The following four thoughts about time may steal your time. A change in perception can give you a better sense of time.

1. Time is money. According to researchers Sanford Devoe and Julian House, thinking of time in terms of money shapes how we view time well spent. Devoe and House asked participants to take a period of time to enjoy music or putter around the Internet for pleasure.

Before one group started, they were asked to share their hourly wage at work. Devoe and House did not ask this question of the second group. Those that were asked to think about their paycheck first grew impatient with “doing nothing.” Based on their post-test comments, those who were asked about money had thoughts about the time not spent earning cash.

Those who didn’t think about money enjoyed their time. They found value in the exercise.

Do you need to account for every minute of you time or are there “non-productive” moments that are priceless?

Creativity demands we have periods of time where we don’t think about work or problems. The more complex a situation, the more there is a chance to overload your cognitive resources. When you instead sleep on it or distract yourself with something mindless or a physical activity, you give your unconscious a chance to sort through possible solutions which is more effective than consciously trying to sift through pros and cons. This is called the “deliberation-without-attention effect.”

There is a reason why you come up with great ideas in your sleep. Creativity peaks at times of mental fuzziness, when you are sleepy and non-focused. On the other hand, the need to work more, work harder and work faster doesn’t lead to more productivity and actually kills creativity.

2. There is not enough time. If you are conscious about how you are spending your time, you might be able to speed up time. How much evidence do you need before you make a decision? How deeply do you need to analyze each step in your plan? According to researcher Roger Ratcliff, decisions and tasks often take a long time because of a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.Trusting yourself to work faster can give you the gift of time.

Additionally, making a plan and sticking to it can narrow your focus so you can’t see alternatives and time-savers right in front of you.

Psychologist E.J Masicampo gave subjects a task of finding Bill Murray’s birthdate after completing another task. They were told they could find it on a particular movie site. About two-thirds of the participants overlooked the Wikipedia website on their screen, thinking they had to go to the movie site as planned. Finding the date on Wikipedia would have been easier than trying to discover it on the movie site.

Blindly adhering to a premeditated path can lead to expending more time, energy and resources on a problem than is necessary. How can you remind yourself to sit back, take a breath, and look around you for other possibilities even when you have many things to finish in a day? The Jesuits have a nearly 500-year old spiritual tradition that emphasizes a twice-daily practice of conscience. Do you have time for this?

3. I don’t have time now but I will later. Psychologically healthy adults tend to be optimistic about the future. This isn’t bad, but it could paint the present as worse than it is. When you are having a good time, you don’t worry about time. When you are not, time is either a drudge or stress producer.

Try to see what makes the present moment the best of times. Positive emotions improve the brain’s executive function and encourage creative, quick and strategic thinking. Gain time by actively thinking about things that make you happy, and then look for good reasons for completing the task in front of you. There may never be a better time than now.

4. Time is fleeting. All the “productivity tools” we have actually make us less productive. Constantly checking for emails, texts, the latest news, social media streams, relevant blog posts, and irrelevant but interesting articles keep our brains scattered and overworked.

When you are working to complete a task, ban the distractions. Be aware of what steals your attention. If you get interrupted or need a break, make a conscious choice to return to the task at hand with your full attention. Letting yourself wander for too long may lead you to having to repeat some of your work just to remember where you left off.

Also, when you leave one task to go to another, be sure you leave the last task behind. Before starting something new, go for a walk, climb stairs, or do some deep breathing to clear your head. Even if you think you are a good multi-tasker, the brain has only 100% of attention to dole out. Giving a task even 80% of your attention can lead to mistakes you will have to fix later, taking up precious time.

Now, I go make up the time that you have taken to read this article.

Even if the story you tell is leading to a better future, are you conscious of the characters and scenes that you are creating every day?

When I teach leadership classes, I ask participants to consider the Leadership Story they want to live. I tell them the class will be a journey where they will overcome obstacles, take on new challenges and begin to see their role as leader in a new way. By the end of class, they all have a new Leadership Story they wanted to live.

