The Corona Virus Outbreak- Things you can do for Career Development as an Employee Working from Home.

by Michael O' Adetu

As researchers and experts in virology work round the clock to come up with the cure for the outbreak of Corona Virus (COVID- 19), organizations are already confronted with the tough decision to make their employees work from home to curtail the spread of the virus. This pandemic virus as recently declared by the WHO once again reminds us all of the undeniable usefulness of the 21st-century technologies.  The impact of this outbreak is currently being felt by everyone and we probably need to start having a conversation about the post-pandemic impact of this virus outbreak. How can you as an employee productively use your time when working from home during this period of Coronavirus outbreak? I have put together the list of things you could do that can be of great benefit to you personally, in your career and family. Here are the lists

Learn and Build Capacity

You can use your time more productively during this period to learn and build capacity. You know yourself better than anyone else and if you will be honest with yourself, you probably know the areas in which you lack capacity with regards to your role at work. This might be an opportunity for you to embark on a journey of self-study. If you need to sign up for a short course online, do it. If you need to arrange coaching moments with a senior colleague who is an expert in the areas you are not, do it. If you need to get a certain certification during this period, get it.

Personal Reflection 

We are currently living in a busy world with immense workplace pressure and stress. You need to care for yourself and make your wellbeing a priority. This short period could be a good time for you to reflect on your attitude towards your general wellbeing and make a decision on what action you are going to take. Your mental health and stress level is important when it comes to performance on the job. Take out time to think through about your attitude towards your general wellbeing and how this is affecting your work. Having time alone to yourself is one of the magical moments to reflect on your actions and pick up important lessons.

Spend Quality Time with your Loved Ones

Amid the chaos, there are opportunities. Opportunity to bond with your kids, opportunity to spend more time with your partner, opportunity to spend more time with your parents, opportunity to care for your loved ones and opportunity to pick up your phone to check up on people you have not heard from for a long time. Often time, people take association for granted and do not appreciate relationships enough. You do not have to wait until when a relationship is taken away from you before you understand how important it is. You have been busy in the past weeks, take this period to bond, merry and demonstrate how much the people you love mean to you.

A coronavirus outbreak will go eventually. The researchers working around the clock will get a cure and everything else will return to business as usual. What you do during this period can have a huge impact that can last a lifetime. It is not enough to allow your heart to be filled with the things you see on media; train yourself to always see the opportunities in every chaos.

 

Think You're Too Old to Be An Entrepreneur? Think Again. (Infographic)

by Michael Adetu

If you think you are too old to start, then take a look at the image below. I hope you will find this useful and be motivated not to give up.




Image Source: Google

50 Signs You Might Be an Entrepreneur

by John Rampton

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people. Not only do they think differently; they act differently. They draw on personality traits, habits and mind-sets to come up with ideas that straddle the line between insanity and genius. But just because you’re an original thinker and came up with an idea to replace gasoline in cars doesn’t mean you’re cut out to be an entrepreneur. If you ever wondered if you were an entrepreneur, check out the following list. You may not have all these traits or skills, yet if you have some, this is a pretty good indicator that you have what it takes. 

1. You come from a family of individuals who just couldn't work for someone else. Your parents worked for themselves. Though this isn't true for every entrepreneur (myself included), many have a family history with one or both parents having been self-employed.

2. You hate the status quo. You’re a person who is always questioning why people do the things they do. You strive to make things better and are willing to take action on it.

3. You’re self-confident. Have you ever met an entrepreneur who was pessimistic or self-loathing? After all, if you don’t have confidence, how can others believe in you?  Most entrepreneurs are very optimistic about everything around them.

4. You’re passionate. There will be times when you spend an excessive amount of time and do not make a dollar. It’s your passion that will keep you going.

5. You don’t take no for an answer. An entrepreneur never gives up -- ever.

6. You have the ability to create unlikely partnerships from out of nowhere because of your ability to connect the dots. People tend to gravitate toward you because you are likable. Many times this is because of your passion.  

7. You spend more time with your co-founder than your spouse or significant other.

8. You dropped out of college like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

9. The daily commute to your office is from the bedroom to the living room.

10. You were always a lousy employee and probably have been fired a lot. Don't worry; you're not alone. I personally have been fired several times in my life. Don't take it as a sign that you're a bad person. Sometimes it's in your DNA.

