Do you have one?

We’ve all encountered them.  The one, or two, or more bad apples on our teams who have little or nothing positive to say about anything, regularly upset and disrupt others, and make work miserable for everyone. 
 

Today’s Tuesday Reading, “Don’t waste your time looking back.  You’re not going that way,” is an essay by Mark (Bo) Connell, Assistant Dean for Hospital Operations, Texas A&M University, College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, Texas Veterinary Medical Center.  It first appeared earlier this year as a leaders program reflection.
 

Do You Have One?

Career limiting habits (CLHs) are habits, repeated behaviors that keep us from greater success or enjoyment in our careers.  And, really, in all aspects of our life.  Research has shown that most of us are aware of our career limiting habits but have not made much progress in addressing them.  Why?  Partly because it is really hard, partly because we don’t understand the cause, and partly because the cure we select doesn’t address the real cause.
 

I suspect that you, like me, must answer “yes.”  From a neuroscience perspective, our brains are constantly, subconsciously scanning the world around us seeking to identify and examine “events” of note – for example, the school bus that went down my street this morning at 

Earlier this summer we introduced the idea (in a series of Tuesday Readings, as referenced below) that if we understand how our brain works, we can better understand why we react the way we do.  I wrote, then, that the individual’s brain, in the days of our early ancestors, had one key goal – survival, avoiding threats and seeking food (rewards).  And, avoiding threats had a much higher priority with five times more neural networks devoted to threat detection than to identifying rewards. 

As I listened to an interview with Rick Levin this morning, CEO of Coursera, what seems to me as a decreasing value of content, was further being validated. 

Over the past years, we’ve written about the skill of listening several times.  (You can check them out at MOR Insights.)  Today, I want to return to that topic with some data.  Today’s Tuesday Reading is Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman’s essay What Great Listeners Actually Do which appeared on a recent HBR blog. 
 

So, what do I do now?

We all make mistakes.  Sometimes they are small and personal like forgetting to put the trash at the curb to be picked up.  Or, larger and embarrassing, like writing the amount differently in numbers and words on a check.  Or, sending a critical email to the wrong addressee.  Or, being the only one to show up for a meeting because you failed to send a notice of the meeting around to the expected attendees.  Or, you crash an application server because you didn’t stop and check the command before you entered it.  Or,

Correcting a Bad One

Several weeks ago, the Tuesday Readings featured a series of essays on neuroscience –Neuroscience and Change – Part 1,