Cool Down (19 page)

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Development of Communities of Practice
. Improvement comes from education, but not all education is classroom-based. Communities of practice are groups of people who have in common a particular interest or procedure within the company's operations. They are informal, as opposed to a formally structured team, and tend to meet, either in person or on-line, at regular intervals to share knowledge about their area of expertise. Allowing time for employees to participate in Communities of Practice helps to both distribute and generate knowledge and expertise.

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Establishment of Organizational Memory
. One of the greatest losses a company can face is when its knowledge base walks out the door due to downsizing, attrition, or retirement. The concept of Organizational Memory recognizes that the collective knowledge and wisdom of a workforce must be transferred and retained if the company itself is to have a future. This requires time for employees and managers to step away from immediacies and instead establish traditions and opportunities to systematically transfer this knowledge through mentors, classrooms, experiential scenarios, and interviews.

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Identification and Treatment of Burnout and Stress.
Not everyone who calls in sick on a Friday is faking it. Similarly, not everyone who is at work today should be there. Can you tell the difference? People who are burning out will soon be lost to the company. Through absenteeism, presenteeism, resignations, and long-term illnesses these assets quickly lose their potential for the company's bottom line, and worse may lead to personal tragedy. Managers and organizations who allow time to step out of the silo and observe what is truly going on in the heads and hearts and eyes of their staff stand to keep them around, healthy, loyal, and productive.

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Elimination of Firefighting and its Cascade Effect
. Firefighting has a quadruple cost: first, the time and stress involved in fighting the fire; second the need to reschedule and revisit the tasks that were put aside in order to fight the fire; third, the ongoing concern among employees of the fire breaking out again; and fourth, the perception in the minds of the customer, who must balance your quick action in fighting a fire against the existence of the fire in the first place. Though fires and crises inevitably happen, it is the company who sits its people down and works in post-mortem review—to identify how to mitigate such fires in the future that stands to refocus its employees' energies on higher value tasks.

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Pattern Identification: There are busy times in the year and quieter times.
There are times when people take vacation, there are long weekends, and then there's the Christmas/ holiday season. Patterns can easily be recognized by people who take the time to lay them out on a tangible surface, such as a wall calendar. Pattern identification can help offset personnel shortages, firefighting, deadline crunches, and can also be instrumental in influencing the needs and expectations of the customer.

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Parallel and Bottom-Up Learning
. Whether implementing large-scale change or simply seeking smaller-scale continuous improvement, more can be done through parallel learning scenarios, in which all levels of an organization together follow a systematic model of inquiry, innovation, and testing. This requires more time than traditional top-down initiatives, but pay off in heightened motivation, buy-in, and, of course, improvement.

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Conflict Management
. Conflicts often escalate because people confuse the issue with the individuals involved. The best time to resolve a conflict is before it becomes a conflict, when it is still just an irksome issue between two people. This requires time to slow down and observe. Sources of conflict don't always go away by themselves, but time spent in advance usually wins back much more later on.

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Superordinate Goals and Motivation
. Companies that take time to demonstrate to its employees the large-scale vision of a single project, or of the company in general, will yield greater productivity, since emotion-based humans work primarily on emotion. Goals are more than a framed mission statement on the wall, though. Managers need to connect, human to human if they are to effectively communicate superordinate goals as well as hear unfettered feedback.

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Eye contact
. Primarily, impressions are made through eye contact—the windows of the soul. Not only is eye contact with others stronger and more frequent when you are aware of your visual presentation, the “shape” of the eye, that is to say the highly expressive areas of skin and facial muscles that surround the eye present a more focused, more direct appearance. To use two extreme examples, think of Mick Jagger and Woody Allen. Mick Jagger, one of the most charismatic and successful entertainers in music history, has a uniquely piercing visual approach; he maintains eye contact far longer than most people, and the skin and muscles that form his eyelids and upper face appear to “hone in” on the person to whom he's speaking in an unmistakable fashion. Compare this to the characters played by comedian Woody Allen—characters renowned for their neuroticism and lack of confidence. Although these are merely fictional people, Woody Allen capitalizes on his own facial characteristics—raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes, and a generally sad and preoccupied demeanor to convey a person more confused than focused.

• Schedule your travels to always arrive early. Make sure you can get to a location with a mirror so you can ensure you look the way you want. Remember, this is not an exercise in vanity; it's an exercise in personal control.

• Carry a travel kit that contains all the toiletries and tools required to keep looking consistently good. (This applies to men as well as women.) This can include:

• Hire the services of an image consultant to gain a professional outside opinion on clothing, hair, jewelry, and other visuals. Use this person's extensive knowledge of others to help build and maintain a consistently impressive look.

• Choose the clothes you plan to wear for the days ahead and organize them in a sequence that will remove the need for decision-making in early mornings.

• Practice knowing how you look by videotaping yourself. This is the only way to really know, since it shows you in “real image,” as opposed to “mirror image” as mirrors do. Schedule a conversation with a friend or family member expressly for the purposes of videotaping yourself. Hold a conversation as you would with a client, manager, or colleague, and review your mannerisms, eye contact, the frequency of smiles, posture, and body language and the way your clothes, glasses, hair, etc
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appear. This is a very revealing exercise, but that's what it's for.

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Body language and posture
. This awareness further translates into effective body language and posture. People who know what they look like walk into a situation fully in control. Their knowledge about their appearance relaxes their mind and liberates their creativity. It allows for their conversations to be well-guided, relaxed and time-efficient. It allows them to recall and relate key facts and discussion points and maintain active, interesting discussions. It allows them to listen actively to others and project sincerity and interest. These are the types of qualities that impress people.