Feedback is an essential component of any team. No matter what level—peer to peer, manager to employee, or business owner to contractor—the ability to both give and receive feedback defines your ability to work effectively as a collective and determines the long-term direction of your team.

Work responsibilities continue to crossover into multiple departments, as projects require knowledge and support across a range of disciplines and experiences. As a consequence, our work environments are becoming more team based and less individualistic.

Adopting a new way of thinking about the feedback process is important. Sports offer useful parallels to management; the one constant of any athletic team is the coach. The coach is on the sidelines, watching all the moving players while staying focused on the bigger picture. As needed, the coach pulls players aside to offer specific feedback that is necessary in the moment, including precise actions or questions to help the player unlock new levels of performance. Sometimes the advice is for the player’s own development; other times it’s for the team’s benefit.

Managing people in a work environment is more complex. Your role isn’t exclusively to oversee your team member’s responsibilities, but to also carry out your own. The manager must achieve specific objectives, maintain his responsibilities, AND coach his team.

But many neglect their supervisory responsibilities, like offering continual feedback, guidance, and assessments, and instead focus solely on their own work. These managers and business owners secretly wish their team and employees would manage themselves. This wouldn’t work for a sports franchise and it doesn’t work for business management either.

No matter what level you’re at within your enterprise, adopting the role of the coach is beneficial as it helps you:

• Build rapport
• Stay results focused
• Maintain a higher level of accountability
• Uncover problems before they reach crisis stage
• Improve productivity and the overall turnaround time of projects

Any good manager coaches his team members and takes great care in doing so. The game of management is a process of continual improvement that requires your dedication, awareness, compassion, and respect—all the qualities of an effective coach.

A person with integrity is aware and concerned for the welfare of his family, neighbors, community, country, and the world.

A CEO with integrity is aware and concerned for the welfare of his employees, company, industry, country, and the world. He, too, tends to see his employees as a family, like Costco CEO and co-founder, Jim Sinegal.

A company with integrity has an internal culture that is concerned and supportive of its employees, customers, vendors, community, country, and the world.

The core of the ego says, “I’m most important; I must put my needs above all else.” This egotistic tendency isn’t a personal quality; we all have an ego. It’s only when a person’s ego is left unchecked that he is labeled narcissistic, self-centered, or ego-centric. It doesn’t serve us to condemn others or ourselves for having an ego. It is, however, helpful to understand the mechanisms and downsides of the ego.

A sign of integrity is when one evaluates decisions in light of its effect on others.

Those with integrity, however, are still human. A sign of integrity is not someone who doesn’t make mistakes, but someone who takes ownership when a mistake is made. Tiger Woods provides an exemplary model of someone who made egregious mistakes and then took responsibility for his wrongdoings—a clear sign of integrity.

Consideration and respect for your fellow human being has a transformative effect on yourself and others. 

Take a look at your schedule for this week.

How much time will be spent in meetings? Reading reports and creating documents? How much time will be eaten away by emails, phone calls, and text messages? And don’t forget about reading news, blogs, keeping up with Twitter, and other social networking sites.

Now, how much time do you have scheduled for the really important work? Not the urgent stuff that demands your immediate attention, but the “Big Thinking” strategy sessions that gives you perspective on your business (and your life).

How can you create the unthinkable if your mind is in a constant state of activity? How can you innovate if you’re constantly distracted? How can you make effective decisions if you don’t have time to evaluate the problem?

What’s a busy knowledge worker to do?

One solution for even the busiest CEO is the utilization of time blocks. Carving out blocks of time—not 15 minutes here and there, but several hours minimum each week—is critical if you’re committed to making effective decisions.

Major contributions to your enterprise happen when you devote time to what matters most.

We put this slide show together to give you step-by-step instructions on how to “create” more time:

Few experiences rival moments of inspiration where in a cloud of confusion and uncertainty, a moment of clarity emerges.

