Here’s how companies can benefit:

• Improved Productivity: Employees with optimized brain health are more focused, attentive, and efficient. Enhanced cognitive function leads to better problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity, boosting overall productivity.
• Enhanced Employee Engagement: Full brain health programs show employees that their well-being is valued. This fosters a positive work environment, increasing job satisfaction and engagement.
• Reduced Stress and Burnout: Strategies like stress management and mindfulness help employees cope with workplace pressures, leading to reduced stress and burnout rates. This, in turn, lowers absenteeism and turnover.
• Innovative Thinking: Optimal brain health encourages creativity and innovative thinking. Employees are more likely to generate novel ideas, contributing to the company’s growth and competitive advantage.
• Effective Leadership: Senior leaders with improved brain health make better decisions, communicate more clearly, and handle challenges with resilience. This positively influences organizational strategy and culture.
• Healthcare Cost Reduction: Promoting brain health can lead to better overall health, reducing the risk of chronic diseases. This can lower healthcare costs for the company in the long run.
• Positive Company Culture: Prioritizing employee well-being creates a culture of care and support. Employees feel valued, leading to improved morale, teamwork, and a stronger sense of loyalty.
• Talent Attraction and Retention: Full brain health programs differentiate the company as an employer that prioritizes holistic well-being. This helps attract top talent and retain valuable employees.
• Adaptability and Learning: Enhanced brain health encourages continuous learning and adaptability, crucial for companies navigating rapidly changing industries and technologies.
• Inclusive Work Environment: Full brain health programs can promote mental health awareness and inclusivity, creating a safe space for open discussions and support for employees facing cognitive challenges.

By investing in comprehensive brain health programs, organizations can create a thriving, high-performing workforce that contributes to a Balanced Organization.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

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If you know that continuing to follow certain of your traditions is hurting you, why is it so difficult to abandon them in favor of something new and necessary?

One tradition that is currently playing out in many segments of society is workforce diversity – especially around hiring and promoting women, particularly women of color.

Quotes from scholars, spiritual, religious and business leaders about why diversity is needed abound. Diversity increases the size of our talent pools, it fosters creativity, it is morally necessary, it makes us better people, and so forth. And yet—it isn’t happening, at least not on a grand scale.

Traditions are more than habits. They define our tribe. Abandoning them, no matter how justified the reasons, threatens our sense of who we are.

How can you overcome that barrier? Here’s one way to begin. It’s about how you frame the challenge. Rather than see the change as a threat, ask yourself what it would take to see diversity as a way to strengthen your existing tribe – both in size and capability. Identify how many new growth opportunities become available with a broader set of skills that can only happen with a more diverse culture. 

This is not a simple, one-time exercise. But it’s vital to your continued success.

We spend a lot of time thinking about this in terms of how we can help our clients address this challenging need. If you’d like to explore this in greater detail, contact us. We’d be happy to start a discussion that could open unseen doors of opportunity for you.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

The post Cultural Traditions – Do They Build, Strength or Threaten Your Survival appeared first on Axies Group.

When you live in a reactive organization where your goal is survival, you are running on a treadmill. When the fear of making a mistake by doing something new outweighs the thrill of succeeding in unfamiliar ways, you are running on a treadmill. When you dismiss the disruptive changes that threaten your continued relevance and justify your actions as being “practical,” you are running on a treadmill.

When you are content to let the growth rate of your market dictate the growth rate of your business your people will be busy, doing the stuff that needs doing in order to maintain what you already have. They will be in motion, but they won’t be moving. Life today will be the same as yesterday, and all your tomorrows will look like today – until one day you wake up and it hits you. What you do is no longer needed or valued. But you never saw it coming. A blind spot of epic proportions.

The comfort found in the sameness of habitual behavior is about motion. 

Adaptability is about movement. Movement requires continuous awareness – of a changing environment and the challenges and opportunities it presents. Movement requires that you embrace the discomfort of learning new skills and habits and becoming an awkward student and making mistakes and falling and getting back up. 

Movement is reinvention. 

Where, on the spectrum of being in motion vs. moving, are you right now? And if you’re just moving, what are you going to do about it? Today.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

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• “Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.”
• “Gather firsthand information, ask questions.”
• “Find time and space in which to think.”
• “Exhaust all possibility of compromise before imposing unilateral executive power.”
• “Anticipate contending viewpoints.”
• “Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.”
• “Understand the emotional needs of each member of the team.”
• “Refuse to let past resentments fester; transcend personal vendettas.”
• “Set a standard of mutual respect and dignity; control anger.”
• “Shield colleagues from blame.”
• “Maintain perspective in the face of both accolades and abuse.”
• “Find ways to cope with pressure, maintain balance, replenish energy.”
• “Keep your word.”
• “Know when to move back, when to move forward.”
• “Combine transactional and transformational leadership.”
• “Be accessible, easy to approach.”
• “Put ambition for the collective interest above self-interest.”

Lincoln applied those principles in 1862 to lead our country away from the danger of destroying the dream of our founders, with all its flaws, and back to being one nation, living on the foundation of our constitution.

Here we are 160 years later, facing a descent into that same abyss, albeit it for different reasons, but similarly grounded in hatred, seeing anyone who disagrees with us as an enemy that must be destroyed. Listening to one another is weakness. Collaboration is cowardice. 