I got this idea after reading Donald Miller’s book,A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Miller wrote a memoir but it wasn’t until he was asked to turn his memoir into a movie that he was forced to focus in on what was most meaningful and memorable about his life. This realization launched him to take his current life, which had become stale, and write risk, uncertainty, loss, meaning, connection and love into the pages he was living.

What is the Leadership Story you want to live? How does it play out this year? This decade?

Noah Blumenthal in his book, Be the Hero, asks this question of all leaders. He believes that everyone, even in the most difficult times, can change their stories to act with a hero’s resolve. Be the Hero asks you to define your story by living up to the hero in you.

Take a moment to ask yourself about the story you are living right now. Is this the best story for you? For your work team? For your family?

Next, start your new story by asking yourself, “What am I longing to experience? What doesn’t want to play by the rules? What would I do “if only…?”

When choosing your plot line, consider these questions. In the story you want to live, are you…

1. Creating something that would affect many people’s lives or are you doing something that makes you feel the incredible depth of your knowledge, skill or art?
2. Able to glimpse and share something important about the future giving people hope or direction or are you fixing something or improving something that wasn’t working before?
3. Getting your sense of joy from helping other people or are you achieving great things that make you and your family feel proud?
4. Giving people hope or laughter or are you working to create a life that has more time to let nature nourish your soul?

You might find your plot line by answering one of the questions or you might find your story in a hybrid of answers to two or three questions. There are no correct answers. It is your story.

The easy story is boring. Consider the ending, the plot that leads to the ending, the chapters you want to include, and the characters you want to be most active with including their motivations for being in your story. Consider the surprises you might have to deal with or you would embrace if they showed up. Twists and turns will happen in your story. The unexpected situations keep your story moving.

This means you will be changing your story on a regular basis if you want to keep it interesting. Tension helps you discover what you stand for. Conflict, if you take it on, moves your life forward. “You can either get bitter or better,” says Miller.

Remember, like most memorable movies, it’s not how you end your stories that counts, but what you become on the way to the end.

Write your story and then muster the courage to share it with others. Miller says, “A good storyteller doesn’t just tell a better story, though. He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too.” How about trying this out at work?

If you consciously choose your leadership story and invite others to help the story unfold, you will all enjoy telling your stories over and over. One good story leads to another.

In its effort to protect you, to keep you alive and safe, your brain can keep you from getting what you want if you don’t take the steps to stop it.

I am not just talking about big goals. Generally, people are more deliberate when making major life and business decisions unless they are running from a terrible situation and think there is only one choice to make. Yet it is easier to identify the anger and fear that are driving these decisions. The questions below will help you with these choices as well.

The greater dilemma surrounds your everyday decisions—whether to make the phone call, confront someone you THOUGHT was a friend, or join, maybe speak to a group of people—when it comes to these decisions, your brain often steers you wrong subversively.

Because your brain’s primary job is to protect you, when you face an uncomfortable decision, it will in a flash give you a fabulously credible rationalization for avoiding embarrassment, humiliation, or just plain nervousness. As humans, we are master rationalizers.

Most of my clients come to me with decisions that presume only two possibilities exist. Either they opt for one way or the other. They rarely see the middle ground or the out of the box solution. The greatest danger in seeing only two options is to choose the one you think will be most comfortable in the end without really knowing what will happen in the future.

Giving yourself the benefit of choices means you first lay out all the options you have, including hybrids where you do one thing while trying out the other. Your decision-making becomes a creative process. You should feel more hope as possibilities unfold. Instead of saying, “Should I or shouldn’t I?” you say, “What else is possible for me in this situation?”

