. The good news is any of us can get grittier with a little extra focus and effort.

Angela grew fascinated by this “extra something” in her students and, since she had a fair amount of it herself, she quit her teaching job so that she could study the concept while obtaining a graduate degree in psychology at UPenn.

Her study, which is ongoing, has already yielded some interesting findings. She’s analyzed a bevy of people to whom success is important: students, military personnel, salespeople, and spelling bee contestants, to name a few. Over time, she has come to the conclusion that the majority of successful people all share one critical thing—grit.

Grit is that “extra something” that separates the most successful people from the rest. It’s the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel in order to stick with our dreams until they become a reality.

Developing grit is all about habitually doing the things that no one else is willing to do. There are quite a few signs that you have grit, and if you aren’t doing the following on a regular basis, you should be.

1. You have to make mistakes, look like an idiot, and try again, without even flinching. In a recent study at the College of William and Mary, they interviewed over 800 entrepreneurs and found that the most successful among them tend to have two critical things in common: They’re terrible at imagining failure and they tend not to care what other people think of them. In other words, the most successful entrepreneurs put no time or energy into stressing about their failures as they see failure as a small and necessary step in the process of reaching their goals.

 

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2. You have to fight when you already feel defeated. A reporter once asked Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he does every day. He responded, “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel pain, cause that’s when it really matters.” The same applies to success in the workplace. You always have two choices when things begin to get tough: you can either overcome an obstacle and grow in the process or let it beat you. Humans are creatures of habit. If you quit when things get tough, it gets that much easier to quit the next time. On the other hand, if you force yourself to push through it, the grit begins to grow in you.

3. You have to make the calls you’re afraid to make. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do because we know they’re for the best in the long-run: fire someone, cold call a stranger, pull an all-nighter to get the company server back up, or scrap a project and start over. It’s easy to let the looming challenge paralyze you, but the most successful people know that in these moments, the best thing they can do is to get started right away. Every moment spent dreading the task subtracts time and energy from actually getting it done. People that learn to habitually make the tough calls stand out like flamingos in a flock of seagulls.

4. You have to keep your emotions in check.Negative emotions will challenge your grit every step of the way. While it’s impossible not to feel your emotions, it’s completely under your power to manage them effectively and to keep yourself in a position of control. When you let your emotions overtake your ability to think clearly, it’s easy to lose your resolve. A bad mood can make you lash out or stray from your chosen direction just as easily as a good mood can make you overconfident and impulsive.

5. You have to trust your gut. There’s a fine line between trusting your gut and being impulsive. Trusting your gut is a matter of looking at decisions from every possible angle, and when the facts don’t present a clear alternative, you believe in your ability to choose; you go with what looks and feels right.

6. You have to give more than you get in return.There’s a famous Stanford experiment where an administrator leaves a child in a room with a marshmallow for 15 minutes, telling the child that she’s welcome to eat the marshmallow, but if she can wait until the experimenter gets back without eating it, she will get a second marshmallow. The children that were able to wait until the experimenter returned experienced better outcomes in life, including higher SAT scores, greater career success, and even lower body mass indexes. The point being that delay of gratification and patience are essential to success. People with grit know that real results only materialize when you put in the time and forego instant gratification.

7. You have to lead when no one else follows. It’s easy to set a direction and believe in yourself when you have support, but the true test of grit is how well you maintain your resolve when nobody else believes in what you’re doing. People with grit believe in themselves no matter what and they stay the course until they win people over to their way of thinking.

8. You have to meet deadlines that are unreasonable and deliver results that exceed expectations. Successful people find a way to say yes and still honor their existing commitments. They know the best way to stand out from everyone else is to outwork them. For this reason, they have a tendency to over deliver, even when they over promise.

9. You have to focus on the details even when it makes your mind numb. Nothing tests your grit like mind-numbing details, especially when you’re tired. The more people with grit are challenged, the more they dig in and welcome that challenge, and numbers and details are no exception to this.

10. You have to be kind to people who have been rude to you. When people treat you poorly, it’s tempting to stoop to their level and return the favor. People with grit don’t allow others to walk all over them, but that doesn’t mean they’re rude to them, either. Instead, they treat rude and cruel people with the same kindness they extend to anyone else, because they won’t allow another person’s negativity to bring them down.

