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    professional development

    Notes from a Strategic Planning Session

    Ah…back on the road again after being home for the entire month of October (thanks, Jewish holidays!)

    As I was facilitating a strategic planning session for a

    The Power of a Six Word Ask

    Hand arrange wood letters as Six word

    By Guest Maven Alina Gerlovin Spaulding

    It is legend that Hemingway was challenged to write a novel in just 6 words… to which he responded: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

    There’s a terrific story about Earnest Hemingway, which, like most stories about him, begins as a bar brawl.

    Years later, Smith Magazine challenged readers to write their memoirs in 6 words.  Nearly overnight, there were so many compelling responses, that they published a book called: Not Quite What I Was Planning.

    A dear friend and fellow philanthropist and fundraiser, Alison Lebovitz, ran a program by which I was completely taken.  In a room full of female leaders, she said: “everyone has a story, what’s yours?”  She challenged us to introduce ourselves, in just six words.  Although nearly every person in the room was a friend of mine, I learned more in the brevity and intention of those six-word introductions than I may have ever learned in years of friendship.  The most important aspects were distilled and communicated.

    I started using this technique with other groups… I asked a group of day school heads to capture the mission of their school in 6 words: “Keep climbing, the view is awesome.”  And for a new, low-cost private school, in New York, we heard “It’s affordable, go have another kid!”  When I asked a group of teen leaders to tell me a 6-word story about how they intend to change the world, one teen said: “I don’t now where to start.”  Someone who did this project with Dr. Ruth said that her story was: “I wish for everyone, great sex!”

    I know a very quick thinking, impatient rabbi who said, “I got it in 5”.  These two made me smile: “My life made my therapist laugh” and “fourth choice to prom, still overcompensating”.

    Here are some other examples that might resonate:

    The work we do is sacred.

    We help Jews, wherever they are.

    My community is a global one.

    Why Federation? I can give directly.

    LOVE the J! Ask me Y!

    Another generation, hanging at the JCC.

    Thank G-d for non-Jewish members!

    There’s something magical about the ease and brevity of this task.  Now, when I start working on a development project, I ask the team or the leader to give me the mission of the project in 6 words.  They always laugh, but when they actually get it, it opens a new dimension.  What’s the story of your passion?

    If you’d like to learn how to create critical messaging for different types of donors and prospects, become more comfortable (and successful) at asking, and learn how to steward your donors for the long haul, join me for my four week online Maven Class: Donor Development Strategies for Breakthrough Results starting this spring. Early-bird registration now available!

    How to Give Feedback To Folks Who Don’t Want to Hear It

    feedback“I can’t wait to hear what I did wrong!”
    “You’re frustrated with my performance? Do tell.”
    “I’m failing to meet expectations plus I have a work habit that drives you crazy? Details, please!”

    -Said nobody ever

    Let’s face it: Getting feedback is hard. And so is giving it. But what’s even trickier is giving feedback to someone who is defensive, in denial or determined NOT to hear it.

    So what do you do?
    Drop it?
    Force-feed them?
    Send them a signing telegram?

    None of the above — but you DO have to deal with it, and I’m thrilled to share my tactics and strategies for doing exactly that, published in Harvard Business Review “When Your Employee Doesn’t Take Feedback”.

    A New Year of Positive Thinking

    31065533_sHaving a positive workplace doesn’t mean waking up to your alarm clock playing Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” song every morning, nor does it mean greeting your colleagues with a “welcome to Disneyworld!” smile every day. This is not always perceived positive, and in fact, it can be downright annoying. However, when your work culture isn’t positive, it has a direct affect on your physical and emotional life. Cultivating a positive workplace requires first understanding that without it, work becomes meaningless, motivation drops and engagement disappears.

    Positivity allows for creativity, big picture thinking and openness to new ideas, which leads to a successful organization.

    I first learned about positive thinking as a child from my father who created a very special bedtime ritual (which I’ve adopted with my girls years later). Every night, my father would ask me “Noa, what kind of dream would you like to have tonight?” In most cases, my answer was to live in a candy store! At that point, my dad would pretend that there was an invisible zipper on my forehead which he would slowly unzip, and whisper my dream to my subconscious. Then he would hurry to zip up the invisible zipper so the dream wouldn’t escape and I would close my eyes and immediately immerse myself in thoughts of my candy store and everything that I get to do there and then I would fall into a sweet sleep.

    So what do dreams of endless candy have to do with having a positive mindset at work? I learned that being able to “choose” my dreams as a child developed into having the ability to choose my thoughts as well as my moods as an adult. Positivity is, in fact, both a mindset and a skillset. We can all cultivate positivity through the choices we make, the perspectives we choose, the behaviors we engage in, the conversations we have, as well as those who choose not to engage in.

