The Core Beliefs of Highly Successful People

As you progress in your career the world of business can at times be ruthless, and even the most successful of individuals will at some point fail. With possible difficulties lying around every corner, what is it then that sets highly successful people apart from the rest of the flock? Undoubtedly, it is their self-belief and resilience to overcome even the worst of situations

Making mistakes is not the important part – it's the getting up, dusting yourself off and moving on that counts. Many great historical figures have commented on failure and success and the intimate relationships between the two; Winston Churchill famously said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm', and it's an attitude reminiscent of this that has pushed renowned business figures like Deborah Meaden and Richard Branson.

Deborah Meaden experienced failure early on, after setting up a glass and ceramics export agency that ultimately failed after 18 months. Deborah said: 'I consider it a failure to slog on with a business that is going to die sooner rather than later. And that's a skill I've had from my very, very early days. A lot of people are blinded. They think, “I can't give this up. I'd feel like a failure.”'

Richard Branson has also experienced a multitude of failed ventures throughout the years, but champions his team's resilience to push through as the basis for his success. He credits recognising mistakes and recovering as essential skills for any successful entrepreneur, saying 'over the years, my team and I have not let mistakes, failures or mishaps get us down. Instead, even when a venture had failed, we try to look for opportunities, to see whether we can capitalise on another gap in the market'.

Branson raises an excellent point, and one that is key to the growth of highly successful people; if you do experience failure, take a step back and see how you can turn the experience into something fruitful and productive. Whether it's just recognising where you went wrong and how to remedy this in the future, or using the situation as a base to progress in another direction, maximising on your mistakes will go a long way to you becoming highly successful in your chosen career.

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It Takes All Kinds of Brains to Make a Perfect Team

If your team isn't cognitively diverse, you're missing a huge opportunity

Creating a Perfect Team - Thinking out of the box

Have you ever wondered why a team of smart, experienced people aren't performing well? It's not owing to a lack of skills. More likely there's a breakdown in something deeper that precludes the group's ability to generate ideas, get things done, or perform at high levels.

This can happen as a result of many things, but in my mind, it really breaks down to two factors.

1. Does the team have the diversity of thought to come at things from different perspectives or is it a one-note band?

2. Even if there are multiple perspectives, does the team have the requisite openness, trust, and communication to allow divergent thinking and ideas to flourish?

From Emergenetics research into psychology and human behaviour, we know that thinking is manifested in four distinct areas--conceptual, social, analytical, and structural. We also know that every person's behaviour falls somewhere along a spectrum in each of three arenas--expressiveness, assertiveness, and flexibility.

Cognitive Diversity: The Golden Ring

Teams that exhibit a full spectrum of these seven attributes are the goal. We call it a Whole Emergenetics, or WE, approach to team building, and it is incredibly powerful in practice.

It's easy to see how this approach works--diverse teams have all the tools at their disposal. They're critical thinkers, innovators, and organized and empathic all at once. They can be accommodating or firm, process internally or be gregarious, and be peacekeepers or drivers, whatever the task requires.

Diverse teams have the ability to see every perspective and put the strength of each individual team member to work toward the common goal. Teams that lack that diversity are unbalanced in one way or another, and that imbalance erodes effectiveness over time.

A group leaning heavily toward one thinking preference may excel in the formation of ideas but lack the ability to formulate a clear plan and see the project through to the end. Or be great at planning and follow-through but short on ideas.

Another group may have the potential to embrace diverse speaking but not actually value or elicit all perspectives. A team led by a few driving, gregarious people may never let others speak, especially those on the quiet end of the expressiveness spectrum. Valuable thinking and ideas are lost.

How to Achieve It

Chances are, you're not going to just stumble across a cognitively diverse team in the wild. You need to be deliberate. If you have a tool like Emergenetics to uncover preferences, that's great, but if not, you can apply these tactics.

Ask for volunteers to fulfill roles. If you're a team leader, you can see inklings of how team members think. Ask the team for volunteers who can naturally bring a perspective of analytical, structural, social, and conceptual thinking to the table. Make sure they're responsible for the perspective. Do the same for expressiveness, assertiveness, and flexibility--you need representation from across each spectrum.

Put tasks and projects into a diverse approach. Any initiative the team works on can be seen through the lens of cognitive diversity. If you're having a meeting, ensure that you approach it from all seven attributes. As you come up with solutions, put each into a framework and test it against the full thinking and behavioral spectrum--does the solution speak to analytical concerns, for example? Is it resonant for structural thinkers? Ask this question for each attribute.

The potential for cognitive diversity exists for all groups and teams whether they are naturally diverse or not. In reality, unbalanced teams exist. What's important is that you as a leader are in touch with the team dynamic and take a deliberate approach to assigning work and creating teams. With conscious effort, balance can be achieved, and potential unlocked and channeled into results.

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Successful Managers - the Fundamentals

Newly promoted managers which despite their past success can often struggle with their new responsibilities. Its classic isn’t? You’re good at your job, you get promoted to the high echelons of management, and then find yourself struggling. I know what’s like having walked in those shoes.  The solution is straightforward, but before highlighting this I’d like to mention, the 5 greatest challenges managers worry about: sales, profitability, managing people, costs and competitors.

So given this, why is a common oversight frequently made, where managers focus on the ‘hard processes’ of strategy, targets and policies, to the exclusion of ‘soft skills’ of managing people?  Let me highlight the priority by asking, in your team what’s the hardest to improve or change? Is it learning new skills, or experience or changing someone’s attitude? The answer is pretty obvious.

‘The Sunday Times Best 100 Companies’ to work for have recently been announced for 2014 and it’s interesting to note the theme across all these organisations; namely, good leadership and management; teamwork and communication. It is these soft skills if applied consistently and in balance with the ‘hard processes’ make for a successful manager.

So, here are the fundamentals for new managers:

1.  Team Climate: as a manager part of your role and responsibility is to create the culture that enables high performance. This sets the foundation for everything else that follows. You can do this by ensuring people’s behaviour and attitude are aligned to your organisation’s values. Hold people to account for bad behaviours. Do be constructive and when needed be assertive with your feedback.

2.   Effective Communication: Engage all staff and aim to influence others. Listen, be in tune with what’s not being said. The grapevine is your barometer of what’s truly going on. Is your style of communication adding to your team’s issues? Are your team confident to feedback upwards? If not, why not?

3.   Build positive relationships: make the time and develop genuine rapport particular with others where it doesn’t come easy. This means building trust, respecting different points of view and holding judgement.

4.   Manage Performance: ensure clarity of objectives, forward planning, manage resources to ensure objectives are met; and communicate; go back to step 2.

5.   Manage inappropriate behaviours: get the balance right of holding yourself and others to account in an appropriate way. Without compromising trust or respect give consistent feedback that keeps others engaged, committed and motivated; back to step 1.

6.   Give Praise. Make it your mantra to catch someone doing something right every day. Doesn’t have to be complicated or over the top, a simple thank you goes a long way to influencing your team’s motivation and commitment.

And the final building block is Confidence. Believe in yourself. You can and will be a successful manager.

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