11. You have to be accountable for your actions, no matter what. People are far more likely to remember how you dealt with a problem than they are how you created it in the first place. By holding yourself accountable, even when making excuses is an option, you show that you care about results more than your image or ego.

Bringing It All Together

Grit is as rare as it is important. The good news is any of us can get grittier with a little extra focus and effort.

Is grit really that important? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

Travis co-wrote the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and co-founded TalentSmart, the world’s #1 provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, serving 75% of Fortune 500 Companies.

Forbes.com | January 5, 2015 | Travis Bradberry

#Leadership : How To Answer Nasty, Scathing Emails…This Type of Email is Known in Cyberspace as “Flaming,” & All such Messages have a Single Thing in Common—A Complete & Utter Lack of Emotional Intelligence (EQ).

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We’ve All Been on the Receiving End of a Scathing Email, as well as its mysterious, vaguely insulting cousins. You know the messages I’m referring to. They don’t need exclamation points or all caps to teem with anger and drip with sarcasm.

red-button

Dressing someone down via email is tempting because it’s easy—you have plenty of time to dream up daggers that strike straight to the heart, and you lack the inhibition that’s present when the recipient is staring you in the face.

This type of email is known in cyberspace as “flaming,” and all such messages have a single thing in common—a complete and utter lack of emotional intelligence (EQ).

A recent survey (sponsored by communications device manufacturerPlantronics ) found that 83% of today’s workforce considers email to be more critical to their success than any other form of communication.

Email has been around long enough that you’d think that we’d all be pros at using it to communicate effectively. But we’re human and—if you think about it—we haven’t mastered face-to-face communication either.

The bottom line is that we could all use a little help. The five strategies that follow are proven methods for keeping your emotions within reason, so that you don’t hit “send” while your emails, tweets, comments, and virtual chime-ins are still flaming.

1. Follow Honest Abe’s First Rule Of Netiquette

I know what you’re thinking: How could someone who died more than a century before the internet existed teach us about email etiquette?

Well, in Lincoln’s younger years, he had a bad habit of applying his legendary wit when writing insulting letters to, and about, his political rivals. But after one particularly scathing letter led a rival to challenge Lincoln to a duel, Lincoln learned a valuable lesson—words impact the receiver in ways that the sender can’t completely fathom.

By the time he died, Lincoln had amassed stacks of flaming letters that verbally shredded his rivals and subordinates for their bone-headed mistakes. However, Lincoln never sent them. He vented his frustration on paper, and then stuffed that sheet away in a drawer. The following day, the full intensity of his emotions having subsided, Lincoln wrote and sent a much more congenial and conciliatory letter.

We can all benefit from learning to do the same with email. Your emotions are a valid representation of how you feel—no matter how intense— but that doesn’t mean that acting on them in the moment serves you well. Go ahead and vent—tap out your anger and frustration on the keyboard. Save the draft and come back to it later when you’ve cooled down. By then you’ll be rational enough to edit the message and pare down the parts that burn, or—even better—rewrite the kind of message that you want to be remembered by.

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2. Know The Limits Of Virtual Humor

Some people show their displeasure with words typed in ALL CAPS and a barrage of exclamation points. Others, however, express dissatisfaction more subtly with sarcasm and satire. The latter is no less of a breakdown in the core EQ skill of self-management, and it can be even more dangerous because it’s harder to detect when you’re doing it. The sender can always convince him or herself that the spite was just a little joke.

While a little good-natured ribbing can sometimes help lighten face-to-face interaction—interaction with an arsenal of facial expressions and voice inflections to help you to convey the right tone—it’s almost never a good idea to have a laugh at someone else’s expense online.

Online your message can too easily be misinterpreted without your body language to help to explain it, and you won’t be there to soften the blow when your joke doesn’t go over as intended. In the virtual world, it’s best to err on the side of friendliness and professionalism. For those times when you absolutely cannot resist using humor, just make sure that you are the butt of the joke.

 

3. Remember That People Online Are Still People

While entranced by the warm glow of a computer monitor, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that a living, breathing human being will end up reading your message. Psychologist John Suler of Rider University has found that people who are communicating online experience a “disinhibition effect.” Without the real-time feedback between sender and receiver that takes place in face-to-face and telecommunication, we simply don’t worry as much about offending people online.