You’ve got it. The answer. The solution. A brilliant idea that changes everything. Then, before you can say Eureka the moment vanishes. Ordinary life returns.

Epiphanies, or moments of pristine clarity, insight, and revelation, can feel like rare gifts. It often feels as though the planets have to align and gravity must reverse itself for a single moment of true clarity to emerge.

Epiphanies are treasures to creative professionals. As a writer, I used to sit at my computer late into the night, waiting for that big breakthrough idea or prolonged state of flow. Patience, it turns out, was never one of my strongest attributes.

Here are a few strategies I’ve found helpful in setting the conditions for an epiphany:

1. Get into a centered state. Creativity favors the prepared body and mind. Think about a time when you had a moment of clarity or times when you are generally most creative. Where were you? What were you doing? How were you breathing? What was your posture? What was on your mind? Duplicate the physical and mental state of a past inspirational moment.
2. Play epiphany-evoking music. Music can be a powerful anchor. What music inspires you to explore and to dream? Some of my favorites include Pachelbel’s Canon in D, John Williams’s overture to the Robin Hood soundtrack, James Horner’s Great Governing Dynamics from A Beautiful Mind soundtrack, and Enya’s “May It Be” from the original Lord of the Rings soundtrack.
3. Surrender to the moment. Embrace the Wanderer within. Breathe deeply. Let go of all your worries, concerns, inhibitions, and problems—at least for right now. Trust in something bigger than yourself. You will find the answer. But first you must wipe your mental slate clean of all the tumultuous chaos that weaves its way through your daily life.

We tend to make life more complicated than it needs to be. Many of us live in a state of confusion and uncertainty. Modern life, with its barrage of information and distraction, breeds neurotic tendencies, the antithesis of creative endeavor.

Epiphanies flow freely when we learn to let go and embrace the present moment.

Feedback: People don’t like hearing about their flaws and most managers and business owners don’t like telling people about their flaws.

The human ego is fragile. It likes to think it’s perfect; it hates hearing that it’s not. How do you offer feedback in a way that others will be receptive to it?

Most managers and business owners use a combination of judgmental comments and personal criticism as their predominant mode of feedback. Judgment might take the form, “This report is terrible.” Personal criticism comes in the form of an attack, “You’re not good at this.” Obviously, these approaches are neither supportive nor helpful.

To overcome our innate resistance to feedback (even of the kinder, more gentle variety), the key is to help the person come to the necessary conclusions on his own and let him take ownership for improving his performance. The best way to do this is through the artful use of questions.

When you’re reviewing someone on a project, let’s say a proposal, you might ask, What’s the primary objective of the proposal? Follow-up questions might include,

• Do you feel this proposal has achieved this objective?
• Do you see places where the proposal may be improved?
• If there was a primary message that needed to be clarified, what might it be?
• What is the ideal response you’re looking for from this pitch?
• How else can you help ensure that it will receive that response?

This line of questioning allows the person to become aware of areas of improvement and take ownership for the changes.

A well-crafted question circumvents the ego’s defense system. Of course, your tone and intention in engaging in this style of dialogue is another important factor. If you come across as arrogant, all-knowing, and impatient, it doesn’t matter how well-crafted your questions are. If, however, you genuinely want to see the person succeed, he will intuit your intention and push for higher performance.

To overcome the feedback barrier: Don’t command, criticize, or give instructions. Compassion, not criticism reduces people’s ego defense systems. Ask questions with the intention of bringing out the best performance and best qualities in your people. If you do, everyone wins.

The one thing I remember from trigonometry is that to solve a proof, you need to have a certain number of “givens” in order to uncover the unknown variable. Basic scientific formulas also rest on givens or constants. Without these constants, there are too many variables to ascertain useful data.

For example, since 1972 the speed of light (c) has been a fixed value of 299,792.458 ± 0.001 #2 kilometers per second and since 1970 the universal gravitational constant (G) is valued between 6.669 to 6.674.

