Steering Point Articles
Bouncing Back from Professional Failure
Striving for excellence is all well and good, but perspective is vital. To function at any decent level consistently requires an understanding that all things cannot be well at all times, and that the moments in which we fall short of our own or others’ standards are opportunities for learning.
Crafting: How to Increase Engagement, Performance, and Job Satisfaction
Dissatisfaction is likely to come to all workers at some point. Oftentimes it passes, proving itself to be no more than a tough project or bad day at the office. But if the problem is consistent and/or stifling, action may need to be taken. For those who don’t think the job itself is the problem so much as how they’re handling it, a potential solution is work crafting.
Emotional Intelligence and Engaging Others
What if we approached mental fitness the way we approach physical fitness? That is to say, conceiving it as necessary and making it a priority. What would that regime entail if it were a daily act, and what might be gained as a result? What if we resituated emotionality in our profession as a catalytic force, not a disruptive one? Thus, shifting the workplace from a rational environment to a place of outward feeling and engagement. The answer to all these questions is related to the development and implementation of emotional intelligence.
New Year’s Resolutions: How to Make Them Useful
There’s something endearing in the lofty aspirations we wheel out each January, unkeepable promises that our poor future selves are made to feel slovenly for not fulfilling until we get the chance to do it all over again this time next year. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are more reasonable targets we can set ourselves – and more practical ways we can go about achieving them – so that when the chiming bells usher us into 2024, we can look back at our year and say we really did something worthwhile with it.
Creating and fostering cultures of meaning
A modish topic, but sometimes less emphasised, facet of success is company culture. Culture is a catchall term, but it comes down to how organisation systems are formed and maintained. It is social in origin and totalising in dissemination. That matters because humans are not innate; we produce and reproduce these systems through learned behaviour, mirroring, and various institutions.
Mindfulness in the workplace
Plenty of the shifts we saw to working practices—such as introducing some form of home or hybrid working as standard—have already become accepted as part of the much-touted “new normal”. Others are still evolving, not least when it comes to the relationship between businesses and their employees’ health and wellbeing. One practice that has emerged as potentially pivotal in bridging the gap between personal welfare and workplace performance is that of mindfulness.
Optimism is a Force Multiplier
Having a positive outlook is predictive of a greater quality of life and a lower death rate. Optimistic people—whether by disposition, purposeful mindset, or praxis—lead healthier longer lives.
Walking, and the benefits of everyday creativity
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” 1 So said Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1886 philosophical treatise Beyond Good and Evil. In the more than a century that has passed since that book’s publication, many other leading public thinkers from Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs also preached the virtues of walking as a tool for thought. And they were right to.
Embracing Failure
Many know this but may not want to hear it. The concept may be anathema to your sense of being and thinking, and you may not even be willing to process the possibility in your workplace. Nevertheless, let’s talk about it. No matter how cautious, discerning, motivated, prepared, and skilled you are—failure is inevitable. So why does it happen, and why are we afraid of it?
The benefits of silence in our professional lives
Among the holistic factors that impact job performance may be something that many of us do not acknowledge or take little notice of but matters considerably. That is our ability to mediate our environment and self-generate calm through silence. Without it, we may allow mental fatigue, creative stagnation, and distraction to influence our decisions and output.
How to Avoid the Winter Malaise and Keep Productivity up Through the Dark Season
As clocks turn back in most of the western world, we must contend with the fact that, though we are still in the throes of autumn, winter has come, or at the very least is coming, bringing with it the annual productivity malaise that accompanies the season of darkness.
“Empowering” Workers is More Than a Catchy Phrase
In a recent Financial Times article accompanied by the headline: “‘Big Brother’ managers should turn the lens on themselves”, Rana Foroohar, the newspaper’s Global Business Columnist, made a compelling argument for why the increased surveillance of workers is not the answer within our increasingly hybrid working world.
