Positive Presence As A Business Improvement Strategy

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

The cultural and managerial aspects of lean are possibly more important than the actual tools or methodologies of production itself. The role of organizational leaders is the fundamental element of sustaining the progress of lean thinking. In 2001 Toyota formalized the basis of its lean management: the key managerial values and attitudes needed to sustain continuous improvement in the long run. These core management principles are articulated around the twin pillars of Continuous Improvement (relentless elimination of waste) and Respect for People (engagement in long term relationships based on continuous improvement and mutual trust).

So too, the cultural and managerial aspects of Positive Presence are critical to the Positive Presence strategy. The role of organizational leaders is the fundamental element of sustaining the progress of Positive Presence as a business process improvement strategy. The same basis required for lean management is true for Positive Presence as well: key managerial values and attitudes are needed to sustain continuous improvement in the long run. These core management principles can be articulated around the twin pillars of Continuous Improvement (relentless improvement of the thought processes/mindset) and Respect for People (engagement in long term relationships based on continuous improvement and mutual trust).

Lean thinking has had enormous influence on business thinking and played an important role in fundamental transformation of businesses. Positive Presence will, without a doubt, form the next big influence on business thinking to create fundamental transformation of organizational work environments.

Tagged with: attitudes, continuous improvement, cultural, engagement, mindset, mutual trust, positive presence, principles, production, relationships, Respect, transformation, values
Posted in Uncategorized

The New ‘Lean’ Is All About Behaviour!

Posted on May 25, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

After the Second World War, the Japanese economy was in ruins. The American economy on the other hand was booming. As a result, a number of leading quality management gurus (Deming and Juran) travelled to Japan to share their teachings. The Japanese took these principles to heart and applied them rigorously. By the 1970s and 1980s, the quality of automobiles coming out of Japan was far superior to American vehicles. Toyota in particular led the way, gaining an outstanding reputation. In an attempt to close the gap to the Japanese automakers, there was a global resurgence of interest in ‘Lean methods and techniques’. This growth spread outside the automotive industry into other manufacturing sectors as well as into transactional environments and even healthcare.

The lean philosophy seeks to eliminate wasteful practices and increase value-producing practices in the manufacturing industry. Essentially, lean is a business process improvement strategy centered on making obvious what adds value by reducing everything else. One philosophical approach to lean focuses upon improving the “flow” or smoothness of production work, thereby steadily eliminating ‘mura’ (‘unevenness’).

In the same way the lean philosophy seeks to eliminate wasteful practices and increase value-producing practices, the Positive Presence philosophy seeks to eliminate negative behavior habits and patterns and by doing so increase value-producing thoughts, feelings and, most importantly, behavior. Positive Presence is a business process improvement strategy centered on making obvious what behavior adds value thus reducing toxic, disruptive and non-productive behavior in the workplace. Like ‘Lean’, Positive Presence focuses upon improving the “energy flow” or smoothness of the work environment by eliminating behavior that is resulting from uneven or incoherent brain wave activity (negativity). Also like the lean approach, the Positive Presence approach naturally takes a system-wide perspective of flexibility and change principally required to allow for an increase in coherent or positive energy flow to drive synergy throughout the organization.

As with Lean, wherein concepts must be understood and embraced by all employees, the Positive Presence concepts have to be understood, appreciated, and embraced by all employees too, right down to the front lines. As well, Positive Presence aims to make the work simple enough to understand, do and manage. What Lean did for manufacturing, the skill of Positive Presence will do for today’s knowledge-based work environments.

Tagged with: behavior, behaviour, change, coherent, disruptive, employees, energy, environment, feelings, Flexibility, habits, improvement strategy, knowledge-based, Negative, patterns, positive, positive presence, productive, smoothness, synergy, thoughts, toxic, value
Posted in Uncategorized

What Is An Engaged And Committed Workforce?

Posted on May 18, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

It is not uncommon in today’s business culture to find organizations where someone is in charge of engagement as though you could assign it or delegate it. You cannot create a culture of engagement through an organizational chart. Where you see this, you know senior leadership doesn’t understand what is required to create a culture where all employees are motivated to do their best every day.

They should instead focus on creating positive relationships and building positive reinforcement into the workplace, from the top down. Employees, who are encouraged, encourage others more often. When it starts at the top, it multiplies as it flows to the front line. Therefore, if it doesn’t occur at the top, it limits what will occur in the rest of the organization. All leaders want an engaged workforce, and many leaders think they have one when they don’t. So how do you know where your employees stand on engagement? Here are five sure-tell ways of knowing:

• They willingly lend a hand to co-workers, even when they aren’t asked.
• They aren’t clock watchers; they often show up early or even stay late.
• They openly offer ideas and solutions for improvements.
• They acknowledge the accomplishments of others and are pleased with their success.
• They quickly volunteer to lead or assist in implementing initiatives outside their immediate work area.

