TU strategy: 5 Secrets to Achieving Your Happiness

Are you happy with your life? How your career is progressing? What types of relationships are you able to create and maintain? 

Happiness has been a constant pursuit for humanity. This pursuit has brought us many innovations which helped evolve our reality into the current era of globalization. With such progress, it’s amazing to see that we don’t have the complete happiness that we desire. Studies have consistently found that the most technological nations are not always the happiest. This points out the fact that happiness isn’t always related to economic status or technology. Happiness is not something that money can buy. It is something that starts internally and integrates with the outside world. 

The foundation of happiness tends to be a bit of a mystery. Conventional wisdom tends to focus humanity on what we have externally, rather than what’s deep inside. This external focus allows someone else to control what we determine as happiness. At Transcontinental Institution, our research and practice have found five secrets that enable our leaders to thrive with sustained happiness and success. These secrets involve an exploration of what’s inside and integrates it with intelligences to control the external world.

1. Knowing Who You Are: studies have consistently found that self-awareness is the foundation for success and happiness. The following are some reflective questions to explore on a regular basis: What is your purpose in life?  What’s your reason to exist? Who are you? Often, asking yourself these questions at least three times will help get through the surface rationale and into a deeper exploration. This introspection starts with a few sentences and transforms into significant reflections.
2. Knowing Your Core Values: the second critical aspect of happiness resides in your values. Values like family, integrity, achievement, and respect are part of every individual. Write down your top 8 values in order of priority. Explore what each word means. You can also explore how others see you by asking them to list your top values and see if your own list match what they perceive you as. This opens the door for better understanding.
3. Aligning Your Core Values with those of your workplace: most of us tend to spend the most of our waking hours at the workplace. Yet, many people don’t know the values being practiced in their workplace. These are often not what’s explicitly stated but practiced within the organizational culture. For example, an organization may state respect as one of its core values in marketing materials; yet, their normal practices require conformity to orders from superiors. Exploring the practiced values of the organization and comparing with your own core values is an alignment process that can minimize stress and lead to happiness. 
4. Empowering Relationships: the quality of human relationships drive our happiness. In all environments such as work, friendships, or family, human beings are social creatures that thrive on health relationships. To build solid relationships, a solid basis of emotional intelligence is needed. Ask yourself, how many people truly care about your growth and happiness are around you? 
5. Being able to Balance Your Multiple Intelligences: as you have seen from the above items, they require various forms of intelligence.  Knowing who you are is part of spiritual intelligence; being able to identify and align values connects analytical intelligence with spiritual intelligence. Empowering relationships require emotional intelligence. These are just a few of intelligences that bring sustained happiness. Making a conscious effort to balance your multiple intelligences is the foundation to sustained happiness and success. 

At Transcontinental Institution, we provide the necessary tools for our students/graduates to not only succeed in business, but also live a happy and fulfilled life. If you seek happiness for yourself and those around you, explore the key skills behind the above 5 secrets to happiness with us. We guarantee it will be a most profound and transformational journey. 

Fixing Performance Management

When you hear the term performance management – how do you feel? As a manager/executive, this concept tends to bring extra work that most people do not have time for at the end of each fiscal calendar; procrastination is common. As an employee, it tends to stir up extra anxiety since it directly has an influence over one’s renumeration for the next year. Regardless of the role you have in an organization, the negative connotations are common.  From an organizational perspective, performance management is rarely effective in consistently enhancing the desired performance improvements. The combination of the negative connotations and the lack of effectiveness at the organizational level makes anyone wonder, why do we use it at all? 

The answer tends to be limited to a few responses, regardless of industry, location, and size. Most executives don’t see an effective alternative, or they don’t have the time/resources to fix what is needed. Having worked with countless executives and HR managers from around the world, the frustrations voiced are similar. This is driven by two major influences from management principles. The first major influence is the latent metrics. Typical metrics tend to measure outcomes after specified time. If a metric at the end of the year looks great, they have no idea which specific set of behaviours drove that success.  If a metric shows poor performance, employees still have no idea how to fix it. For clever employees, studies show increases in performance for them just a month or two before the review time to maximize their rewards. These individuals learn to play the game to get the raise, but then their performance reverts back to normal. The second major influence is the frequency of measurement that minimizes chances for development. When the performance evaluations are done once a year or even twice a year, people have already developed habits in their daily tasks. Even highly motivated employees need direction for development. The responsibility to provide effective direction is left to the leadership abilities of individual managers, which also is not systematically developed in the organization.