Whether you are deciding on a career move, the next step in a project or a relationship issue, or what clothing to pack for your conference, ask yourself these questions:

• Am I making a black and white decision or have I explored all of my options around this choice I have to make?
• Which option will I regret more if I don’t decide on it?
• What is the worst that can happen if the option I take doesn’t work out, really? How likely is the worst to happen? How painful will a failure be? Will I be able to pick myself up and move on, rich from the experience?
• What sacrifices must I make or discomfort will I endure to realize my goal? Is it worth it? Is the possible gain greater than the expected pain?
• Why am I making this decision now?

The moment your brain says yes or no to something, even with good reason why, you should ask yourself, is my reason really a convenient rationalization? Is this my fear or my logic speaking? Then explore the impact of each option and discover other solutions before you make your choice.

Your gut feeling can be based on fear, not good sense.

Most people can’t predict the future. It is hard to know, really, if the action you take is going to have a horrific outcome or if something great could come out of an awkward situation.

Remember, there will be less to regret if YOU make the decision instead of letting your protective, control freak brain do it for you.

You can outsmart your brain. The possibilities you create will make achieving success much easier.

Collaboration is the hot word today, which means leaders and teams are expected to know how to do this. So we train people on how to honor everyone’s strengths, how to include different perspectives in decision-making and how to celebrate team milestones. We push people to say “we” instead of “me.”

Knowing how to collaborate is also handy for families, volunteer groups and team sports.

Yet the “rah-rah” of teams may mask the shortfalls of teamwork.

In a brilliant article recently published in the Harvard Business Review, Nolifer Merchant brought to light Eight Dangers of Collaboration. Subtle and sometimes invisible blocks to team productivity include

• the fear of speaking up against the majority
• subtle tribal behaviors of inclusion and exclusion
• slow reaction times as problems are talked to death
• team assignments create more busy-work for already overworked people
• conflict avoidance so as not to rock the boat
• watered-down solutions
• lack of accountability

I am often told to keep my training positive. Negative views bring down the energy. Regardless of how it makes my participant feel, I think it is important for teams to answer the question, “What will stop you from succeeding?”

In my doctoral studies, one of my professors shared some additional time bombs that can kill collaborative efforts:

1. Handclasping – When one or two strong members agree with the leader no matter what, forcing others to align with their decisions.
2. Majority voting – When the majority silences the minority without fully hearing their points of view.
3. Collusion of rebels – When a number of members resist the leader’s decisions no matter what or they question the leader’s action enough to slow down the process to an inefficient pace demonstrating that the team is as useless as they predicted.
4. Near Consensus – When some members don’t have all the details but the solution sounds good enough for them to go along with the others. This could lead to groupthink and possible serious errors.
5. Village Idiot – One person’s ideas are continually ignored or killed without any consideration.

In the 1980’s, I worked for a computer company that was sold to a group of four Harvard MBA graduates. The company was having difficulties shifting to the new smart computer technologies. The new owners thought they would fix our problems by creating cross-functional teams to make decisions. In a culture where departments didn’t get along and there was no corporate training, this grand experiment failed due to the collusion of rebels. The company went bankrupt a few years later.

My next job was to help take a floundering semi-conductor company out of near- bankruptcy. We re-organized into cross-functional teams based on business units. Based on what lessons I learned from the Harvard leadership team, I created a team training program that taught both the light and dark sides of collaboration. This allowed the team to surface and resolve resistance, poor decision-making, and unproductive practices. The team training was recognized as one of the key contributions when the company went public and became the top IPO in the United States in 1993.

Collaboration can increase creativity and innovation as people build on each others ideas. Collaboration can increase team spirit and motivation when people succeed together. The younger generation of workers tends to thrive in collaborative environments.

To make collaboration work, people need to be trained on both how to do it and what to watch out for.

A great program that addresses all sides of collaboration is The Team Advantage by the Pyramid Resource Group.

You must go into any partnership or team with your eyes wide open. All participants should have the “language of dangers” and feel safe enough to point out the possibility of these hazards occurring.

Highly productive teams know where they are vulnerable so they can bring problems to light and commit to moving on to create a more open, respectful and enjoyable experience.