    While it is much easier to have a positive outlook when times are good, it’s even more important to focus on positive thinking when things go wrong. Many of us have serious and urgent problems. We experience disappointments, heartaches, rejections, and stress on a daily basis. While we don’t want to pretend that our problems aren’t real , “sugar coat” them or withdraw into denial, we can still approach solutions in a positive manner.

    Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage and Before Happiness explains that stress is an inevitable part of work. It can be obstacle to growth but it can also be the fuel for it.

    His suggestion to working stress in a positive manner is to make a list of all the stresses you’re under and place them in two groups – the ones you can control (unfinished tasks, inbox) and those you can’t control (the stock market, politics in Iran). You then are being asked to choose one stress that you can control and come up with a small, concrete step you can take to reduce it. This is what signals your brain to shift to a positive, productive mind-set.

    Most people believe that success preceded happiness. “Once we reach our campaign target, then I’ll be happy”, or “Once I lose 10 pounds, then I’ll be happy”. However success is a moving target – as soon as we hit our target, we raise it again and the happiness that results from success is gone.

    Similarly to training our muscles at the gym, recent research on neuroplasticity, shows that it is not so different than training our brain to be more positive.

    Here are a few things that we all can do each day to help our brain cultivate more positivity in our work and life:

    • Writing down three things we are grateful for.
    • Acknowledging someone else for doing/being good.
    • Exercise for 10-30 minutes.
    • Meditate anywhere for two minutes.
    • Describe in a journal the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours in a journal.

    Even by choosing one of the above as a new habit and repeat it for three weeks, will show improvement in your levels of positive and engagement.

    Growing up in the 1970s, neither my dad or I knew anything about “positive psychology” and the “happiness factor”, but somehow, we knew how to apply these principles.

    As you are gearing up for a new day at work, remember that you can’t have a positive work environment with a negative mind. Training your brain to look for the positive outcomes in each situation and your positive contribution to taking one step towards solution will help you enormously in cultivating a positive day.

    Is Your Halo Hollow?

    For the past two years, if you were looking for me on weekday mornings between 8 and 9 am, you would have found me at my local CrossFit – that workout regimen that combines Olympic gymnastic and weightlifting moves and high-intensity aerobic training with weeping, grunting and collapsing. This was going to be the habit that upgraded my physique! This was going to be the new activity that changed my life for the better!

    Guess what? It didn’t work – and not for the reasons you might think. It didn’t work because I misplaced my halo.

    For two years, I believed that if I exercised the way that professional athletes do, I could also eat the way professional athletes do. 50 pull-ups? 100 squats? 200 sit-ups? Surely that’s a recipe for carte blanche dining, right? As it turned out, it wasn’t. I had fallen prey to a behavioral halo effect bias that was hurting me both physically (100 squats!) and emotionally (feeling stuck at the same weight).

    The “halo effect” is defined as the tendency for a person’s positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one personality area to another in others’ perceptions of them. My halo effect was behavioral – I was expecting the benefits of one overwhelming positive action (intensive exercise) to spill over into another area of my life (my eating habits). I thought that if I behaved beautifully in the gym, I could misbehave at the table. So maybe I could have gotten away with it a little bit, but I couldn’t get away with it nearly as much as I told myself. And as much as I tried to right-size my portions, I couldn’t shake that “halo” feeling that I shouldn’t have to work out so hard to still eat so little.

    I am not alone. Have you ever worked for a manager who believed that her intelligence and talent gave her the right to explode at her direct reports? Behavioral halo effect. Do you know a major donor who thinks that the size of his gift permits him to boss other volunteers (as well as professionals) around? Behavioral halo effect.

    And how about you? Do you:

    • Treat your members and customers with incredible patience at work…and then come home and blow up at your kid for leaving his shoes in the hall?
    • Give your undivided personal attention to your boss but keep one eye on your cell phone when a direct report wants to talk with you?
    • Attend every board meeting but cancel your supervision meetings?
    • Make sure your babysitter or nanny never wants for anything, while brushing aside your spouse’s needs?
    • Take care of everyone else while ignoring your own health and happiness?

    If you answered yes to any of these, your halo is hollow. You’re allowing one set of positive behaviors to cast an artificial glow on others that clearly don’t deserve a spotlight. How do you fix it? Stop granting yourself permission and excuses to behave carelessly, and start giving yourself credit for the fact that you clearly have what it takes to act responsibly, considerately, and like a mensch. If you can do it somewhere, sometimes, and with some people, you can do it (almost) everywhere, every time, and with most people. Especially with and for yourself.