While these five indicators are not all inclusive of engagement indicators, they do constitute a reliable checklist for organizations to evaluate their efforts to create an engaged workforce. You cannot change what you do not measure and you cannot measure what you do not know.

It is important that you evaluate your organization for engagement and create a tactical capacity to develop it and sustain it. Introducing the skill of Positive Presence to your workforce is the first step to an engaged and collaborative work environment. It will get you off the engagement roller coaster and move you on to higher levels of productivity and organizational performance.

Tagged with: accomplishments, collaborative, culture, engagement, improvements, initiatives, leadership, motivated, performance, positive, positive presence, productivity, relationships
Posted in Uncategorized

What Your People Want

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Gone are the days when a paycheck, the employee of the month award, and the gold watch at retirement were sufficient motivators for people to perform at their best or to remain loyal and dedicated to the organization.

Just as technology has increased the borders of our markets, it has also increased competition for the best and brightest employees. Employees today seek to work for a company and leaders with whom they feel proud to be associated and who treat them like active contributors, not passive producers. They want to work for leaders who appreciate the value they add and rely on their passions and talents to every extent possible. An ‘influential leader’ is a leader with or without rank or position who leads with a positive mindset and is versed in the behaviour competencies of Self-awareness, Collaboration and Connection.

As such, influential leaders engage their employees in various ways, to include:
• Communicating effectively and regularly
• Sharing appropriate information
• Soliciting feedback
• Rewarding and recognizing good work
• Responding to personal and professional needs
• Providing timely and adequate resources and guidance
• Inviting then into decision making, problem solving, and the brainstorming process

All of these tactics have a behaviour component to them and require a behaviour awareness of the individual leader for their employees. All of these tactics, to be effective, require the skill of Positive Presence. Your behaviour makes the difference. As leaders you make a purposeful decision to engage your employees. Although engagement is a personal matter, as a leader, your power of influence is directly related to your ability to acquire and practice daily, a behavioural skill set that will create a culture that promotes a sense of personal ownership, accountability, and responsibility among their team members.

Tagged with: accountability, behaviour, brainstorming, collaboration, Communicating, Competition, connection, contributors, decision making, engagement, feedback, guidance, leaders, passions, passive producers, responsibility, Rewarding, self-awareness, Sharing, talents, team
Posted in Uncategorized

Giving Back

Posted on May 4, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

No matter what your circumstance in life, you have the ability to give back, and giving benefits all those involved both physically and emotionally. When giving to others makes you feel good, those feelings translate to your biology and the region of your brain associated with pleasure, social connection, and trust is activated, creating a ‘warm glow’ affect. Scientists also believe that altruistic behaviour releases endorphins, producing the positive feeling known as the ‘helper’s high’. These same biological responses will also decrease the negative effects of bad stress.

In her book “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want”, Sonja Lyubomirsky tells us that being kind and generous leads us to perceive others more positively and more charitably, fostering a heightened sense of interdependence and cooperation in our social community. The act of giving also promotes a sense of trust and cooperation strengthening your ties to others, as well as creating the likelihood of being rewarded by others.

Researchers have found that giving inspires observers to behave generously later – seeing altruism spread by as many as three degrees. There is also evidence that the act of giving may release the hormone oxytocin inducing feelings of gratefulness, warmth, euphoria and connection to others.

All people want to achieve meaning, fulfillment, and happiness in life. However, thousands of years of human history confirm that these things come not from being self-centered but rather from making a difference and giving happiness to others. So, if you find yourself feeling unhappy, try making someone else happy and see what happens. Or if you are feeling empty and unfulfilled, use your skill of Positive Presence by doing some meaningful and worthwhile work and see how you feel.

”A rich life”, writes philosopher and theologian Cornel West, “consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.” Every one of us can have a rich life if we choose.

Tagged with: altruism, biology, brain, connection, cooperation, emotionally, endorphins, euphoria, fulfillment, giving, gratefulness, happiness, helper’s high, interdependence, kind, Meaning, oxytocin, physically, positive presence, stress, Trust
Posted in Uncategorized

Be Great A Decade At A Time

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

I recently listened to an author say that if they reflected on their life in the past three decades, and taken into account all the unique changes that occurred in those three separate spans of time, they could not have fathomed at the start of each ten year sequence how their life was going to be.

Picture it this way, would your 40-year-old self have been able to see where you are now? Now what about your 30-year-old self and what if your 20-year-old you could see where you are now? Would that person have seen you where you are today?

