Technology, rapid transmission of message, ideas, and … directives from the boss—all create a certain chaotic mentality. What first? Why did that meeting not go well? How will we get to our strategic goals this year? These are a few of the questions that run alongside a manager’s day—in addition to… what’s for dinner, why haven’t I gone to the gym this week? And what was that weird noise in the brakes as I screeched to a halt in the parking lot this morning?
Intelligence and ambition drive many people into management roles, jobs with diverse responsibilities and positions that are rewarding, through achievement and compensation. Intelligence and ambition also drives many people right into the middle of life’s demands of time, responsiveness—and management of stress.
Although deadlines, cranky customers, and managing funding for an agency will not change, managing responses to chaos, stress and the positive rewards of responsibility can happen.
The staff of Path Forward are firm believers in a minimal time commitment—but commitment—to purposeful assessment of EQ or emotional intelligence behaviors with steady, incremental changes in those behaviors. What does that mean? It means that when you KNOW that your monthly staff meeting makes you cringe, even when planning it, that you notice that you can handle customer complaints like no other in your firm, that you’re not so sure that you have the confidence to take on a project you know the boss is going to hand to you—these are not indicators of your intelligence or ability, this is all about your emotional intelligence.
Operational goals that happen—this occurs when the mission of the organization is truly the day to day activity—and everybody knows certain work has to get done to provide the service, develop the program, raise the funds.
Strategic goals are VERY different—and separate organizations who barely make their goals with a moderate sense of intellectual framework—to organizations who are stars in their industry. These organizations not only make their operational goals seem to be part of the regular fabric of the work, staff and managers are keenly aware of what is most important to their constituency, their customers, their stakeholders—and progress is made every year to get to those goals. As strategic goals are met, an organization is able to see ahead beyond even a current strategic year – achievement begets vision and looking around at the environment.
Group training around commonly interesting topics can be of great benefit—to the organization—in the short term most likely.
Small group training with topics CREATED by the input of the participants is powerful—attendees show up to listen to their idea for development. And those participants also appreciate the follow-up by Path Forward staff around their goals that are aligned with those topics. Take the topic of delegation for example – that behavior can be a persistent problem for a manager—especially if structure around accountability and realistic goal setting and deadlines aren’t part of the plan. If a manager wants to hear about this topic, this goes beyond yawning after lunch, to LISTENING and recording the actions to take to be successful.
Working as an executive or high level leader in an organization can certainly mean taking multi-tasking to a level of—well, inefficiency. First of all, multi-tasking doesn’t work—and secondly—it doesn’t work.
Objective analysis of EQ and Strengths—blended to build Path Forward Goals with a check-in monthly—builds personal accountability and reduces stress.
