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6.) Limit Your Choices

5.) Create To-do Lists Based on Specific Goals

3.) Learn To Let Go

.) Simple Rituals

1.) Make All These a Habit!

The process of creating habits involves building neural pathways in your brain – and this takes a heck of a lot of time. How much time? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says 10,000 hours. Another author says it takes approximately 45 days.

A lack of coordination is a serious shortcoming in our helping system

We started with a networking exchange: we had the representatives indicate when each church group served warm meals. This revealed that two churches provided meals on Sundays. When the churches agreed that one would offer a meal on Sunday and the other would serve its meal on Wednesday, we moved from networking to coordination

Himmelman defines cooperation as exchanging information, modifying activities, and sharing resources for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose. Cooperation builds on the exchanges of networking and coordination and adds the new concept of sharing resources.

common purpose really become critical in cooperative exchanges.

Common purpose is more complex than mutual benefit

visioning process about where they want to go as separate entities, and then they have to determine what parts of their visions are held in common.

element of sharing resources. Here Himmelman has included the magic word: resources.

collaboration, which builds on networking, coordination, and cooperation. Our definition already includes the concepts of exchanging information, modifying activities, sharing resources, and having a common purpose. To reach collaboration, Himmelman adds enhancing the capacity of another for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose by sharing risks, resources, responsibilities, and rewards.

enhancing the capacity of another.

risks, resources, rewards, and responsibilities

resources

Rewards, too, must be shared.

sharing responsibilities.

2006 study

Bridgespan predicted that there would be a huge need for top-notch nonprofit leaders, driven by the growth of the nonprofit sector and the looming retirement of baby boomers from leadership posts.

the need for C-suite leaders5 grew dramatically.

the majority of our survey respondents (57 percent) attributed their retention challenges at least partially to low compensation, an issue that can feel daunting to many nonprofits. Lack of development and growth opportunities ranked next, cited by half of respondents as a reason that leaders leave their organizations.

those jobs keep coming open.

Surprisingly, little is due to the wave of retirement we have all been expecting: only 6 percent of leaders actually retired in the past two years.6

major reason is turnover:

losing a star performer in a senior development role costs nine times her annual salary to replace.

supply grew with it. Organizations largely found leaders to fill the demand.

corporate CEOs dedicate 30 to 50 percent of their time and focus on cultivating talent within their organizations.1

lack of learning and growth

lack of mentorship and support

he number one reason CEOs say they would leave their current role, other than to retire, was difficulty with the board of directors.

respondents said that their organizations lacked the talent management processes required to develop staff, and that they had not made staff development a high priority

combination of learning through doing, learning through hearing or being coached, and learning through formal training.

skill development can compensate for lack of upward trajectory. Stretch opportunities abound in smaller organizations where a large number of responsibilities are divided among a small number of people.

found that staff members who feel their organizations are supporting their growth stay longer than those who don’t, because they trust that their organizations will continue to invest in them over time.1

“When you invest in developing talent, people are better at their jobs, people stay with their employers longer, and others will consider working for these organizations in the first place because they see growth potential.”

define the organization’s future leadership requirements, identify promising internal candidates, and provide the right doses of stretch assignments, mentoring, formal training, and performance assessment to grow their capabilities.

Addressing root causes may steer funders away from supporting traditional approaches, such as fellowships, training, and conferences, and toward helping grantees to build their internal leadership development capabilities, growing talent now and into the future across their portfolio of grantees.

All organizational value is created by teams and networks.

Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.

Social learning is how groups work and share knowledge to become better practitioners. Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing. Over a century ago, Charles Darwin helped us understand the importance of adaptation and the concept that those who survive are the ones who most accurately perceive their environment and successfully adapt to it. Cooperating in networks can increase our ability to perceive what is happening.

Wirearchies inherently require trust, and trusted relationships are powerful allies in getting things done in organizations.

Three of these (IOL, GDL, PDF) require self-direction, and that is the essence of social learning: becoming self-directed learners and workers, all within a two-way flow of power and authority.

rom Stocks to Flow

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life. Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results. Learning may be an individual activity but if it remains within the individual it is of no value whatsoever to the organization. Acting on knowledge, as a practitioner (work performance) is all that matters. So why are organizations in the individual learning (training) business anyway? Individuals should be directing their own learning. Organizations should focus on results.

Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model.

Organizing

our own learning is necessary for creative work.

Developing emergent practices, a necessity when there are no best practices in our changing work environments, requires constant personal directed learning.

Developing social learning practices, like keeping a work journal, may be an effort at first but later it’s just part of the work process. Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period.

we should extend knowledge gathering to the entire network of subject-matter expertise.

Building capabilities from serendipitous to personally-directed and then group-directed learning help to create strong networks for intra-organizational learning.

Our default action is to turn to our friends and trusted colleagues; those people with whom we’ve shared experiences. Therefore, we need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow those trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

The result of the process was 19 over-arching categories of skills, and between 3 and 11 sub-categories under each one.

Here are the 19 main categories: