“The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world.”
-Dr. Joseph Edward Murphy
Surgeon
” The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket “
-Andrew Carnegie, Industrialist
Source w2wlink.com
There are seven essential principles for managing power and politics in organizations. They are based on the philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli, the classic theorist in the field. Not even skilled and relatively sophisticated people can succeed in management — and be seen as leaders — without internalizing these principles, although they may have minor short-term successes. In the long run, they will be undermined because they can’t build and keep alliances, protect themselves from the grapevine or influence top management. Here are the principles:
1. To gain cooperation from subordinates or peers, show how it will benefit the individual. Most managers worry about how to motivate people. It can’t be done. Trying to motivate someone is like pushing on the end of a string. Persuading a subordinate to do something for the “good of the organization” is futile. This is especially true when dealing with Baby Busters who have a lifetime immunity against organizational loyalty.
Treat organizational change as a political issue and determine who has an interest or who can be given an interest in the changes the organization needs to make. Too often, no attempt is made to build a consensus around change because the change is “necessary” or “logical.” The successful politician’s mindset is, “What can I do for you that will make you want to do it my way?” People motivate themselves when they see clearly that what you want them to do will benefit them.
For cooperation from colleagues, establishing a peer relationship is essential. People who don’t or can’t do this will encounter jealousy, resentment or other relationship-destroying feelings in co-workers whose help they need most. For example, the medical director who doesn’t believe the nursing vice president or hospital CEO is his/her organizational equal had best give an Oscar-winning performance to the contrary. The lawyer who wants a paralegal to think as she does must exhibit nothing but egalitarianism.
Submerge all thoughts that, because you are better educated and hold a higher rank, you’re entitled to respect. Entitlement is a career killer, whatever your rank.
2. Plug into and monitor the grapevine. It’s the best way to establish an early warning system. It’s imperative that you know how people think about organizational issues. Too many managers (though not the truly powerful) are disdainful of office gossip. “Petty stuff” or “personal trivia,” they say. Wrong! The grapevine is accurate at least 85 percent of the time — and that’s a conservative estimate. It also carries the word from the grassroots. Unless you are plugged in, events will surprise you. You might shoot from the hip and undermine your position. Managers are expected to be in control of themselves as well as events.
Test your level of knowledge: Has anything happened in your organization in the past month that you learned about from your boss before you heard it in the grapevine? If so, there are gaps in your intelligence system. Fill them by identifying the entrenched power people, usually long-term support staff, and building alliances with them.
3. Always exhibit absolutely predictable behavior. If you asked workers at every level, everywhere, which boss (and/or co-worker) bothered them most, they would say, “The one that goes crazy over a missed deadline one month and does not respond that way next month. I can never figure out how he/she will react.” Predictable responses allow subordinates to manage up, peers to mesh effectively and teach everyone how to manage you.
4. Give all the credit and take all the blame. The power position is always giving credit, never receiving it. People who solicit praise for their work either have ego deficits or no desire for power or both. The grapevine knows who did what. The need for adulation is an infallible sign of insecurity and undermines the troops’ confidence in management.
Taking the blame means that people will hurt themselves scrambling to work with and for you. They will realize that a mistake that may have been as much an organizational as a personal failure won’t trash their careers. You, at least, don’t believe that blood sacrifice must follow every disaster to placate the organization. Don’t be surprised, as you shoulder the blame, when people rush to share a portion of the disaster. No one is allowed to hog the spotlight for more than 10 seconds, good or bad.
Without this attitude, getting people to take the risks needed to make changes or get the result would be difficult, even impossible. Why should anyone put herself on the line personally?
5. Anticipate needs before they go public. Here’s another reason to listen to the grapevine: Every gripe you hear represents an unmet need and an opportunity to go one-on-one with someone and meet his/her needs in exchange for whatever you want done.
6. Keep your ego hermetically sealed in an old mayo jar. Effective people are (relatively) ego-free. Nobody can aggravate you unless you agree to be aggravated. No one can insult you without your willing participation. Remember, work is a role. You are not what you do for a living. The people you work with don’t know you well enough to dislike you personally. That privilege is reserved for family and close friends. Disliking your plans for change or reorganization isn’t the same as disliking you personally. By the way, why do you care whether you’re liked? Isn’t respected and followed the key?
7. Keep score from results only. The motto for the new millennium is “Get the result.” Effort never counts and there is no such thing as a magnificent failure. All failures look pretty much the same. Process-oriented people, those determined to do things the “right” way, are rarely flexible or creative enough to dream up the solutions that will get the result.
How much or little you like people is not important; what counts is how well you work with them. It doesn’t matter if you love what you do as long as you appear to love it. It doesn’t matter if you’re sincere. Some fairly terrible things, e.g., giving someone your honest opinion, are done in the name of sincerity. Righteousness is another non-starter. People whose personal values are “right versus wrong” rather than “get the result” are in mortal danger of bashing their own – and other peoples’ – careers.
You won’t be able to oust the CEO by applying these principles but you might be able to succeed him/her. If you are the CEO or the leader of your own entrepreneurial venture, these same principles apply to help you stay in touch, connected and on top. No one who’s really in tune with Machiavelli has been less successful than someone whose M.O. is slash and burn. And the results for the organization are always more positive
By: Brian Tracy
The most important thing you do for your success is to take control of the suggestive elements in your environment. Be sure that what you are seeing and listening to is consistent with the goals you want to achieve.
Listen Your Way to Success
Listen to educational audio programs in your car. The average person drives 12,000 to 25,000 miles per year which works out to between 500 and 1,000 hours per year that the average person spends in his or her car. You can become an expert in your field by simply listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place.
