Successful Supervisor 45 – Negotiating for Success

Supervisors do a lot more negotiating than they may realize. My observation is that supervisors negotiate all day every day.

If you want to be a more effective supervisor, study up on your negotiating skills.

For most supervisors, negotiations usually involve resources. Obtaining the right level of staffing or a specific piece of test equipment would be typical negotiation discussions.

Also, the budgeting process is always a time of great challenge for most supervisors.

In the day-to-day activities of the operation, getting people to do the right thing at the right time is a form of negotiation challenge. If the standard break time is 15 minutes, how are you going to get people to adhere to the rule?

This article highlights some tips I have learned over the years in courses and in practical applied leadership in a large organization. Before sharing some tips, let me dispel a myth; negotiating…

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Thursday’s Tip For Success!

Practical Practice Management

How do you go from knowledge to action?

We often find this step difficult and then we stop and fail to achieve what we really desire.

According to Mel Robbins, we have about a five second window of time to move into action on what we want to do before our mind starts bringing “things” that try to stop us from moving forward.

We need to act fast, even if we are not sure if it is the right move, at least we are moving in the direction we we want.

Go for it! (great video, if you don’t have time to watch is now make sure you look it up on Ted)

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Thursday’s Tip For Success!

Practical Practice Management

How do you go from knowledge to action?

We often find this step difficult and then we stop and fail to achieve what we really desire.

According to Mel Robbins, we have about a five second window of time to move into action on what we want to do before our mind starts bringing “things” that try to stop us from moving forward.

We need to act fast, even if we are not sure if it is the right move, at least we are moving in the direction we we want.

Go for it! (great video, if you don’t have time to watch is now make sure you look it up on Ted)

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Choosing High Performance

Practical Practice Management

We have multiple choices we make each and every day.  Each one can affect how the day goes and what the outcome may be.  How we perform throughout the day also plays a big part in what we accomplish.

The choice is ours whether we are going to perform just enough to get by or put the effort in to kick ourselves into high gear and be a high performer.

Ask yourself this question; “Will who you are today and how you are performing lead you to who you want to be in the future?”

What we do today impacts our tomorrows.

Remember it is a choice, high performance or poor performance, which will you choose today?

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Poor Sleep Associated With Higher Risk Of Chronic Pain

Our Better Health

(Reuters Health) – People who sleep poorly may be more likely to develop a chronic pain condition and have worse physical health, a study from the UK suggests.

A general decline in both the quantity and quality of hours slept led to a two- to three-fold increase in pain problems over time, researchers found.

“Sleep and pain problems are two of the biggest health problems in today’s society,” said lead study author Esther Afolalu of the University of Warwick in Coventry.

Pain is known to interfere with sleep, she told Reuters Health by email. But the new study shows “that the impact of sleep on pain is often bigger than (the impact of) pain on sleep,” she said.

Sleep disturbances, she added, contribute to problems in the ability to process and cope with pain.

Afolalu and colleagues reviewed 16 studies involving more than 60,000 adults from 10 countries. The studies…

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How to Stop Projecting

Our Better Health

These tips can help you stop projecting your less-flattering traits onto other people.

Expert Source: Psychotherapist and clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo, PhD, author of Why Do I Do That? Psychological Defense Mechanisms and the Hidden Ways They Shape Our Lives.

Cranky existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Hell is other people,” and we’ve all felt this way from time to time. Especially when the snide comments of a coworker, a friend’s constant complaining, or our sister’s endless bossiness annoy us to distraction. If only they would change, we think, we’d find some peace.

We’re often wrong about that. In a process psychologists call projection, we attribute traits we dislike in ourselves to other people. Then those people drive us crazy when they remind us of qualities that we’re trying to suppress.

“Parts of ourselves don’t simply disappear when we disown them,” explains psychotherapist Joseph Burgo, PhD, author of Why Do…

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Transactional Leadership

Lead Today

Transactional leadership is one of the eight main “theories” of leadership. This type of leadership focuses on the role of supervision, organization and group performance. This theory bases leadership on a series of rewards and punishments.

You may not have known what this practice was called but I’ll bet you have often seen it used in business. When employees are successful, they are rewarded; when they fail, they are reprimanded or punished. Every interaction between the “leader” (I use that word very loosely here) and their people is a separate transaction. Think “what have you done for me lately” and you’ll get the idea behind transactional leadership.

Transactional leadership is an incredibly lazy way to lead. It requires very little on the part of the leader. They have no need to really know their people and they don’t have to care about them one bit. They are not responsible in…

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Leaders Don’t Complain

Lead Today

I’ll never really understand why some people continually complain about the people and circumstances they allow to be part of their lives.

Some people would rather complain than actually do something about their situation. Doing something may require leaving their comfort zones and that’s well, that’s just too uncomfortable. Other people just want to fool themselves into thinking they have no power of decision, often because they have no idea what to do.

Some people are just too lazy to take control over their lives.

I wouldn’t care about any of that if they would just stop complaining about the things they allow to be part of their lives. If by chance there are things, people or circumstances in your life that you don’t like and you have no control over, well that’s a different story.

If that’s the case then you need to change your attitude about it. Either…

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How Easy Are You to Lead?

Lead Today

I speak and write often about the concept of 360 Leadership. The idea of 360 Leadership is simple; you can lead today, right from where you’re at in your organization. It doesn’t require a raise or a promotion or a fancy title, all it requires is a decision that says I will lead today.

360 Leadership means that you lead in all directions – you of course lead those below you on an organizational chart, you lead your peers across from you on an organizational AND you lead above your position on the organizational chart.

It?s the last one, ?leading up? in an organization that is tough for many people to grasp. Many people believe it is wrong or even impossible to lead the person above them on an org chart. After all, that person above you is most often your boss and you can?t boss the boss.

Leadership however…

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Are you in Control? Really?

Lead Today

So, you?re the boss! You?re the one in charge! You?re in Control! The buck always stops with you! Well?not exactly.

When you’re at or near the top of your organization you have lots of influence, but you don’t control all that much. You don’t control your peoples’ attitudes. You can help them motivate themselves but if they don?t want to be motivated then their motivation is beyond your control. You can?t control what they think. You might be able to prevent them from saying something but you cannot prevent them from thinking it.

Somewhere along the way to achieving your leadership position someone might have told you that leadership, or being “the boss” is about being in charge and being in control. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that you can’t make much of anything happen by yourself. In fact, all you can control with any…

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