Ptips

3 Steps To Eliminating Workplace Drama

Workplace Drama: A Leak In The System

Shannon: Let’s jump right in. How do you define drama, and how will people know what drama is and what it’s not?

Cy: The simple definition of drama is emotional waste in the workplace. So it’s energy, focus, productivity, time—whatever metric you want to apply to it—that took away from results and happiness rather than added to it. It’s a leak in the system.

Examples of drama include venting, tattling, gossiping, score-keeping, judging, resisting change, focusing on why we can’t rather than how we could, not being aligned to this organization, and arguing with reality.

And what we were shocked to discover in our research is that currently, the average person, good performer, good person, spends two and a half hours a day at work in drama.

This doesn’t mean they aren’t working hard. This doesn’t mean they’re constantly complaining or venting. That’s just one part of drama. It does mean they’re working, but working with a bit of a grudge or chip on their shoulders or a sense of a story that they’re not valued or that they’re underappreciated or that they’re under supported by their world.

And when you look at the numbers, two and a half hours a day means 816 hours a year. If you’re a leader or business owner, and you’re looking for how to really give your business a shot in the arm, if you think about the opportunity to recapture and upcycle 816 hours per year per person in your organization and focus it instead on customer service, or sales, or innovation, or product development, it’s really a “terrimazing” opportunity—terrifying that we have this much waste, but amazing that we have this opportunity.

7 Steps To Being A Great Interviewer

Both you and your interviewee need to be crystal clear on the purpose of the interview, which means understanding your target audience: Who’s meant to benefit from this information?

If you don’t know that, you risk having all their wonderful knowledge and experience fall on deaf ears … and wasting everyone’s time and energy in the process. The purpose of sharing information is to create value, and value is specific to the audience.

In other words, it’s not about you.

As an example, the most interesting discussion in the world about building a deck won’t do much good to an audience of condo owners. Likewise, that fun anecdote about the time you met Bill Murray might be better suited for your next dinner party than a talk on long-term care facilities.

Knowing your audience means knowing what excites them, what motivates them, and what frightens them, and value creation comes down to addressing all of those concerns.

Want A Great Company Culture? Do These 7 Things Immediately

Acknowledgment is important—and so is how you give it. Part of your role as an effective leader is to help grow and elevate your team members and to give direction about how they can improve.

When you reinforce positive behavior, it lets your team know what they’re doing right and encourages them to repeat it. It also makes it easier to course-correct later.

Consider how often you take the time to slow down and pay attention to what’s going on around you and to other people’s contributions. Your focus doesn’t need to revolve around what’s next on your to-do list.

How Strategic Coach Will Keep Growing Over The Next 30 Years

Circumstances in the world will change, including how big a part technology plays, but we’re going to continue to do what we do because the desires of entrepreneurs—freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose—will stay constant.

In fact, I’ll say right now that the number one industry in the world in the 21st century is going to be coaching.

This will apply both to industries that are around now and industries that don’t yet exist.

Communication networks in which creative people can create new things are the main enabler for everything in the global economy, and if these creative people are properly focused and feel properly supported, they can create amazingly bigger and better results in the years ahead than were possible in the past.

More and more, in every area of entrepreneurship, every person who’s in a position to create a new enterprise needs a framework, a structure, and a process for establishing both short range and long range progress, and someone to bounce their thinking off of.

And that’s a coach.

Every quarter, I get better at three things: being a coach, creating new thinking tools, and doing certain marketing activities. And that’s going to continue decades into the future.

Babs and I, and all of our team members, are fully committed to the next 30 years.