Gravity and light—two basic components of our world—have their own values as defined by mankind. But as theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake points out in his adventurous book, Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, even these two nonchanging constants have changed and will continue to change.

We have a lot of assumptions, don’t we? We assume certain people will act a certain way in certain situations. We assume we know what the other person is saying. We assume the other understands what we are saying. But as we know, our assumptions are often wrong.

Innovative thinkers challenge assumptions continuously. They ask, What if it didn’t have to be this way? Their answers often transform what we think we know and how we live.

I’m not suggesting that we eliminate assumptions; we need them. Without implied constants we would be in chaos, afraid to cross the street. Every game has its rules.

I am suggesting all assumptions should be held provisionally. A degree of adaptability and flexibility serves us well:

• Arguments cease  to ensue because we no longer hold strong emotionally charged opinions about things we don’t really need to hold strong opinions about.
• New ideas present themselves continually because we now have a mindset wired for exploring them.
• We are less likely to get stuck; if something isn’t working, we try something else and continue this process until we build positive momentum.

The only boundaries you have are those you inflict upon yourself. Be flexible with your rules and assumptions. Question everything. Test it out for yourself. You are bound by nothing.

(Our apologies if you’re receiving this post a second time through your RSS feed. We had some technical difficulties last week.)

Writing and talking go together like water and oil. You can talk or you can write. You can’t do both.

As Robert Frost eloquently put it: “Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.”

Writing is an introverted activity. It takes a wellspring of internal energy to translate thoughts and ideas into effective prose. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Talking is an extroverted activity where your energy is poured into another person.

In writing, one is focused on translating one’s thoughts and ideas into comprehensible syntax and meaning. In talking, one is focused on articulating ideas so that another person will understand while simultaneously trying to listen and apprehend what the other person is attempting to communicate.

Writing and talking are of two different worlds. Writing is isolating—it’s a job of one. Talking is communal—it’s a job of at least two. As humans seem to be social creatures by design, talking comes more natural. Writing takes greater effort.

Writing requires special conditions like large blocks of uninterrupted time. For some, nothing else is needed; others may also require total quiet, a cup of coffee, a leather journal, a medium tip pen and a MacBook Pro.

Writing and talking are both complex—both require a great deal of energy. So if you want to write more, stay quiet.

If you’re in business, your job involves human interaction. Human interactions are complicated as we have varying temperaments, opinions, personality defects, beliefs, and cultural conditioning. If you think about it, it’s amazing that we’re able to get along at all.

Most workplace conflicts can be avoided by applying a little more spirit and a little less ego. Humans are hard wired to be self-serving, but successful communication requires graciousness.

Life is often challenging. Most of us have inner and outer turmoil. As bestselling novelist Andy Andrews always says, we’re either in a crisis, coming out of a crisis, or heading for a crisis. We can call it the human dilemma.

So if you want to be a person of influence and an effective communicator, you need to focus on others instead of yourself. Is it easy? Not usually, but you can train the self-interested ego to behave, allowing the gracious self to take over. Then your relationships transform.

Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People provides expert principles to help you communicate more effectively by focusing on others instead of yourself. Here are several people-winning principles he identified:

Begin in a friendly way. Whenever possible, begin with praise and honest communication. Smile and be inviting and open instead of serious and demanding.

Give honest and sincere appreciation. How often do you offer genuine appreciation to your co-workers versus the times you criticize and condemn them?

Become genuinely interested in others. Learn to ask thoughtful questions that will show your interest in others.

Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely. Operate by the principle that you gain more influence by raising people up than by knocking them down.

Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Learn to value the positive instead of hunting for the negative. It’s easy to see what’s wrong—everybody can do that. A skilled individual finds the optimistic and positive perspective.

Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Remember, everyone is self-interested. Your job isn’t to change this, but to use it to your advantage in gaining influence in a benign, supportive way.

