Jeffrey G Causey

Late December and early January have turned out to be very busy, so my plans to put together a post outlining my 2017 reading list has been languishing on my to-do list. No longer though as I have finally found a few minutes to stop and put together the list. Why did I bother to put together a list for the upcoming year especially when I almost always have a book "in progress" at any given time? It was mainly driven by the suggestions on goal-setting that I recently wrote about. One of those tips was putting your goals in writing, so I did that with regard to what I hoped to read in 2017.

The concept of caring being something positive should be fairly obvious, but the title of this piece is not meant to be redundant. Instead, I hope it emphasizes the importance of a positive attitude and how it can impact those around you, notably your co-workers that you likely spend a lot of time with in your life. Besides helping to relieve stress, which can in turn enhance productivity, efficiency and effectiveness, positive attitudes can help people perform better when dealing with customers. Hopefully you realize that helping improve the customer experience ultimately has a positive impact on the bottom line for a business or organization.

The other day via one of my newsletter subscriptions, I came across this article ( Carol Dweck on Creating a Growth Mindset in the Workplace ) that surveys a book from 2007 - Mindest: The New Psychology of Success . I thought it had some really interesting points - to the point that I decided to jump in and order Mindset from Amazon (should be here in a few more days). The idea behind Mindset is that different mindsets impact not only how we do our jobs, but the mindsets of our employees can impact the ultimate success of an organization.

Last week I shared an article about some potential problems that can crop up if collaboration efforts are not managed effectively. One of the issues that may surface is the stress and burnout for top performers when they are continually sought out by others in the organization. Likewise, as managers we likely have certain employees who are considered stars and it can be tempting to turn to them on a frequent basis to get the work done in an organization. However, it is important that we proactively manage the work that is being delegated so as to avoid overloading some employees and at the same time taking steps to help raise up lower performing employees. Although management may be as much art as it is science, we can still bring some structure to this delegation process as discussed in the article Make Sure Your Team's Workload Is Divided Fairly . The article brings up several steps and actions that managers can take when delegating assignments and projects. The main th...

Very likely you are familiar with the refrain from Forrest Gump who quotes one of his mother's favorite sayings, "stupid is as stupid does". A quick search on the Internet suggests the saying is rooted in an older proverb, "handsome is as handsome does". In both cases, the meaning is that one can assess qualities like "stupid" or "handsome" by a person's actions and not by anything one can see.

Recently I came across an article from Wrike that tried to list 6 ways introverts make great leaders. Unfortunately, after reading through the article I concluded that they had only listed 2 ways introverts could be effective leaders and 4 ways introverts deal with the ways of the business world. I did some additional brief research and managed to cobble together a list of 8 qualities of introverts that make them excellent choices for leadership positions. Here is the list I put together: