A Helpful Guide to Managing Ourselves and Our Responses
We have published 31 Issues of 2040’s Ideas and Innovations Newsletter and appreciate all your feedback and support over this year. We wanted to take the opportunity to curate some of our favorite and most important topics for your holiday reading.
As we all take a break from navigating the dynamics in our workplaces and shift to focus on family and friends, we offer you some tactics and approaches you might use. Our interactions with people are pretty consistent at work and on our own time, so the following thought leadership pieces could come in handy!
Let’s start with The Fault in Ourselves which explores how strongly our biases play into how we perceive and define others and the world around us. We also go deeper into how we think and solve problems with pieces, on critical thinking, leading with courage and allowing criticism, active listening, recognizing patterns, improving decision making, and mastering communications that actually communicate. Each of these themes separately and combined represent best practices that you should consider in creating deeper understanding of the humans that comprise your life, your family, your friends, and society at large. Below are some additional relevant articles.
Happy Thanksgiving from the 2040 Team
Your Thanksgiving Sampler
The Fault in Ourselves
Issue 26: October 21, 2021
One outcome of the pandemic is operating in a highly fractious marketplace with gender identity, economic and political distinctions often accelerated into polarization. These issues are not just external, they are also prevalent internally, revealing new challenges to leading and working together. Frankly, it’s hard to get in touch with personal bias since our default is to assume everyone believes and operates the way we do.
Managing Individual and Team Transitions
Issue 22: September 23, 2021
The human element of any change or transformation effort is often overlooked or, worse, not even considered. Leaders assume the hierarchy of management and staff will simply follow directions and bring the strategies and goals to life. In today’s everchanging environment, internalized urgency to do “something” to adapt to market forces is critical, but even with that urgency, critical thinking remains paramount.
Customer Loyalty
Issue 19: September 9, 2021
Running an organization that is customer-centric is a marathon. Human behavior can be mercurial. Trends from one industry segment suddenly disrupt another sector in the highly connected and interdependent system that comprises society. A global pandemic sends rational planning out the window and accelerates emerging trends and changes that were suppressed or sometimes completely ignored. And the biggest challenges today are understanding changing human behaviors and accepting the fact that the customer is the point of purchase, whenever, wherever, and however they demand to be served. Unfortunately, most organizations end up in a defensive mode if they don’t anticipate the future and deeply understand their customers.
Decision Making and Primitive Automaticity
Issue 27: October 28, 2021
We live in nearly constant transition as the world around us continues to change quickly and dynamically. We often don’t know what we may have lost (or gained) as situations change or evolve around us. A quote from The Matrix sums it up best when Morpheus responds to Neo by saying, “What is reality? Reality comes from electrical pulses firing synapses in the brain and which forms the construct. The reality, then is what the mind believes it is.” How does this relate to managing ourselves and our responses?
How to Manage a Five Generation Workforce
Issue 25: October 14, 2021
We are at an interesting inflection point: Five different generations make up today’s workforce: Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, boomers and the Silent Generation. And the Alphas are not far behind. Each generation approaches their careers differently and each needs to be managed in nuanced ways.
Decision Making in a Digital Age
Issue 24: October 7, 2021
The debate in management and leadership circles is how to best make decisions in a digital age. Should you be data-driven or intuitive? We are the sum-total of our own biases and past experiences, which hinder the effectiveness of intuitive decision-making in the 21st century. A decision-making approach that is based on quality data that represents a complete or close to complete reality can more clearly reveal effective actions, intelligence, and strategies.
Taking the Pulse of Your Employees
Issue 23: September 30, 2021
Many organizations are facing a Kairos moment, a moment they neither anticipated nor planned for. Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment. Others might think of the Kairos as a crucible and defining moment. Over the past 18+ months, organizations have had to adapt and change quickly. Some have been successful, some haven’t, and some have had limited success, still on the journey.
Get in touch with us!
2040 helps organizations navigate the sea changes of finding their new normal. We offer actionable expertise in the strategy and operations of digital growth and engagement, empowering an empathetic workplace culture, strengthening your value proposition and driving revenues. We’ve been in your shoes and we know what impedes transformation … and what unlocks it.
Onward and upward from the 2040 Team