Based on these major factors, the results of performance management are abysmal. Executives and managers desire a workplace where performance increases along with innovation. Let’s explore some ways to improve your system. Start with visualizing a new learning structure that drives the right thought process to yield desired behaviors. In time, the learning structure leads to the desired performance targets. This addresses a fundamental flaw, which is that outcomes cannot be measured without learning from the mixture of key behaviors that drive performance.

1. You start with exploring tacit knowledge, which challenges leaders to discover what their employees know. This includes their greatest frustrations at work, their innovations, and other aspects of their knowledge. 
2. You then take the tacit knowledge and make it explicit by synthesizing the individual knowledge into group knowledge. This provides the foundation of what’s needed in developing employees. Combined with organizational goals for skills development, explicit knowledge creates the learning contents.
3. New information is then shared through standard mediums of learning such as workshops, articles, meetings. Keep in mind – this is far from learning. It is only the introduction of new information. 
4. Next is the scheduled application of new learning, which should  occur within a week of new information. This is where an accountability structure must create the expectation and build the courage within the individuals to apply. This calls for a safe experimental environment.
5. The final stage is the measurement of outcomes. This is the key design that takes performance management into a different dimension. The measurement will occur with the activities of learning, as well as with outcomes resulting from application. 

This process is the organizational process for continued success in performance. Some organizational cultural elements also must be in place, such as weekly learning meetings. In such meetings, leaders inquire of personnel what they have learned/innovated/overcome in the past week.

3 Ways To Keep Your Top Performers From Leaving

When a valuable employee leaves your organization, it’s painful! You’re likely to think, “how can he/she leave, after all we’ve been through? After all the training and development, we’ve given him/her!” You may feel anger from the thought of betrayal; you may feel guilt, asking yourself what else could you have done differently; you may even feel regret, towards spending all the money and countless efforts to develop this person only to see all your efforts lost. On top of it all, the amount of work left must be done by others, adding more stress to the entire team, including yourself having to delegate most of it.

Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience by managers and executives in most companies. Many employers are losing or about to lose their top performers. Studies have shown that losing an employee can costs the organization up to two to three times their salary, depending on the type of position. Besides the obvious problems such as lower employee morale, hiring efforts, and training costs, the loss of tacit knowledge is irreplaceable. All these problems are caused by an old management principle that’s still applied in many organizations – external motivation (money). This management principle assumes that human beings are very simplistic creatures, reacting with a consistent visible behaviour based on a stimulus which is money. In reality, people may be motivated by money, but they are more inspired by many humanistic factors that create loyalty. When you provide people primarily with financial rewards, you’re only training them to be loyal to money. It’s no wonder they’ll leave if the money is right. What if there are other ways to create loyal employees?

Having designed many inspirational systems in organizations across the world, three specific ways are proven strategies that achieve tremendous loyalty from innovative and hardworking employees.

1. Understanding employees’ core values: when you take the time to create an inventory of employee values, you’ll obtain a much further understanding of who they are. Core values like family, respect, integrity and growth can create a much stronger bond between your employees.  Start by asking employees to list their top 5 values and see how they are aligned.
2. Developing an employee growth process that creates meaningful achievement: this strategy transforms the problematic performance review process into a completely new dimension of learning. Based on the common foundation of humanity that everyone desires to grow and see some form of achievement that’s meaningful to them, develop a frequent learning process that aligns with the passions of the individual employee. This is far beyond prescribing a generic training session from time to time and call it training. A continuous development process aligns with the core values of the employee; furthermore, co-create some goals that are meaningful to the employee and the organization. Having meaningful achievements and a path to get there develops an extraordinary bond of respect.
3. Enhancing the emotional intelligence of your management team: this strategy calls for the key managers who interact with your employees to consistently act with high level of emotional intelligence. For example, managers each week proactively finds 2 problems from their employees and leading the employees to create solutions. Such consistent behaviours show employees a high level of empathy and care while also intellectually stimulating them to feel positive about their solutions.

Each of these strategies build on top of one-another. They are relatively very inexpensive to create but takes significant strategic thought that goes well beyond conventional wisdom. At the end of the day, when you create these processes, you’ll achieve incredible employee loyalty as well as a highly innovative organizational culture.