Take Courses in Your Field
Attend seminars given by experts in your field. Take additional courses and learn everything you possibly can. Learn from the experts. Ask them questions, write them letters, read their books, read their articles and listen to people with proven track records in the area in which you want to be successful.
Get Around the Right People
Associate only with positive, success-oriented people. Get around winners. As we say, fly with the eagles. You can’t fly with the eagles if you keep scratching with the turkeys. Get away from the go-nowhere types and above all, get away from negative people. Get away from negative coworkers. If you’ve got a negative boss, seriously consider changing jobs. Associating on a regular basis with negative people is enough in itself to condemn you to a life of underachievement, frustration and failure. Associate only with positive people. Get around winners.
Visualize Your Goals
The last thing before you sleep and the first thing in the morning, think about and visualize your goals as realities. See your goal as though it already existed. Your subconscious mind is only activated by affirmations and pictures that are received in the present tense. See your goal vividly just before you go to sleep. See yourself performing at your best. See the situations that you’re facing working out exactly the way you want them to.
Feed Yourself Mental Pictures
See yourself living the kind of life that you want to live. See yourself with the kind of relationships, the kind of health, the kind of car, the kind of home you really want. Visualize just before you fall asleep at night. The first thing you do when you get up in the morning is to feed yourself mental pictures. Those are the two times of the day when your subconscious mind is most receptive to new programming, when you fall asleep and when you wake up.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do, all day long, to keep your mind and emotions focused on your goals and financial success:First, listen to audio programs in your car and when you travel around. Continue feeding your mind with a stream of high-quality, educational, motivational material that moves you toward your goal.
Second, resolve to associate with positive, optimistic people most of the time. Get around winners and get away from negative people who criticize, condemn and complain. This can change your life as much as any other factor.
By: Brian Tracy
Overcome A Major Fear
A major source of stress in your life is the “fear of rejection” or “fear of criticism.” This fear of rejection manifests itself in an over-concern for the approval or disapproval of your boss or other people. The fear of rejection is often learned in early childhood as the result of a parent giving the child what psychologists call “conditional love.”
Rise Above the Need For Approval
Many parents made the mistake of giving love and approval to their children only when their children did something that they wanted them to do. A child who has grown up with this kind of conditional love tends to seek for unconditional approval from others all his or her life. When the child becomes an adult, this need for approval from the parent is transferred to the workplace and onto the boss. The adult employee can then become preoccupied with the opinion of the boss. This preoccupation can lead to an obsession to perform to some undetermined high standard.
Avoid Type A Behavior
Doctors Rosenman and Friedman, two San Francisco heart specialists, have defined this obsession for performance as “Type A behavior.” Experts have concluded that approximately 60% of men and as many as 30% of women are people with Type A behavior.
Don’t Burn Yourself Out
This Type A behavior can vary from mild forms to extreme cases. People who are what they call “true Type A’s” usually put so much pressure on themselves to perform in order to please their bosses that they burn themselves out. They often die of heart attacks before the age of 55. This Type A behavior, triggered by conditional love in childhood, is a very serious stress-related phenomenon in the American workplace.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to deal with the fear of rejection, criticism and disapproval.
First, realize and accept that the opinions of others are not important enough for you to feel stressed, unhappy or over concerned about them. Even if they dislike you entirely, it has nothing to do with your own personal worth and value as a person.
Second, refuse to be over concerned about what you think people are thinking about you. The fact is that most people are not thinking about you at all. Relax and get on with your life.
By: Brian Tracy
The very worst use of your time is to do well what need not be done at all. The Pareto Principle says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of the value of your activities. This means that, if you have a list of ten items to accomplish, two of those items will be worth more than the other eight items altogether.
To achieve great things, you must always be concentrating on the small number of activities that contribute the greatest value to your life and your work.
Determine the Consequences
The value of anything in your order of priorities can be measured by assessing the potential consequences of doing it or not doing it. Something that is important has significant consequences to your life and your career. Something that is unimportant has few or no consequences of significance to your life or career. The mark of the superior thinker is your ability to consider possible consequences before you begin.
Ask the Key Question
Continually ask yourself, “What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?” And whatever it is, work on that. Your ability to discipline yourself to work on those few tasks that can make the greatest difference in your life is the key quality that makes everything else possible for you.
Action Exercises
Here is how you can apply this law immediately:First, make a list of everything that you do as a part of your job. Now, analyze the list and select the three to five things that are more important than everything else put together.
Second, imagine that you are going to receive a $100,000 bonus at the end of the month if you can work on your highest priority items every minute of the day. How would that change your behavior? What would you do differently?
Great article by Kare Anderson: The ” Say It Better Expert” in how you persuade, resolve conflict, sell and build relationships.
By Marshall Goldsmith – April 2007
http://www.marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/docs/EEP/To-Develop-Others.doc
“Success is not in the accumulation of the details, but in the consistent and progressive action taken daily in harmony with little details possessed.” Richard Onebamoi
Most people will agree that you have to have all the details before you can take action and achieve any meaningful results. However, as great as that may sound I am convinced that by now wisdom and life experiences must have taught you that this is not always the case and it is not in all situations of life that you have to have all the details. It is a know fact that struggling and searching for all the details can cause anxiety and stress which ultimately leads to frustration in the final analysis.
There are individuals that are not able to handle the fact that it is part of the process in life events that sometimes you can’t wait to have all the details to take congruent action. There are those who must have all the details otherwise they cannot function and if they cannot function they get frustrated and frustrate anyone around them. There are situations that you just have to go ahead with what you have and get the further details as you progress on.
Sometimes most of these individuals keep gathering details that they never take action in the direction of their anticipated expectation. These are individuals that are said to have paralysis through analysis that is spending too much time pondering unnecessary detail.
