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Mark October 15 on your calendar: Seminar on managing the Gen Y sales force

I am pleased to be teaching this program with the talented and engaging Steve Parry. This class will be held from 8:30 to 10:30 AM, at 5181 Ward Road, Suite 202, in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. More information later. Today I wanted to give you advance notice so you can hold the date.

NeuroLeadership Summit 2009: Speakers and topics

Here's a list of speakers from the brochure (linked to below):

• Daniel Siegel – author of best seller ‘The Developing Mind’, co-director of UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
• Warren Bennis – one of the greats of leadership development
• Werner Erhard – founding father of transformational leadership
• Jonah Lehrer – neuroscientist and author of recent bestseller ‘How We Decide’
• Marco Iacoboni – leading mirror neuron researcher
• Naomi Eisenberger – leading social neuroscience researcher
• Yi-Yuan Tang – leading attention researcher
• Matthew Lieberman – founding father of social neuroscience
• Evian Gordon – leading brain researcher, building world’s largest database of brain research
• John Joseph – expert on teaching kids about the brain
• Dr Al Ringleb – Director, CIMBA Business School, Italy, co-founder, NeuroLeadership Institute
• David Rock – author and global leadership consultant, co-founder, NeuroLeadership Institute

And some of the topics to be covered:

• Mindfulness and the integrated brain
• How we make decisions
• The neuroscience of flow
• Making decisions in groups
• Emotional regulation and the brain
• The neuroscience of motivation
• How we know each other
• The social brain
• Learning from the masters of change
• Making leadership development stick

More in this NeuroLeadership Summit brochure [pdf].

Blog Glob: Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask

Excerpt:

One of my partners, Mats Lederhausen, recently shared with me a mentorship framework, first inspired by wellness guru, Deepak Chopra, that he's evolved and used over the years. The framework is an amazingly simple-yet-powerful set of five critical questions. ... These five questions, when asked in the order presented, form an effective diagnostic tool that can provide better guidance to mentees, employees, or generally anyone with whom you are playing the role of a counselor. Additionally, they can serve as a self-diagnosis of one's own capabilities and opportunities.

Here are the questions:

Click to read the rest of Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask (Harvard Business Publishing blog).

Active listening: Is it helpful? Insulting? What?

When people find out that I sometimes teach listening to lawyers and mediators, they often ask if that means active listening (where the listener paraphrases or reflects back what the other has said — "What I hear you saying is ...") and "I" messages (stating what one wants or feels rather than concentrating on the other’s faults — "I would like some quiet" rather than "You are too noisy"). I say an emphatic "no."

Although I learned these techniques in the various counseling courses I have taken, I have never used them (except in the classes) or taught them. I agree with Stephen Covey when he says in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that active listening or reflective listening is “mimicking what another person says. That kind of listening is skill-based, truncated from character and relationships, and often insults those ‘listened’ to in such a way.”

John Gottman and his colleagues had long recommended active listening to couples seeking counseling. They studied 130 couples for six years to find ways to predict marital success and failure. This study did not support the efficacy of active listening in resolving conflict or improving relationships. They write, “We need to convey how shocked and surprised we were by these results for the active listening model.” After learning that active listening occurred infrequently in the resolution of marital conflict, they studied tapes and transcripts of stable, happy couples.

They found that these couples “were not paraphrasing their spouses very often. [They] also found that

Interviews of Bruce Tulgan, author of NOT EVERYONE GETS A TROPHY: HOW TO MANAGE GEN Y

Excerpt from the first interview of Bruce Tulgan, a non-practicing lawyer:

...I've been conducting in-depth interviews with young people in the workplace steadily since 1993. That was shortly before the oldest Gen Yers—those on the cusp of Generation X—started arriving in the workplace as teenagers. Since then, we've followed Gen Yers as they have become the new young workforce and have been developing a comprehensive picture of who they are, how they became that way, and what motivates them. Of course, the identity of any generation is very complex and is always constantly changing. When I describe GenYers, I am making vast generalizations about tens of millions of people. Every individual has his or her own unique story. But there are broad trends in attitude and behavior that shift with each generation.

Generation Y is the generation of kids where every kid did get a trophy, just for participating. So many so-called 'experts' have jumped onto the bandwagon of this topic, but our research shows that most of these so-called 'experts' have got it all wrong. In many recent books and articles, many of these 'experts' argue that, since Gen Yers have always gotten a trophy just for showing up, maybe

Ready, aim ... fail: Another article on the downside of goal setting

With such an emphasis on goals in the US, cautionary words about setting and using them are always for me a welcomed balance. A Boston Globe article this morning takes a look at the pros and cons of setting goals. From "Ready, aim ... fail: Why setting goals can backfire":

[A] few management scholars are now looking deeper into the effects of goals, and finding that goals have a dangerous side. Individuals, governments, and companies like GM show ample ability to hurt themselves by setting and blindly following goals, even those that seem to make sense at the time. These skeptics draw on a broad array of large-scale failures - the design of the Ford Pinto, the Enron collapse, the rash lending practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - as evidence of the pernicious effects of goals. Outside the workplace, these thinkers point to the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing in grade schools, and psychological literature showing that goals and other incentives can constrict our thinking. Even the scarcity of cabs on rainy days, some argue, illustrates the ways that goals can blind people to their own best interests.