Often times in this fast-paced world you think in long linear terms, but fail to account for the change you will encounter along the way that may direct your path. As you apply this axiom to leadership, and/or instituting massive culture change in an organization, you have to break it down into achievable segments using your perspective from the skill of Positive Presence. Set goals that always serve the vision and mission of the organization in a positive and strength-giving manner.

Set your leadership and culture change goals into three categories, what you must do right now, what you must do tomorrow and what you must do next week. As you prioritize these goals you then begin to take into account all the things you must do to make these goals a reality. The old Chinese proverb says “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.”

Prioritize your goals, establish realistic benchmarks that will make them reality and then go out and achieve them. That way, in another 10 years you can look back and be amazed by what has occurred – and that you never thought could have been possible.

Tagged with: achievable, change, culture, fast-paced, goals, leadership, linear, positive, positive presence, Prioritize, realistic, strength-giving
Posted in Uncategorized

Bad Apples Or Bad Barrels?

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Maybe you have heard the phrase “that one bad apple can ruin the whole barrel”. This adage has been used for centuries to relate individual behaviour to the ability of a rotten piece of fruit to spoil an entire barrel of unspoiled fruit. You may even have used this word picture to illustrate the need to beware of bringing toxic individuals into your teams and workplaces.

Unfortunately in virtually every organization there is one individual regarded as detrimental to the mission, vision, values and strategies of the organization. This is a person who comes to work every day intent on being disruptive and uncooperative. No organization needs a team member like this. If one of two employees exhibit toxic behaviour, that behaviour will show up across the entire organization.

As a leader, you must have the ability to identify toxic members of your organization and you must be introspective enough to recognize if you are creating and/or enabling a toxic environment that hinders a collaborative and cooperative work environment. This is why the sole key indication of an organization’s effectiveness is individual leader behaviour.

Using your skill of Positive Presence you understand ‘your natural human energy’ (or as you say in the business world, ‘your 20 square feet’) and you quickly become aware of a person’s negative energy when you enter into their biofield, or on the flip of that, you recognize when a negative person enters into your biofield. As a leader, your goal is to help others replace their negative with the positive through your influence using your skill and language of the skill of Positive Presence to drive a collaborative work environment.

Just as if you brought a bad apple into a good barrel, the same result would occur in bringing good apples into a bad barrel. The end result is a toxic environment, exhibiting dysfunctional and disruptive behaviour. Whether you have bad apples or bad barrels, you must recognize that negative work place behaviour will never drive performance and will always harm patients, drive down morale and create toxic environments, because negative behaviour will never bring people together to create anything of value.

The cure is collaboration, without it negative competition and conflict reign – two conditions in which medical error are likely to occur. Likewise staff morale and motivation are low, performance is inconsistent and unreliable, and communication and cooperation are non-existent. Who wants to work in this kind environment? As leaders if you want to succeed and create a workplace that promotes the goals of your organizations that exhibits the mission, vision and purpose, then you do so by first creating a culture of collaboration.

Tagged with: behaviour, biofield, collaborative, communication, Competition, conflict, cooperation, disruptive, dysfunctional, morale, motivation, negative energy, positive presence, succeed, teams, toxic individuals, uncooperative, value, workplaces
Posted in Uncategorized

The Science of Gratitude

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Gratitude is getting a great deal of attention these days within the realm of positive psychology. Studies show that gratitude not only can be deliberately cultivated, but can increase levels of well-being and happiness among those who do cultivate it. In addition, grateful thinking—and especially expression of it to others—is associated with increased levels of energy, optimism, and empathy.

The word gratitude is derived from the Latin word gratia, which means grace, graciousness, or gratefulness (depending on the context). It is a thankful appreciation for what we receive, whether tangible or intangible. In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with helping people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships. Although most studies cannot prove cause and effect, they do support an association between gratitude and an individual’s well-being. A deliberate practice of gratefulness helps us refocus on what we have instead of what we lack. And, although a deliberate practice of gratefulness might feel artificial at first, this mental state grows stronger with use and practice.

Brain research suggests that consistent feelings of gratitude may actually affect brain health by creating feelings of optimism and determination resulting in fewer reports of body pains, less depression and anxiety, and improved sleep. Alex Korb, PhD, a UCLA postdoctoral researcher, says being thankful can increase your brain’s ‘reward circuits’ and relates this to something called the ‘virtuous cycle’ of the brain. He says “the brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli. On top of that the brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias – that is, it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for. That’s how the virtuous cycle gets created.”

Our personal well-being is far more important than status and possessions. The greatest obstacles to gratitude are envy, greed, pride, and narcissism. Materialism is not happiness. That feeling of entitlement will never bring joy. Happiness is peace of mind and all too often in this fast-paced roller coaster life, that concept is lost. The characteristics that define those people who can handle adversity – faith, hope, love, gratitude – are the same characteristics that define people who will have a happy, healthy and productive life. We all have bad days because life’s not perfect, but when life gives us a blow it can be very helpful to write down the current things that we have to be grateful for … Seeing those things in writing itself, and even the act of writing, can be calming and cathartic.