11. You’ve always resisted authority; that's why you've had a problem holding down a job.

12. You believe that there is more than one definition of job security: You realize that your job is safe as long as you are in control as opposed to relying on a boss who could ruin your career after one swift mistake.

13. Most of your wardrobe consists of T-shirts; some you probably got at SXSW. Others display your company's name or logo.

14. You have a competitive nature and are willing to lose. You always know that you can do something better.

15. You check GitHub when you wake up in the morning.

16. You ask to be paid in game tickets, shoes or whatever else you love. There are just some things that are better than money, right?

17. Your idea of a holiday is a working day without anything interfering with the tasks you really need to get done.

18. You’re unemployable, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Life skills are more valuable than the office politics commonly found at 9-to-5 gigs.

19. You work more than 60 hours a week; yet you earned more money at an hourly job when you were in high school.

20. You want to be in control and in command of your own company. You typically like overseeing most things that go on at your company.

21. You see opportunities everywhere. For example, you walk into a building and are curious about its worth or the companies inside.

22. The word “pitch” no longer has an association with baseball.

23. Your take a personality test, like one offered by the Enneagram Institute, and end up with a result calling you a "reformer type," someone purposeful, self-controlled and perfectionist.

24. You recognize that the best seats at your favorite coffee shops are those closest to power outlets.

25. You’re a logical thinker with ideas about how to correct problems and the overall situation.

26. Speaking of problem solving, have you checked to see if there's an app for that? Perhaps you've already begun to create a business model and the software architecture to see if it’s feasible.

27. You’re a people person. You have no problem communicating with people.

28. You regularly quote Steve Jobs mainly to keep yourself from falling to pieces.

29. You sold stuff as a kid like at a lemonade stand. Heck, when there were class sales, you were probably one of the top sellers. 

30. You get more SMS alerts from people you follow on Twitter than from actual friends listed in your address book.

31. You’re a self-starter, meaning you don’t give up on a project until it’s completed.

32. No matter what you do on a daily basis, you always think of it in terms of delivering a return on investment.

33. Your dress code is shabby chic and your suit is just collecting dust. You prefer T-shirts and jeans over a suit any day.

34. You’re unrealistic. As an inventor or innovator, you kind of have to be this way.

35. You think outside of the box. If not, what will change?

36. You’re a charming and charismatic person. 

37. Rules don’t apply to you. We’re not talking about breaking the law. Instead, you believe in efficiency and will bend rules to make things run smoothly.

38. You realize that you can’t do everything alone. You have an idea and can promote it but also know that you’re not skilled at every task of running a business.

39. You’re very opinionated. That's another reason you got fired a lot.

40. You’re unpredictable. As an entrepreneur, you know how quickly things can change. Thankfully, you're ready and willing to make adjustments.

41. You enjoy being with a group but don't relish much being alone. You probably get most energetic when working with groups of more than four people.

42. You’re determined. You have to make the impossible possible.

43. You have the support of your friends and family. These are the people who get you. And they’ll be there to support you along the way.

44. It’s normal for you to take a nap under your desk to catch up on sleep. After all, getting eight hours of sleep sometime between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. is antiquated.

45. You’ve done the market research. You know that just because you have an incredible idea doesn’t mean that it’s profitable. But you’ve already looked into whether customers will make the purchase.

46. You surround yourself with quality people -- not leeches who will bring you down.

47. You’re a bit out there. Having the ability to create something out of nothing takes a mad-genius type of person. Remember, people thought Albert Einstein was insane before he proved the theory of relativity.

48. Did you ever ask your family, friends or significant other to send you a calendar invite so that you could talk for all of five minutes?

49. You believe that your time is worth more than money.

50. During your most recent rant about growth hacking, your spouse or boyfriend (or girlfriend) totally understood what you were saying. 

Even if you don’t have all the above traits right now, you’ll probably develop more of them over time. After all, being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle, not a job or hobby.

Are You Using Your Data, or Just Collecting It?

by Robert Glazer
 

One of the most important business lessons is also the simplest: success is often the result of making more good decisions than bad ones over time. The question is how to do that. This should be easier to do today. Technology and business intelligence (BI) provide a wealth of data to guide even the most nuanced decision-making. For many scenarios, there is data that can show you the outcome of past decisions that were similar and reveal the projected outcomes over time. Despite this, many leaders aren’t taking full advantage of the tools at their disposal and rely heavily on gut-instinct in situations where data provides a more complete picture. In situations without data or precedent, instinctive decision-making is likely the most viable option. But this strategy is unnecessarily risky in cases where the data shows the outcome of similar situations that have occurred in the past.