None of these principles are mind blowing or radically new. But they are rarely practiced consistently—except by the masters of influence and the leaders of change.

With the artistic brilliance of its handler, a movie camera can produce innumerous emotions, define characters’ dispositions and transform the quality of a film. Four primary elements affect the picture produced in a camera: light, color filters, lens size, and the lens stop. Differing any of these elements changes the experience of the story.

Brighter lighting, for example, can create a positive, high-energy mood, like in a radiant heaven scene or a sunny day in the park. By contrast, darker lighting can create a more villainous tone like in many comic book hero action movies where almost the entire film takes place in darkness (e.g., Batman films).

Similarly, colors and their infinite variations communicate its own language and evoke an endless stream of emotions. Lenses vary in a wide range from 9 millimeters to over 600 millimeters. Shifting to a wide-angle lens alters the viewer’s interpretation of the shot.

Our lives are living, breathing movies. We determine what genre and style of movie to create. Understanding how your internal camera works can lead to greater awareness of your innate movie-making abilities.

The primary camera elements affecting your life pictures include beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and predominant thought patterns—all governed by your overall level of consciousness. The collective whole of these filters and their derivatives produce your experience of reality.

Changing one of the above filters can alter your experience. For example, if you believe you are a poor writer, you won’t spend time writing, and if you do, your writing is probably drab. What if you suddenly believed you had the potential to be great? Will your writing immediately improve? Unlikely, but it is possible. But now you’ll be more likely to read a few books on writing, take writing courses and practice your craft. Before long, your belief will manifest into a physical reality.

(Parents: Do you see how important it is to instill a belief in your kids that they are capable of achieving what they set their minds on? However contrived this may sound, a lesser belief limits your child’s worldview. If our “movie-making” abilities aren’t cultivated early on, we often struggle later in life.)

Your life picture is not static. As a constantly changing work of art, each moment presents an opportunity to further sculpt your experience. Rotating your internal lens (of how you perceive yourself and the world) by one-degree can radically shift the course of your life movie.

If you don’t shape your adventure, your adventure shapes you.

English essayist James Allen wrote, “You will become as great as your dominant aspiration … If you cherish a vision, a lofty ideal in your heart, you will realize it.”  Every Creative Professional needs a compelling vision that moves him in the direction he wants to go. With a compelling vision, an extraordinary lifestyle awaits.

Stretch your mind and envision how you want your business or career to look like. Articulate your aspirations and clarify your far-reaching goals and dreams. Think short term. Think long term.

Start by answering a deceptively simple yet ultra-powerful question, What do you want? Try asking this question to most people and you’ll get that “deer-in-the-headlights” look.  Most people know what they don’t want, but few souls ever pinpoint their objectives.  (Could this be one of the reasons 95 percent of all businesses fail and why few people are satisfied wit their careers?)

What do you really want to create and achieve in your business or career? Answer the following questions without holding anything back. This is just an exercise. Allow yourself to peer into your potential future:

1. What will your career or business look like when it’s done? (If you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like, you won’t know when you’ve achieved your objective or how to navigate your course. Clarify the end picture.)
2. What will you be a leader in? What will you be the best at? What do you love doing? (In order to create massive value for your customers, employees and associates, determine what you will do better than anyone else.)
3. Whom do you want to impact?  Who are you committed to best serving? (The more clearly you can define whom you plan to serve, the more effective you’ll become at fulfilling their needs.)
4. How will your work positively impact the planet? (Without sounding grandiose, what contribution will your work make to your customers, community and/or society-at-large?)

A note to all perfectionists: Don’t be a perfectionist. Trying to be perfect will only hinder your ability to craft your vision. Simply answer the questions as honestly as you can without over-thinking or over-analyzing.

After you answer all of the above questions, review your answers and combine the most important elements into a concise Vision Statement.

Get into a centered and enthusiastic state and decide on your vision. Capture all your thoughts on paper without any restrictions—let go and have fun!