We don’t have to experience the discomfort of watching someone else grow confused, despondent, or angry because of something that we said. When these natural consequences are delayed, we tend to spill onto the screen whatever happens to be on our mind.

Averting such messages requires you to be intentional in applying your social awareness skills. Without being able to physically see the other person’s body language or hear the tone of his/her voice, you must picture the recipient in your mind and imagine what (s)he might feel when reading your message as it’s been written.

In fact, the next time you receive a curt or outright rude email, put the brakes on before firing back a retort. Taking the time to imagine the sender and considering where he/she is coming from is often enough to extinguish the flames before they get out of control.

Could the sender have misinterpreted a previous message that you sent to him/her? Could (s)he just be having a bad day? Is (s)he under a lot of pressure? Even when the other party is in the wrong, spending a moment on the other side of the monitor will give you the perspective that you need to avoid further escalating the situation.

 

4. Know How The Internet Feels 😉 🙁 😮

Emoticons have a mixed reputation in the business world. Some people and even organizations believe that smiley faces, winks and other symbols of digital emotion are unprofessional, undignified, and have no place outside of a high school hallway.

When used properly, however, a Dutch research team has shown that emoticons can effectively enhance the desired tone of a message. The team led by Daantje Derks at the Open University of the Netherlands concluded that “to a large extent, emoticons serve the same functions as actual nonverbal behavior.” Considering that nonverbal behavior accounts for between 70 and 90% of a message when communicating face to face, it’s time to ditch the stigma attached to emoticons in the business setting.

For those leery of dropping a smiley face into your next email, I’m not suggesting that you smile, wink, and frown your way through every email you write. Just don’t be afraid to peck out a quick 🙂 the next time you want to be certain that the recipient is aware of your tongue planted firmly in cheek.

 

5. Know When Online Chats Need To Become Offline Discussions

Managing online relationships will always be a somewhat difficult task for people built to communicate in person. However, managing critical email conversations is even more difficult for those programmed to communicate via email. Significant, lengthy, and heated email exchanges are almost always better taken offline and finished in person.

With so much communication via email these days, it can be hard to pull the trigger and initiate a face-to-face conversation when you sense that an online interaction is becoming too heated or simply too difficult to do well online. Online technologies have become enormously useful for increasing the speed and efficiency of communication, but they have a long way to go before they become the primary source for creating and maintaining quality human relationships.

Bringing It All Together
Email is a challenging way to communicate strong emotions, and we could all use a little help.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

 

Forbes.com | June 23, 2015 | Travis Bradberry

Leadership: How Do You Create a Culture of Service?… We Strongly Encourage Employees to Volunteer in Their Communities

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In December, Points of Light and Bloomberg LPreleased the 2014 Civic 50—a list of the most community-minded companies in the country. The Civic 50 sets the standard for corporate citizenship, honoring companies that are effectively giving their time, talent and resources to improve lives in the communities where they do business.

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This is part two of a five-part series that examines the trends and highlights released in Points of Light’s report, The Civic 50: A Roadmap for Corporate Community Engagement. In this piece, I worked with Yvonne Siu Turner of Points of Light to find out from Margot Copeland, Chair and CEO of KeyBank Foundation, what inspires her to lead the company’s corporate citizenship efforts, and how KeyBank has created a culture of service.

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Q: A culture of service depends on policies, incentives and systems to support and sustain corporate community engagement efforts. Tell us about KeyBank’s policies and incentives.

A: Our culture of community engagement is longstanding. KeyBank is more than 160 years old and KeyBank Foundation is 45 years old this year. Throughout the decades, we’ve implemented a number of policies that we regard today as simply part of our culture. For example, we strongly encourage employees to volunteer in their communities. On Neighbors Make the Difference Day, our annual day of volunteerism supported by paid time off, our goal is to have half of our 14,000 employees to volunteer across the country, from Alaska to Maine. We achieved this last year, with 50 percent of our workforce participating in 900 projects. Super Refund Saturday is another important day of service for us, where we provide free tax preparation for hardworking local residents trying to make ends meet.

Apart from these days of service, we encourage employees to continue volunteering throughout the year. We currently have more than 600 volunteers who teach our free financial education curriculum to the public, helping people better understand saving, spending, We encourage employees to volunteer on nonprofit boards and take an active role in matching employees with interested nonprofits, in partnership with an organization called Business Volunteers Unlimited: Center for Nonprofit Excellence. Board placement is led at the corporate level by the KeyBank Foundation and supported at the market level by Key’s market executives.