Life is a gift. Freedom is a gift. Employment is a gift. Friends and loved ones are gifts. Your very breath at this moment is a gift. Viewing life with grateful eyes gives insight that life owes you nothing … allowing gratitude to work its humbling magic. Gratefulness is one of the primary steps to enhancing your skill of Positive Presence!

Tagged with: Appreciation, brain health, empathy, energy, gratefulness, Gratitude, mental state, optimism, positive emotions, positive presence, positive psychology, relationships, thankful, virtuous cycle, well-being
Posted in Uncategorized

The Art of Gratitude

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

Angeles Arrien, in her book “Living in Gratitude: A Journey That Will Change Your Life”, says that although gratefulness often arises spontaneously, it is also a choice we make. She identifies the four universal portals to the practice and virtue of gratitude: 1) blessings; 2) learnings; 3) mercies; and 4) protections. As we develop our ability to track how the four portals appear in our lives we will find the benefits of gratitude practice are multidimensional, in that they will appear in the four quadrants of life experience that are common to all humans, which are – 1) health and well-being; 2) work environments and communities; 3) financial stability; and 4) relationships. In addition, our personal ‘evolution-experience quadrants’ of both character development and spiritual growth, are influenced by, and in turn influence, our four life-experience quadrants.

In the quadrant of health and well-being, grateful people elicit more support from others. They cope better, have better health, and are more socially adaptable. In work environments the four portals to experience gratitude (blessings, learnings, mercies, and protections) are highly active within the realms of work and community. Work itself is what we have come here to do, whether to earn a living or to volunteer our time. It is our contribution to the world – our purpose, our calling. The financial quadrant is about our experience of solvency and abundance. When we focus our attention on all of the ways we are supported by our financial life, we find many opportunities to be grateful for what we have. In the Relationship quadrant it is important to remember that the longest relationship we have is with ourselves. Therefore, an important component of our life’s experience is to befriend ourselves just as we are, today, in this moment.

As we evolve and mature we develop and scrutinize our character, our values, our authentic voice, our authentic self … and qualities such as integrity, honesty, and gratitude become more precious than accuracy and efficiency. At the same time, our spirit, or life force, at the core of our essential nature, brings meaning to our life and allows us to integrate our internal and external experiences. It is our spirit that makes us unique – as we look for the goodness in ourselves and in others.

The practice of gratitude is yet another key element in developing the skill of Positive Presence – the skill of adjusting and creating a positive an energized mindset within our self through conscious thought processes –providing us with the necessary mechanism to focus on that which will bring us the greatest positive returns in terms of achieving peak performance, for building and maintaining good relationships, and for experiencing good health.

Tagged with: abundance, authentic, blessings, change, Character, community, contribution, energized, Gratitude, health, honest, learnings, mercies, mindset, positive, positive presence, protections, purpose, relationships, social, spiritual, Stability, support, values, well-being, work
Posted in Uncategorized

Leader or Coach?

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Catherine Osborne

In the face of rapid, disruptive change and the highly dynamic state of business, companies are realizing that leaders can’t be expected to have all the answers and that command-and-control leadership is no longer viable. That being said, investing in developing and empowering employees has a newfound importance, and the demand for coaching skills has increased significantly in recent years. Leaders need to be able to facilitate transition and inspire behavioural transformation.

In many of today’s organizations (particularly public sector) there is neither money or time available for a robust coaching program. The latest research in the neurosciences however is proving that anyone can acquire first-rate skills simply through targeted, conscious, deliberate, intense practice focusing on your goals and your individual situation to create an environment of learning about your self. And then, apply the same framework to those you are leading. As you learn about yourself, walk with others as they too become self-aware.

Dr. Joseph J. Luciani has brought the idea of self-coaching to a whole new level with his book, “The Power of Self-Coaching – The Five Essential Steps to Creating the Life You Want”. As a psychologist, Dr. Luciani encourages us not to subscribe to panic, anxiety and depression as mental illness, but instead to understand them as habits to be dealt with and broken. According to Dr. Luciani, happiness is our natural state and chronic unhappiness is nothing more than a bad habit waiting to be broken!

Self-coaching is a personal reflection – an honest and compassionate conversation with your self. It’s about speaking your truth, affirming your desires, stating your intentions, and recalling your successes, while being gentle and patient with your self. It is about self-empowering and being our own champion … and the champion for others on the same path.

Tagged with: behavioural transformation, coaching, disruptive change, Learning, positive presence, rapid change, self-aware, Self-coaching, transition
Posted in Uncategorized