    So how did I drop the halo and its blinding effects? I quit exercising and eating like a linebacker and started working out like someone who needed to 1) have better balance and 2) be careful about what she ate. I no longer allowed one overwhelmingly positive action to grant me permission for excess or carelessness.  By dropping the halo, I raised the bar for my behavior and dropped the excuses — along with almost 25 pounds — along the way!

    Making a Bar Mitzvah with Less Stress: The 5 Secrets of Savvy Delegators

    March 16th is my twins’ b’nai mitzvah. That’s 4 days away. And as you know, regardless of whether the big day is a ceremony followed by a buffet brunch (like ours) or a booming blow-out that rivals the Vanity Fair Oscars party, there are a million things that need to get done in advance of it. So when I delegated to my son Jacob the design of the photo montage, which traditionally shows as many friends and family members as you’ve ever taken a picture of, matched with a sentimental and upbeat soundtrack, I was thrilled that he agreed to take it on. Until….

    Until I realized that he thought pictures of his twin sister crying or in diapers should be well represented. Until I realized that his tolerance for low-resolution images was much higher than mine. And until I realized that his choice of music was, shall we say, more explicit than mine. I was about to take back the whole project when I remembered one of my own Secrets of Savvy Delegators: “Clarify expectations up front, plan for check-ins, then get out of the way”. In other words, rather than panicking that he wouldn’t do it the way I would do it (which he wouldn’t), I sat him down for an expectations conversation, where we covered a few ground rules: 1) No pictures that embarrass anyone; 2) if you can see pixilation in the photo, shrink it or skip it; and 3) no music with lyrics that would make a grandparent blush. With that start-up information shared, and a schedule of frequent check-ins planned, I put the montage out of my mind so that I could focus my mind on everything else I couldn’t delegate.

    Here are four other secrets of savvy delegators:

    1. Delegate to the right person when the stakes are high. While many folks are more focused on the “bar”, we are more focused on the “mitzvah”. So while the party playlist might not be perfect or the decorations may not be sophisticated, getting the service as right as we could in terms of both accuracy and intimacy was critical for us. What this means is that we delegated the design of the service and the preparation of our children to one of our closest, most trusted friends – who also happens to be a rabbi. Anyone can be in charge of the balloons, but not anyone could be in charge of helping our kids’ embrace this day as a milestone, and helping us have the event feel special and sacred.
    2. Distinguish between responsibility and accountability when delegating. Even as much as we trust our rabbi and friend to deliver on his responsibilities, we are still accountable for making sure that the kids do their preparation. We are still accountable for making sure that the service is inclusive. And we are certainly accountable for making sure that our children’s interest in and commitment to leading a life of good deeds and loving behavior towards others and a belief in something lasts beyond 13 years old. None of those things can be delegated.
    3. Stop seeking positive reinforcement for being overwhelmed. “Deb, how are you guys DOING with everything going on?” has been the topic of most chats with my friends and family over the last few months. And while I appreciate the recognition that this is a crazy time for us, I am actively avoiding the desire to seem busier than I actually am. Yes, it is very tempting to play the burdened victim here, and hope that people would send me certificates for Massage Envy and some take-out dinners, but that’s not the truth, nor is it the message I want to send. Yes, it is a lot to do. But my husband has taken on a huge number of tasks, and our kids are carrying their weight. So I am very clear in letting people know that it is major AND manageable. And that I am important but not indispensable.
    4. Don’t give away all the fun stuff. Delegation is supposed to make your life and work easier, not harder. It kept my motivation up throughout the boring parts (like planning the seating arrangements – a task I couldn’t delegate but one that aged me by several years) to know that I got to pick the menu because I really, truly care about the food. Nobody was taking that off my plate, so to speak. So there will be bagels and lox and baked ziti and macaroni and cheese and rainbow cookies and…and….yum. How do you know that there’s something you should keep for yourself? When someone says to you, “I can do that for you,” and you think to yourself, “Nope – that’s mine.” Which is probably what I’ll say about anyone who tries to touch my rainbow cookie!

    So whether you are planning next quarter’s business activities, your company’s annual staff retreat or a major family milestone, use the Secrets of Savvy Delegators to make your next project feel doable rather than dramatic.

    Want to learn more savvy delegation secrets to help you manage your team, your work and your life? Join me for a one hour Virtual Presentation, “Delegate without Drama” this month, and 10 other topics throughout the year! Register here: www.myjewishcoach.com/webinar.html

     

    Great Question #1 from a Strategic Planning Session

    Ah…back on the road again after being home for the entire month of October (thanks, Jewish holidays!)