I just returned from my second trip to China. This time, I taught business owners the art of emotional engagement when speaking. The biggest problem I had was getting the owners to focus on one theme for their speeches.

China is going through a business boom. This makes people act like kids in a candy store when it comes to determining the focus of their business and career. They want to do anything that looks like it will bring them success. They bounce around, following the trend of the year or even the month.

It is profound right now in China. Yet I know the urge to follow the shining stars also exists in the United States and Europe. This restlessness is only stifled by the economy that frightens people into more rigid behavior. People are staying in careers and jobs out of fear, not desire. This doesn’t ease their discontentment.

Whether you bounce around with your career and business brand or you stay in one place out of fear, you are not mining the riches found in persistence.

Looking back on my own career, I also bounced around in search of new challenges every few years. I now wonder what I could have accomplished had I stayed longer in one place.

There are two problems with this inability to delay gratification in what you choose to do with your career or the focus of your business:

1. You do not stay long enough to make the impact that is truly possible with a committed, long-term focus.
2. You choose your life’s work based on external rewards, which you are always chasing, instead of internal inspiration, which provides more lasting satisfaction.

You might fall victim to one or both detractors.

In Steve Jobs’ famous speech to the 2006 Stanford graduating class, he quoted the words, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Although people tend to respond to the words hungry and foolish as the drivers of his success, the truth is Jobs succeeded through his dogged determination to stay the course. He believed in the value of his work and the possibility of the difference he would make in the world no matter what difficulties he faced. The key word in the quote is, “Stay.”

No person has accomplished great things without a passion for their work and a strong belief that what they are doing is a good thing for many people. They chose work based on internal inspiration. They had no problem defining what they stood for and this stand rarely faltered.

Your voice that defines who you are in the world must come from within. Once you define yourself by this driving passion, you must stay the course to experience true success.

There have been many movies made, including the recent movie Money Ball, where the lead character pursues what he or she believes in despite bad press, angry critics, and misguided family and friends who think they are saving you when their disbelief is actually standing in your way. Yet these protagonists of the movies believe in their cause, and themselves, until they finally succeed.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claims that you can master something if you put 10,000 hours into your learning and practice. You can lead a remarkably impactful and lucrative life if you focus, commit and let your belief in your dream drive your decisions.

Short of hitting the 10,000 hours mark, the following tips will help you feel both successful and fulfilled if you take the time to learn as you grow.

1. Be aware of what you want. I have coached many people, including my Chinese participants, on noticing what gifts they offer and what tasks excite them. When you combine your talents with your joy, you can begin to identify what life path will be most successful for you regardless of what your neighbors are doing. Then 1) create your vision, 2) identify what will get in the way of achieving it and 3) make plans you can flex with as the world around you changes keeping your vision in mind.
2. Absorb what the critics say as information. Weigh their words against your plans, keeping your voice as the final arbitrator. The naysayer’s words might help you overcome roadblocks as you move on your chosen path. This way, people aren’t roadblocks, they are just data providers.
3. Be patient and make small tests. As you move on your chosen path, be observant so you can identify what works and what doesn’t. See mistakes as guideposts that keep you going in the right direction after you stumble. Write your goals down and write “victory” next to each one as you achieve it. Don’t give up.
4. Help others realize their dreams. When most of your conversations are about possibilities instead of problems, you stay in a positive mindset for longer periods of time. You entrench the habit of positive thinking while helping others around you find their way as well.

Don’t let anyone or any trend define your business, career and life path for you. Let your own voice rise above the critics and the glitter. And please don’t settle for doing work that pays the bills, at least in the long run. Define your own life and you will be the winner in the end no matter what happens along the way.

First, let me clear up what a company or corporation is. Underneath this explanation are clues to why you will either flourish or fade under your frustration at work. This definition can be applied to how you work with any group of people, including teams, communities and families.

