#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Many strategy execution processes fail because the firm does not have something worth executing.

The strategy consultants come in, do their work, and document the new strategy in a PowerPoint presentation and a weighty report. Town hall meetings are organized, employees are told to change their behavior, balanced scorecards are reformulated, and budgets are set aside to support initiatives that fit the new strategy. And then nothing happens.

One major reason for the lack of action is that “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented, despite the ample efforts of hard-working people, because they do not represent a set of clear choices.

Many so-called strategies are in fact goals. “We want to be the number one or number two in all the markets in which we operate” is one of those. It does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. But you’ll still need a strategy to achieve it.

Maybe you want to start a business. Maybe you want to change careers. Maybe you want to get fit, or gain a new path, or in some way take your life in a new direction.

To do that, sometimes all you need is a little push, a little nudge. A little burst of motivation and inspiration.

Here are fifty of those nudges.

Pick the one that makes your skin tingle, your heart race, your motor rev, and place it somewhere you'll see it every day: your monitor, your screen saver, your background, and let it help take you to the place you've always wanted to go.

It's that time of year--leaders everywhere are charging employees with the task of establishing goals for 2018. If you've never been through a structured process, this exercise can be daunting, and frankly, feel like a big waste of time. I can assure you, it's not. 

Setting goals is critical. Goals provide direction, help you focus, prioritize your time and energy, and ensure that you can objectively prove you've advanced the company's agenda.

But just any goal won't do. Research shows that goals are not only important but also that the level of specificity and difficulty matters. Goals that are both clear and challenging drive higher levels of performance.

To set their teams up for success, many organizations use SMART goals. Google leaders use something a little different--"Objectives and Key Results" (OKRs). On Google's re:Work site, a resource that shares the company's perspective on people operations, Google explains the concept.

The Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) coalition is on a mission to help people break bad habits and successfully make behavioral changes that will lead to longer, healthier lives.

Many of the most successful people had to fight tooth and nail for opportunities to learn new skills and advance up the corporate ladder. That’s often because what they wanted to learn and achieve wasn’t in sync with what their bosses wanted for them. You’re not a data scientist. You’re not cut out for engineering. Sales isn’t what you do. Lines like this are still used all too frequently when employees tell their managers that they want to move in a new direction.

But this is only half the story. Managers are under tremendous pressure to generate results. You have annual quotas, quarterly goals, and increasing competition. Who has time to let employees go learn skills that may not be relevant for years, or may not serve your unit at all?

I hear these challenges all the time as I work with managers at all levels, particularly in large corporations. I’ve also faced them myself with the companies I founded and scaled. It’s a tough balancing act. But I’ve learned key lessons to help managers turn lofty goals — such as making learning and development a central pillar of the workday — into real actions that mitigate damage to, and even help strengthen, the bottom line. Here’s how.

With the Olympics underway, elite athletes across the world are in an arena that they have likely dreamed about for a lifetime. Imagine the pressure of knowing that your shot comes once every four years. Most will get only one chance to achieve their goals. One opportunity to demonstrate what they have been training for their entire lives. This is enough pressure to cripple most normal people. The highly successful have learned to manage this pressure by refocusing their mind onto what is effective, rather than what is debilitating.

By learning to approach goals like the highly successful, you can achieve much more success with much less stress and anxiety.