In these cases, many leaders use past exceptions as justification to ignore the cost of failure. Reasons for this may vary — from a distrust of analytics to a desire to succeed with a bold, unconventional move — but it can prove costly in the long-run. An illustration of this is professional gambling. Casinos thrive because many bettors believe they are smarter than the odds, and that they can beat the house with bold betting. These are the gamblers who drive the majority of casinos’ profits. The bettors who win in the long-run clinically assess the odds of each bet and make careful, data-backed decisions, making their biggest wagers when the odds are in their favor. Statistics tend to normalize over time, eliminating the short-term aberrations that give the false appearance of good or bad luck. The longer you play the same game, the more the odds win out.

 

The Flashbulb Memory Problem

When relying on prior experience, consider that memory is inconsistent and fallible. We are more likely to recall extremely unexpected events, rather than more mundane occurrences, thanks to “flashbulb memory.” According to the American Psychological Association, flashbulb memory describes distinct recollections of emotionally significant occurrences. APA notes, “Though flashbulb memories are more likely to be retained than the memory of an everyday event, they are not always accurate.” In a business context, flashbulb memory causes people to remember exceptional results, rather than expected outcomes. For example, an executive may vividly remember taking a chance on an unconventional hire and watching that employee grow into a star performer. They are less likely to remember when they made a safer bet on an obviously qualified candidate who turned out to be exactly as competent as expected, or the risky hires that did not work out. The exception becomes the legend.

Taking Advantage of Data

There’s a huge difference between understanding the importance of data and making it a priority in your organization. Every business needs experts responsible for analyzing pertinent data and helping inform employee decision-making. For example, at Acceleration Partners (AP), a member of our team is responsible for using BI to tell us which brands, based upon their attributes, past behavior, and failure rates, would be risky to take on as clients. If left to their own devices, a salesperson would naturally not be very inclined to turn away a prospect. BI-informed rules can overrule our sales team if the prospect seems to have a high potential to fail based on past data. This does not mean it is always a bad idea to take risks. Leaders should still rely upon their instinct if they strongly believe they are right. But comparing that gut-feeling with the data consensus is a good way to test the certainty of the decision. Likewise, if a leader decides to go against the data, they must take ownership of that choice if things go badly, and bear responsibility for the outcome. Exceptions need to have accountability because, as the saying goes, “Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.”

 

Setting Rules and Policies

Of course, decision-making is executed at all levels of the organizational chart. While the executive team will handle decisions that make or break the business, successful companies ensure that employees are empowered to make decisions at every tier of the company. Where the data is overwhelming, leaders may choose to set guidelines based on evidence. Another pertinent example at Acceleration Partners is our approach to counteroffers. In our experience, counteroffers have a poor short-term outcome because they adversely affect the relationship with the employee and only temporarily fix the underlying issues. For example, a study from Heidrick & Struggles found that 80% of senior executives think trust with an employee is diminished after the employee accepts a counteroffer.

Knowing this, we made a blanket policy for our talent team to not extend counteroffers. We think it’s a mistake to do something with such a high failure rate, and by setting a policy, we release less-experienced employees from making those hard choices without the benefit of the data or experience. We are playing the odds. Educating employees on the historical odds of decisions prevents them from making unnecessarily risky decisions and gives leadership a chance to carefully consult the data and weigh the consequences and costs of failure. Instinct still has a place in business, but it should not be the only driver of decision-making. By making data and BI a focal point of your team’s strategic thinking, and using it to craft smart organizational policies, leaders can safeguard their businesses against unnecessary failure, and ensure that the company makes more good decisions than bad.

About the Author

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global performance marketing agency and recipient of numerous company culture awards. Bob was also named to Glassdoor’s Top CEO of Small and Medium Companies in the U.S. list, ranking #2 out of 50. He is the author of the international bestselling book, Performance Partnerships and the upcoming book Elevate: Push Beyond Your Limits and Unlock Success in Yourself and Others. 100,000 leaders around the world read his weekly Friday Forward.

Source: Harvard Business Review