In spite of what some politicians would like you to believe, a corporation is not a person. It is a piece of paper. It’s a series of agreements made by people. It does not have a thinking brain and beating heart. Although we can use metaphors to make the corporation appear to be a living being, a corporation survives on money, not food and affection. And when a corporation dies, there is nothing to bury or burn but the original paper that created it.

However, any work you do with someone else, whether it’s a partnership, alliance, small business or multi-national corporation, is regulated by specific beliefs that the partners or founders—the people—infused into the agreement when it was conceived. This gives the company the sense that it is alive in the form of its values, culture and living brand.

In other words, the team, company or corporation does not have a face but it has a soul, mirroring what is important to the people who came together to create something they couldn’t do alone.

To succeed and even to stand out at work, what you stand for has to align with what the company stands for in the form of the values and the brand that it lives every day. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras explains that these values guide behavior in daily life across all levels of the organization. Whereas a person’s work values may shift based on their position of leadership, company values and what the organization stands for—the brand—are stable over time.

The core values stay stable even if someone changes the posters and business cards. The values and brand are present in how meetings are run, how people feel when they are at work and what someone tells you when you ask them how they like their job.

Therefore, no matter how good your work is, your success depends on how well you align with the values and brand—the soul—of the company.

I have left companies where it was clear my brand did not align with theirs. If I would have known this before I started the work, I would have moved on in spite of the money offered. Now that I work for myself, I have to be conscious of this alignment when I chose to work with partners and clients. If there is no match, I can’t do my best work.

However, when I was a company employee, my greatest success came when I realized how my best contribution—creating a workplace that is both fun and inspiring for all—aligned with the company’s core values of innovation, experimentation and team spirit. There were other values that didn’t match up to mine very well such as the value for crushing the competition, but when I focused on the match, I was a star.

This process of discovering how you can align what you stand for to what the organization stands for at its core is defined in Suzanne Bates’ new book, Discover Your CEO Brand: Secrets to Embracing and Maximizing Your Unique Value as a Leader (McGraw Hill).

The book is not just for CEOs. It’s for anyone who wants to institute change in a company that benefits both the bottom line and the people who achieve this. It’s about discovering your own values, brand and leadership style, and then determining how this will align with what your organization stands for so you can harness the two to work in concert. Or you can discover when your path needs to start somewhere else where the alignment is clear.

Suzanne says, “The brand begins with the story of you—the experiences that defined you, the lessons you learned, and the ways those lessons shaped your values and beliefs. Once you understand the essence of your brand, you will be able to communicate it to the world. It will become a powerful force, creating positive results. You will be able to leverage that brand of yours to drive tremendous value into your company.”

Personal branding isn’t just about marketing. It’s about your happiness. Know your values and brand and then have the courage to only align with people where you can stand by your brand. If you do this, you will flourish. Otherwise, you will flounder under the conflict with your partners, leaders and your own heart.

Add technology to the equation and stressed-out leaders and employees are spending more time at home checking emails as well as working on and thinking about work. According to a survey by Right Management, one out of three employees in North America said they often get emails they must reply to from their bosses during weekends.  “It’s now taken for granted that everyone has to check their work email during the weekend,” says Douglas J. Matthews, Right Management’s president.

As a result, our “work brain” never stops whirring. These intrusions cut out down time unless you go on a real vacation, something few Americans take these days.

Has all this extra work paid off? No. In fact, the never-ending work cycle is detrimental to productivity.

I was teaching a class for a group of managers who worked for a French bank in Moscow. One woman told me that she started her career working for an American bank. She had great aspirations of success. As her manager demanded more and more of her time, insisting she work harder and faster on so many “priorities” that she had to take work home, she found herself overwhelmed, exhausted, and always on the brink of tears. She knew her work suffered as well.

The story has a happy ending. She quit and went to work for a French bank. Her managers helped her discern top priorities from less-important tasks and encouraged her to maintain a healthy lifestyle. She followed the “do less and focus more” rule. She is not only happier, she is more productive. Her good work has earned her two promotions in three years. The French-based bank is currently more successful than the American bank she worked for.

