Insights

When you are chosen to do more, it can feel uncomfortable. Learn to let go of outdated self-perceptions, engage the new and step into progress by embracing these 3 tips.

Have you noticed that successful people seem to be able to negotiate relationships and get work done, despite that difficult co-worker or demanding boss?

Coming up with a culture that will hold us all – despite where we work – is the accelerated challenge that leaders and HR professionals now face.

The idea of specified tolerance, the notion that tolerance has limits, is a useful benchmark for our personal and professional lives. It suggests that our acceptance of situations or behaviours, our ability to ‘put up with something’, can or should have an expiry date. It implies that there will be a boundary to our endurance and stoicism.

Freedom within limits understands that maturity rests in the notion of interdependency rather than independency. It appreciates that all of our actions have consequences and possible ramifications for others and the wider collective system – so as individuals we need to be mindful of the constraints we operate within.

Our success in lifting another person's performance depends on our ability to read the situation correctly and then find the right motivational levers to have that person change.

The key to promoting a clear and fuzzy strategy, and to operate within it, is to be vigilant about looking in and looking out. Great businesses keep a watchful eye on the market, competitors and customers – whilst retaining a stable anchor point by referencing and executing company plans and goals. They pay attention and stay present, and importantly, know when to yield and know when to hold firm.

Giving up control and letting go can be incredibly difficult, especially if you’ve been given responsibility for an outcome. But the route to an individual’s growth is a delicate dance between providing guidance and intervention and allowing room for experimentation and a different approach.

Simply put, employees want to know how they’re doing. Isolation and a lack of consideration are a sure fire way to lower engagement and performance. Leaving people to just ‘get on with their job’ can work for a time, but is not sustainable. What you ignore will persist, escalate and become a bigger problem.

The hardest aspect of change is that it asks us to make a different choice from the one we made yesterday. Our lives are defined by our choices and decisions. Many of our choices are patterned, unconscious responses which turn into habits.

Rebecca had been stoically enduring a manager who was routinely scapegoating her. She had been his punching bag as he consistently blamed her for his mistakes, as he externalised his own shortcomings by projecting them on to her.We know that one of the hallmarks of emotionally intelligent and successful people is their ability to personify individual accountability.