Develop the right skills efficiently

Globalization has created many opportunities for nations to advance but Myanmar hasn’t been able to take advantage of this situation. Rather than waiting for one from someone else, how might you make a breakthrough?

The key issue is the development of skills efficiently and quickly. To do this, the mastery of learning is the foundation. We all start with information, which is mostly free and easily accessible. But information is worthless unless we can recall it at the right time and use it correctly. To transform information into knowledge that you can recall, there must be some form of application that creates an emotional link to that piece of information which enables long-term memory. Skills are then built on top of that knowledge through consistent application and feedback. Studies have shown tremendous insights on how the human brain actually learns, but the application of that information is left as mere words in journal articles. We spend tremendous amounts of money and time on new information at workshops or traditional courses but in truth, only ending up with very limited recall of what we have been exposed to. 

Learning requires a conscious process that should develop your self-efficacy, which is your own ability to learn as fast as possible. If you don’t know what your preferred learning modality and consciously design your efforts around it, you’re losing invaluable time and money. It is fascinating to speak to educators, whether at the primary or the university education level. They have a very limited idea as to what learning modalities are, or how to apply them into their classrooms. 

Learning occurs in 3 primary modalities – auditory, visual and kinesthetic.  If you’re visual, you’re more likely to have very neatly organized desks. If you’re more kinesthetic, you’re more likely to have organised messes. We all have a primary and a secondary modality to learning that helps us bond new information with emotion to form knowledge.  Which modality do you think is your preferred way of learning?

Once you know what your primary learning modality is, the next step is to find ways to apply this new information somewhere within your own life. This can be in your family or workplace. This application must happen within a few days at most, before that information is forgotten. You’ll need to design the application in a profound way that the results are clearly felt with meaningful emotions. Skills are then developed through conscious practice of knowledge. This is what we call a Performance Learning System. You can build one for yourself or your team/organisation.  Scrap the performance reviews that don’t work and design instead a learning system that focuses on skills development. You’ll quickly realize how easy and rewarding it is to see yourself grow quickly and consistently. 

Knowledge is often not merely built in a workshop or classroom. Skills are even further removed from that traditional learning context. We can’t just expect to go to a workshop on communication and expect to be better communicators. Learning how to empower yourself  using a performance learning system is a far better the path to produce great leaders.

How can you Exceed your Potential? Secrets revealed through systemic thought

We all have potential. Some potentials are empowering, and others are limiting. These potentials represent an internal belief system about who we are and what we can accomplish in our lifetime. What if what we believe as our potential is only a box designed to limit our true potentials? This exploration calls for a discussion beyond what we know, beyond what we know that we don’t understand. More importantly, it calls for a discovery of what we don’t know that we do not know. Your potential is much more than what is in your awareness. 

This brief article illuminates some secrets towards exceeding what you believe is your potential, while shattering the limitations in your mental framework. 

Potentials start with self-belief. At a very young age, you’re taught by your parents about who you are and how far you can reach. Within one’s national culture, beliefs are also ingrained in every aspect of life. Some potentials are limited by birth right, some by education and others by gender. Ask yourself this: 

How can you become the President of the world?

We’ve done this in dozens of countries; the responses are the same – a puzzled look. 

People tend to define one’s potential within the limitations of titles in a specific career. Most don’t realize that titles were created during the industrial revolution to mirror the military’s hierarchy to achieve a level of control over a large group of people.  It creates a scarcity mentality for people to fight on a predetermined corporate ladder for more and more scarce higher positions of authority. As early as your initial entrance into a school, you’re subject to the authority of a teacher’s judgment in grades. This continues for the next 17 years through university education where students are trained to be subordinate employees in a rigid hierarchy of the classroom. You are trapped in a system of control.

Why does one authority figure (teacher/professor) get to determine your worth? Can they accurately judge your knowledge, abilities and potential? 

This is only one of many limitations that restrain your potential. Many others exist in the educational systems such as behaviorism, specialization, categorical learning and examinations. Each of these are well documented in research in their limitations and would take many pages to fully explain.

You can choose a different path, one that breaks the walls of these frameworks. Thanks to scientific research, human potential can be integrated with complex developments like multiple intelligences and systems thinking. Imagine your potential when you have a full comprehension and wise use of multiple intelligences such as analytical intelligence, emotional intelligence, somatic intelligence and systems consciousness. Complex developments enhance key areas like confidence, self-efficacy and the ability to build trusting relationships.