Leaders who chase every opportunity and feel their teams must excel at every objective on their list are running resources too thin. Focus is then scattered, killing any chance that the leader and the organization will stand out as superior in one particular area which is critical to be a competitive success.

The question is, “What is your mission as a Leader?”

Are you supposed to focus on getting many results or getting an extraordinary result or two?

To get extraordinary results, you have to be aware of the impact your requests have both on yourself and on your employees. As my colleague, executive coach Val Williams says,

“When leaders follow this ‘more, better and faster’ strategy they’re often surprised that instead of achieving confidence in their success, they feel ore burned out and insecure. When you employ this strategy of ‘do more, faster’ over the long-term, then you actually become more reactive, less strategic and frankly, more replaceable.”

If instead you focus on your highest priorities and inspire others to do their best on the tasks that give them both good results and a feeling of pride, then you are giving everyone a chance to apply their best selves to their jobs. This includes making sure people have time to rest their bodies and brains so they can create and produce top quality work.

The more complex a situation, the more there is a chance to overload your cognitive resources. When you instead sleep on it, or distract yourself with something mindless, you give your unconscious a chance to sort through possible solutions which is more effective than consciously trying to sift through pros and cons.

TIP #1: Taking a nap or letting your mind wander gives your brain a chance to process complex decisions. Set an alarm for 20 or 30 minutes. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Even if you don’t fall asleep, this relaxation will ensure you rest. If you can’t sit still, play a computer game or read a mindless magazine to keep from thinking about work. This enables your brain mind to relax and open up, leading to both higher concentration as well as productivity when you return your focus to your work.

TIP #2: Lindsey Paho, writing on behalf of Colorado Technical University suggests you determine your own sense of balance. What can you accomplish without feeling stressed and overwhelmed? What tips you over the edge? When you are aware of your own limits, you can design a schedule that keeps you sane.

TIP #3: Lindsey also suggests you get over yourself and ask for help when you need it. As a leader, you don’t have to be the superstar lone ranger. Modeling rationality for your employees is better than demonstrating stressed-out self-reliance.

Do you want your organization to win? Re-evaluate your mission. Are you pushing for expected results or are you creating the space for extraordinary results? The latter requires you do less with more focus.

In the end, you and your employees will have better ideas, make more sales, complete more projects, better answer critical emails and collaborate in a way that is needed for amazing results.

The problem with this guideline is too much emphasis is put on making goals specific and measurable with a deadline whether you are writing a goal for yourself or your team. Not only does this make goals boring, the other two factors – attainability and relevancy - are often assumed and discounted. Why would you set a goal that wasn’t important or one that couldn’t be achieved? Because the goal sounds good.

But goals that sound good are often not met if they don’t also feel good.

Goals must generate positive emotion to truly be smart.

Yes, you don’t want your goals to be ambiguous. Nonspecific goals such as deciding to be a better leader or a healthy eater can mean anything and leave you feeling more guilt than satisfaction. General productivity goals can stifle the creativity needed to make work more efficient.

So a good goal should be specific, but it should also inspire action, not mandate it. The inspiration is best driven by a deep desire for the end result. You need to feel how important the goal is to you and that you have a real chance at succeeding before you will whole-heartedly commit to making it happen.

BRAIN TIP: If you want a permanent shift in behavior, make sure the goal gives you a sense of excitement, hope, pride, or fun. Goals focused on making more sales or losing weight will lose steam if you aren’t emotionally engaged in the vision of what the increase in revenue or loss of pounds will give you. What will people be doing and feeling differently once success is achieved? What deep desires will you fulfill once you meet your personal goals? If your visions conjure more fear than excitement, you might spend more time finding the reasons for failing than you do on reaching your milestones.

Descartes got it wrong when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” When it comes to changing behavior and achieving goals, the truth is, “I feel, therefore I am.”