The argument is not that goal setting doesn't work - it does, just not always in the way we intend. "It can focus attention too much, or on the wrong things; it can lead to crazy behaviors to get people to

Blog Glob: Avoid Choking under Pressure

Excerpt:

The idea that too much self-monitoring hinders performance aligns with the well-established theory of how the brain learns to perform complex motor skills—anything from speaking to typing to cradling a lacrosse ball. The part of our brain that is most involved in learning a new task is the cerebral cortex, which controls higher-order, conscious thought and is adaptable to novel situations. But as we play a piece of music or practice a speech over and over again, we gradually transfer the control of that activity from the cerebral cortex to another area of the brain, the cerebellum, which orchestrates the lightning-fast motor activation needed to perform complex actions. “The cerebral cortex is very good at general-purpose stuff but not at intricately timed things,” says Boston University neurologist Frank Guenther. “You want to get the better-equipped part of the brain doing the job for these tasks.” ...

The wrinkle in this system is that the cerebellum, unlike the cerebral cortex, is not consciously accessible. As a result, Guenther says, it is when chokers try to check their progress as they are performing that they run into trouble. “Let’s say you’re trying to play the piano. If you were relying on your motor memory”—just letting it fly—“your motor command would automatically read out the next note in about 50 milliseconds.” But consciously monitoring your performance brings this superfast sequence of motor commands to a screeching halt, resulting in a choking incident of epic proportions. “The feedback from the first note takes 100 milliseconds just to move from your cochlea up to your brain. So if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, I just finished the C, now I have to go on to the D,’ you’re going to have problems.”

Click to read the rest of "How to Avoid Choking under Pressure" (Scientific American).

Free Webinar on January 8: Facilitation Techniques with Stories

From the Web page:

Guiding groups through sense making is challenging yet rewarding. Our job is to help people work with their stories to generate new meanings, learning, and insights. This is not as simple as it may appear. Stories operate on lots of different levels. Unless we become sensitized to the various ways people make sense of their stories, we will miss precious opportunities to help them find meaning that can guide their behaviors in new directions.

This 40 minute interactive webinar examines dynamics that surface when groups share their stories and experiences with one another.

The majority of our time will be spent discussing several different scenarios. Through interactive discussions and polling we will capture your ideas of different ways you might respond to these situations.

All participants will receive a FREE copy of the white paper titled, Nine Ground Rules for Working with Stories.” Following the webinar you will receive a copy of the scenarios discussed during the webinar and a summary of the group’s ideas. The session will end with a drawing for one of my [Terrence Gargiulo] books. Be sure to tell a friend!

Sounds worthwhile. Join me? In addition to the content, I am looking forward to seeing how the Webinar is run. Terrence is both knowledgeable and creative. Register here.

Note: Several articles on the use of stories are available here at his makingstories.net.

Making any 2009 resolutions? 5 neuroscience-based steps to self-leadership

[Note: Some of these links are temporarily not working due to an overhaul of The Complete Lawyer Web site. However the article which is the focus of this post IS still available.]

Try these strategies for making changes in the coming year. Since an article I wrote with Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz came out in May of 2007, I have guided many people through the five steps described in "Lead Your Brain Instead Of Letting It Lead You." Although the steps are simple but not easy because of the old, often out-dated, habits etched into our brains, I have seen these strategies create self-mastery for people so I am presenting them below.

Good news: Even though the five strategies can be challenging, each time you make good use of a Golden Moment of Choice (GMC), the path gets easier. By drawing on principles of neuroscience, you can become a better leader of yourself—and others.

The steps are

• Harness your will
• Instead of resisting the old way, substitute a new one
• Rehearse the new behavior in your mind
• Act as if you have already mastered the new skill
• Make mental notes

These link are to excerpts from the "Lead Your Brain" article. Be sure to read the whole thing for context. I hope some of you find the strategies helpful as we move into a new year that promises to be nothing if not eventful. In the new winter of 2009, when we look back over the last 12 months, what we will see?

Image credit: imageafter.com.

Blog Glob: Putt with your brain

Excerpt:

So, how do we block out the pressure, so that our automaticity can kick in? Another 2001 study by Beilock looked at mental imagery during putting. Using the same explicit monitoring theory, should we try to think positive thoughts, like "this ball is going in the hole" or "I have made this putt many times"? Also, what happens if a stray negative thought, "don't miss this one!" enters our brain? Should we try to suppress it and replace it with happy self-talk? She set up four groups, one receiving positive comments, one receiving negative comments, one receiving negative comments followed by positive comments and one receiving none as a control group. As expected, the happy people did improve their putting over the course of the trials, while the negative imagery hurt performance. But, the negative replaced with positive thought group did not show any more improvement over the control group. So, when faced with a high pressure, stressful situation ripe with the possibilities of choking, try to repeat positive thoughts, but don't worry too much if the occasional doubt creeps in.

Our strategy towards putting should also vary depending on our current skill level. While learning the intricacies of putting, novices should use different methods than experts, according to a 2004 study by Beilock, et al. Novice golfers need to pay attention to the step by step components