I myself am honored to serve as a trustee of Kent State University, the Thomas White Foundation, Kenneth Scott Foundation, University Hospitals Health System and the Delta Foundation in Washington, DC. To show support of employees’ board service, we provide annual $500 Community Leadership Grants to each organization (up to four per employee) that includes one of our employees on its board.

Our matching gift program allows an employee to make a gift, use the receipt as proof and then request a matching amount from KeyBank, which is sent directly to the organization. Through this Matching Gift Program, employees have a say in how and where we give. In 2014, we contributed nearly $4 million through employee gifts, matching corporate contributions and United Way fundraising.

Q: Peter Drucker once said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” How important are policies and incentives to creating a culture of service at KeyBank?

A: Business strategies grounded in solid, long-standing values are always superior to strategies that are merely opportunistic or that view customers as mere “transactions.” Setting the tone at the top is extremely important. From the CEO down, we expect and foster a culture of service, as well as a commitment to diversity and inclusion, among our 14,000 employees. The “shadow of the leader” is a very real concept at Key, and our leaders are heavily involved in their communities. We purposefully hire, promote and retain those who are invested in building thriving communities, and select questions we ask potential leaders during interviews revolve around the importance of community service. At any given time, there are dozens of service and volunteer initiatives throughout the bank.

We intentionally established a structure that supports our values when we launched a Corporate Responsibility department in 2012. Created by our CEO Beth Mooney and led by Executive Vice President Bruce Murphy, the department includes the bank’s philanthropy, volunteerism, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and Community Reinvestment Act initiatives.

The Corporate Responsibility department influences all segments of the bank. It provides both expert leadership and direct guidance on how best to invest in our people and the planet and how we can achieve profits responsibly. The department aligns the conduct of the entire bank in a way that produces an industry standard for responsible banking. In the end, we see a competitive advantage in the marketplace because we are a responsible business partner.
Q: How did you choose which policies and incentives were the right fit for KeyBank?

A: All of our policies support our purpose of “helping our clients and communities thrive.” Let me give you an example of a recent policy that directly supports our value of diversity: Valuing diversity and fostering an environment of inclusion are among Key’s highest strategic priorities. We believe that diverse individuals bring with them unique backgrounds, experiences and ideas, which make KeyBank stronger. The lenses of diversity and inclusion are considered when we recruit talented employees, invest in our communities, engage in grant-making, volunteer, develop vendor partnerships and reach out to customers.

Two years ago, the Foundation carefully looked at specific practices of certain nonprofits that directly opposed Key’s values and policies related to inclusion. In June 2013, the KeyBank Foundation Board adopted a non-discrimination policy, stating that, “KeyBank Foundation shall not make any grants, whether through its employee matching gift program or otherwise, to charitable organizations that discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender, gender identity, disability, or sexual orientation.” This decision demonstrates our continuing corporate commitment to advancing the concept of inclusion.

Q: Did you struggle with any policy or incentive at first?

A: Recently, we have been challenged with aggregating and quantifying the good work our 14,000 employees are doing. We know we are helping clients and communities thrive, and celebrating this is important to us, but it has been difficult to track. That’s why, at the end of last year, we decided to use new software that will allow our employees to share with us their good works and allow us to reward their volunteerism. We’re proud of our employees, and we want them to know just how much they are valued. We look forward to the full deployment of this system in 2015 and to sharing how the incentive program has been received.

Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in corporate citizenship and what inspires you in the day-to-day of your job?

A: To pinpoint an event, day, or time is difficult, so I must attribute my life approach to my upbringing. Throughout my entire career, I have been inspired to volunteerism and community service. It’s a part of the very way I live and operate. You could ask others who know me and they would say I’m a relationship person – people are extremely important to me. I know that building connections are the way to create change.

Long before I came to Key, I had a track record in community affairs and was a champion of civic vitality, which is part of the reason I was offered the job. To me, affecting change is about going directly to where the need is greatest and serving there. When you care deeply and are deeply connected, you can put the right policies and people in place with greater speed and efficiency. To see transformation happen – in individual lives, as well as institutions – is exciting to me and constantly keeps me inspired.

Forbes.com | March 23, 2015 | Cause Integration