In my last job as a corporate training manager, I was busy rolling out organizational change programs when my boss asked me to change my priorities. He wanted me to focus on leading the team in charge of rewriting the corporate HR policies. He gave me the goal, the resources and the deadline. I argued about priorities. He won the debate.

The first team meeting was minimally productive and full of conflict. Afterwards, I again argued with my boss, this time saying, “Why me? I am not an HR policy person. I don’t see this as the best use of my time.”

He said,”You are my only staff member who has successfully run a project team before. These changes are critical for the turnaround of this company. You are the only one I can count on to make this happen.”

If he would have made this point first, I would have felt the relevancy of the task and accepted the attainability with confidence. I was now proud to accept the assignment.

If the goal inspires a desired emotion, you are more likely to do what it takes to achieve it and possibly, go beyond expectations.

And it must be a desired emotion. Please do not use fear or shame as a basis for your goal, at work or at home. Although the fear of consequences may motivate action, the results are often short-lived. And most life-style choices or big organizational changes require flexibility and creativity, both squelched in the presence of fear.

Define the Relevancy first, then ensure the Attainability. These two factors drive the psychological commitment to any goal whether it is a personal goal or one you set for your team. Without an emphasis on these two factors, SMART goals feel dumb.

I think the same answer applies to the question, “What is the ROI of soft skills leadership training?” When you think of what a good mother provides – someone who cares about what you want, who helps and encourages you to grow and who inspires your greatness – these are critical attributes for today’s effective leaders. Even when well developed, the direct effect of these abilities, though profound, is difficult to measure.

Lauren Klein shared some thoughts with me from Kenneth W. Thomas, author of Intrinsic Motivation at Work, when he presented to the Executive Networks Global Talent Leadership forum. Thomas says work engagement requires intrinsic rewards, the positive feelings that energize people to do good work. Leaders need to focus on what makes people want to do their best work and stay with an organization, from the inside out. Discretionary effort is fueled by the heart.

According to the Corporate Leadership Council, emotional engagement is four times more powerful than rational engagement from external rewards in inspiring employee effort. They surveyed over 50,000 employees at 59 global corporations. By increasing employees’ engagement levels, they found organizations see increase in performance of up to 20 percentile points and an 87% reduction in employees’ probability of departure. Their study demonstrates a clear ROI of soft skills.

Thomas calls actions that ignite internal motivation “firing up the talent engine.” Keeping the talent engine burning is critical to creating business success in today’s competitive and consistently changing marketplace. Daniel Pink in his book, Drive, says it is critical that a company’s mission and strategic objectives also fire up this energy. People need to feel that the work they are doing is important, even if it is helping other businesses be successful.

Yet all too often corporate executives still focus on using the hard skills of process improvement, increasing efficiency, and creating new business models to try to increase bottom line results. Focusing on old methodologies keeps them hitting their heads on the ceiling of short-term and marginal solutions.

The generations entering the workplace and moving into leadership positions today are used to instantly connecting, collaborating and voicing opinions on the Internet. They expect to have work environments that provide the same atmosphere. The good performers want to have fun, feel challenged and express their creativity. They want leaders who care about what they want, who help and encourage them to grow and who inspire their greatness. I repeat Gary Vaynerchuk’s questions, “What’s the ROI of your mother?”

On the flip side, the younger generations despise workplaces rife with fear and negative emotions. They won’t put up with this nonsense for long, especially when the economy stabilizes and jobs open up.

It’s time to quit giving lip service to the soft skills and truly make them important strategic directives. It’s time for leaders to truly support the development of skills such as coaching, collaborative visioning, emotional intelligence, and team motivation in their young leaders. It’s time to make the workplace a place where people look forward to going to.

Soft skills focused on enriching human interaction get solid, hard results. Do you value caring for, listening to, developing and inspiring others? Then translate this value into reality by putting time and money into ensuring your leaders excel at connecting with human beings.