    As I was facilitating a strategic planning session for a Jewish group, one member posed a terrific question about how the group would vet its activities: “How do we make sure our efforts are sustainable?”

    I often use this question with coaching clients as well – clients who are looking to make a significant change in behavior or activities (such as lose weight, network more, etc.) If you can get past the hurdle of starting something, your next hurdle is likely to be the sustainability of the process. How long can you do what you’re doing? What do you need to consider or adjust in order to keep it going?

    Is eating only salads sustainable? How about skipping all desserts? How long will this last?

    But of course, this isn’t the only great question…

    Tune in for the second part!

    Deborah Grayson Riegel
    www.myjewishcoach.com
    www.myjewishcoach.blogspot.com

    Leadership is about what you DO!

    “Leadership is action, not position.” — Donald H. McGannon, Former CEO, Westinghouse Broadcast Corporation

    Whether you are the board president, the rabbi, rosh yeshiva, CEO — or hold any title that makes people site up and take notice, remember what people really want and need from you — your commitment to roll up your sleeves and participate in a meaningful way.

    I believe that most of us have two fundamental needs, regardless of our role in the organization — the need to benefit and the need to contribute. In fact, when I teach sessions on running effective meetings, those are the two criteria for determining who should attend a meeting. If a meeting participant will neither benefit from nor contribute to a meeting, then give them back their time to do something more useful than sit in on a meeting! Trust me — he or she will thank you for it, and your meeting participants will appreciate a leaner, more focused meeting process.

    Those in Jewish organizational leadership positions often benefit from title, position, status, connections, and paycheck for those in paid positions (and yes, I see you — the one eye-rolling about the idea of benefiting from a Jewish organizational paycheck. But I won’t let you distract me!).

    Here’s the question: does your level of contribution — decisions made, problems solved, resources developed — meet or exceed the benefits you receive from your position? How would your lay or professional counterparts and direct reports answer that if asked about you?

    If you’re not sure, are you willing to ask? If you’re willing to ask, who will you start with? If you’re not willing, why?

    In the words of writer Elbert Hubbard, “Don’t make excuses. Make good.”

    Deborah
    www.myjewishcoach.com

    RA RA for Team Ruach!

    When it comes to getting your staff, volunteers, donors, members, etc. excited and engaged about their work for and connection to your organization, you’re going to need to create a little ruach: “RA! RA!”

    Now before you pull out your high-school pom-poms, try this less embarrassing and more effective approach to rallying the troops:

    R – Recognition: Tell your staff members and volunteers specifically what they have done to make your life easier and/or how they have contributed to the organization’s mission. Make sure that you meet each person’s preferences for how they like to be recognized (publicly vs. privately, in-person vs. over the phone, in writing, with a small token, etc.)

    A – Appreciation: The options are endless and you can find one that fits your budget and timing: take someone to lunch, give a Starbucks gift card, stop and ask them about a hobby or personal interest, offer some schedule flexibility, allot some professional development budget for them, or just take the time to tell them. Oh, and remember handwritten thank you notes? They never go out of style!

     

    R – Respect: Trade in the Golden Rule (treat others as you would want to be treated) for the Platinum Rule (treat others as THEY would would want to be treated). So, while you are finding out how each of your staff and volunteers defines respect, here’s one universally appreciated gift: Listening. Really listening. That means listening on two levels — for both content (what is being said, and what isn’t being said) and emotion (how the message is being communicated). To do this effectively, you’ll need to put away the Blackberry, turn off the lap top, and get rid of any other distractions. Attentive listening is hard — and desperately needed. But it’s free of charge and looks good on everyone. Try it.

     

    A – Accountability: When the U.S. Army was looking for a workshop on Accountability, they found my online self-assessment, downloaded it, and called us up for training. I invite you to take this assessment and see where your staff and volunteers may be looking to you for greater leadership: www.myjewishcoach.com/pdf/accountability-self-assess.pdf.

     

     

    When it comes to retaining your organizations most important resources — your human resources — make sure you take the time and make the effort to give them what they need to keep contributing.

     

     

    RA! RA!

    Deborah
    www.myjewishcoach.com

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    “Deb has been a respected speaker and facilitator for a number of our JCC conferences over the past few years. While I've heard about her energy, hard work in preparing, and meaningful content, it took her recent keynote speech at our annual JCCs of North America Professional Conference to make me realize what an incredible asset she is. Watching her present a content-filled, energetic, and personalized session -- without using any notes -- was very impressive. Deb is a multi-talented, serious, and impactful presenter."

    – Allan Finkelstein, Past President and CEO, JCC Association of North America

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