• Willingness
• Desire
• Courage

If …

1. The person is willing to take the first step,
2. The change provides a payoff they desire, and
3. They have the courage to let go of old habits, to make mistakes and feel awkward or fearful while trying, and to admit to others that they needed to change,

…they may make the changes you request.

WILLINGNESS

Unfortunately, it often takes a crisis or a bad situation before people willingly accept they need to change.  Instead, they spend their energy rationalizing and justifying their current behavior.

If you ask someone to change their behavior, you need to be equipped with the “why.” You need to precisely identify the negative impact their current behavior is creating. This is not the consequence, the “if you don’t stop, you will be sorry” declaration. This is the description of how the person’s behavior is affecting the feelings of others and hurting the end result. If the impact is evident, the person might be willing to try on new ideas and actions. This is step one.

DESIRE

A person may be willing to work on new solutions, take a risk, or listen to a different point of view. Unless there is a payoff based on something they want, their willingness will not last long.

Real changes occur only if the person has a strong personal desire to make them happen. People say things like, “I’ll try to quit smoking,” “I’ll try to stay calm and listen,” “I’ll try to do read the instructions” knowing they don’t really want to. Desire is based on a payoff.

Most long-term changes don’t happen because it is the right thing to do or it will please someone else. Logic may initiate change but it cannot sustain it without the emotional support of desire. Too many failures happen because, “my heart wasn’t in it.”

Therefore, when asking someone to change, you need to find the emotional payoff that will fuel the commitment to practicing the change until it sticks.

Payoffs that inspire change are usually related to something the person values such as being seen as a leader, being respected by their peers, developing skills that will help them meet their goals, earning the chance to be given challenging projects and adventures, more time with their family, more fun at work or peace of mind.

Be careful about promising money because the joy from a bonus or raise is short-lived. Tying the change to someone’s personal values and career dreams is more likely to result in long-term results.

Always ask the person what they want. Do not assume that what you value will match those of your colleagues or even your spouse.

Additionally, desire can change over time. Life circumstances and wisdom often change our perspective on what we hold dear. Never assume you know someone too well to ask them what they want.

COURAGE

Iyanla Vanzant, wrote in One Day My Soul Just Opened Up, “I was not willing to make people angry or hurt their feelings…I was not willing to sound weird or stupid or like a know-it-all. I was not willing to run the risk of being wrong. I was not willing to defend myself if I were challenged…I knew what needed to be done, but I was not willing to do it.”

Courage is a word rarely used at work but keeps people frustrated and stuck in old behaviors. Once faced with a conflict or the possibility of looking stupid, good intentions fly out the window.

They might be willing to try and they desire better results. As soon as negative emotions rush in, they lose the gumption to sustain the change.

The good news is that helping people to acknowledge what they fear can break down these blocks. Fear of disapproval can be vanquished when we admit someone might not be happy with what we do or say. Fear of making a mistake is surmountable when we admit we are less than perfect.

Declaring a fear out loud takes the air out of the emotion. When a person says they worry about what others will think, they are taking the first step toward doing it anyway.

Helping someone muster the courage to say, “Yes!” in the face of possible embarrassment or loss is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

You must create a safe space for people to reveal their fears. If you sense the source of their fear, you might share a story where you felt the same thing, making it okay for the fear to exist. Then remind the person that courage is not the absence of fear, but acting in the face of the urge to flee. This is the stuff of heroes.

BRAIN TIPS:

1. When working with someone who you think needs to make a change but doesn’t seem to be moving in the right direction, determine if they:

• Have expressed a willingness to change.
• See a payoff for getting the better result.
• Have the courage to sustain the pain of change or to act differently in front of their co-workers and friends.

2. What support does the person need from you? Do they need advice? Do they need encouragement? Do they need to know they aren’t weak or incompetent, but merely human?

Hold people to their commitments and adjust your expectations if the change is slower than you hoped for. Changing behavior isn’t a decision; it’s a process that needs support.

Adapted from Outsmart Your Brain: How to Make Decisions Feel Easy by Marcia Reynolds