Lincoln’s principles are as relevant today as they were in 1862. They beg the question: What must define great leadership in all segments of society today? And most importantly – what would it take for you to apply them – right now?

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.  

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There are things out there that you need to know, understand, and act on. But you don’t know what those things are. You cannot discover them yourself because you cannot identify something you have never seen, or felt, or experienced. And knowing about them could very well change your decisions, your strategies, and your very existence. 

We all have Blind Spots. They range in impact from minor annoyances to catastrophic collapse (think BlackBerry phone for example).

How did your blind spots come into being? They reside in your unconscious mind. So how on earth can you uncover them and address them?

Blind spots are created at various stages of your life – from fears based on events occurring in childhood through a traumatic event that triggers a fear later in your life. 

On top of a blind spot being something that you don’t know you don’t know, it is also something that you don’t want to know. 

Much has been written on how you can discover your blinds spots through meditation, deep reflections using meta cognition (your thoughts about your thoughts), or therapy. All of those methods take a long time. And the danger is that even when you discover them, how you interpret and address them will be hampered by your own unconscious biases. 

So here’s the bottom line.  Through our personal experience(s) in and working with leaders, the best approach is to work with a trusted advisor who knows you well enough to be accurately aware of your blind spot(s) and who will candidly and constructively tell you what you need to hear but don’t want to hear. 

Through that process, you will see: How those blind spots have cost you; how continuing to avoid seeing them will cost you more going forward; and most importantly – how to address them. 

You cannot do this alone!

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.  

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But what if you are not concerned about the disruptions that conflict with your business model? What if you believe that you have it (whatever the “it” is) handled? What if you think that the apparent disruptions are temporary? They’ll pass, and you will return to the normal that you understand, the normal in which you succeeded through years of hard work?

And what if all those things actually reveal your blind spots? You cannot identify and deal with your blind spots alone. You can’t fix what you can’t see. If you could, they wouldn’t be blind spots.

First, know that transformation is a very personal journey. Second, enlist the help of a trusted advisor – someone who is willing to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. And address these questions: 

• What is the potential cost of doing nothing? Things like: loss of revenue; your best people leaving; loss of market share; and ultimately – a loss of relevance.
• What would it take to embrace the disruption and apply the human and capital resources needed to adapt to it. 

Carefully considering those two questions, and with the help of trusted advisors, you will be properly positioned to make the wisest decisions possible.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.  

The post Adaptability and Transformation appeared first on Axies Group.

Here is an approach to avoid falling into that trap.

First, know that inductive reasoning is normal. It’s part of our survival mechanism. Our brains are wired to project single, or limited occurrences onto a larger group of people or circumstances that seem to have similar appearances or behaviors to the one in question. 

Since you will always be tempted to act inductively, the time to get out of that trap is immediately after you have the thought, but before you take any action to either act on it or use it as a tool to guide future actions.

One effective way to approach those situations is to force yourself to shift your perspective from inductiveto deductive reasoning. In deductive reasoning you go from general assumptions/observations to specific conclusions. 

For example you might say: any employee that is addicted to video games and plays them during working hours will not be a good employee for us. John is addicted to video games; he will not be a good fit for us. Notice that the connecting arguments that provide the foundation for your decision are based on specific behaviors attributable to individuals – not groups. And there is no connection between a person’s date of birth and your basis for a decision.

This approach requires awareness and practice. But it’s worth beginning now. The costs of not doing it are too great to be ignored.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

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Here’s a major challenge to doing that. Faulty inductive reasoning. 

Fundamentally, inductive reasoning is the science and art of developing probabilities based on the results of a sample and attributing those results to a larger population, i.e. what is true for the sample will be true for the whole. The accuracy of inductive reasoning is based on the source and intelligence of your assumptions and the size and appropriateness of your sample.

Inductive reasoning hurts you when you take too small a sample (like one event) and attribute the result to your entire population.

For example, you’re a boomer. You hire a millennial. He spends too much time playing video games. You fire him. You conclude that all millennials are lazy. You will never hire another one. You dramatically shrink the size of your talent pool. 

You’re a millennial, leading a tech company. You hire a boomer for a role in strategy development. He is slow to grasp the tech knowledge needed. You fire him. You conclude that all boomers are dinosaurs. Then, you find yourself disadvantaged because none of your employees have the needed wisdom to develop great strategies. 

That kind of simplistic, inductive behavior is normal for most people, most of the time. It comes into being whenever you don’t want to think more deeply. It becomes the cover story that justifies your unwillingness to act transformationally. You are leading by allowing the situation to define you, rather than you shaping the situation. It is NOT the way great leaders operate.  

What should you do?

In our next blog post we’ll take a deeper dive into how to use inductive reasoning in ways to improve the quality of your decision making while avoiding the minefield of mistakes that explode when you make decisions simplistically.

To explore more in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.

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         – Albert Einstein

The past: Employees serve the company. 

The future: Employees are a new category of customers.

Your new customers have needs. Here’s a list:

• To be heard and have their opinions respected, taken seriously, studied and when appropriate, acted upon. When not acted upon, told why.
• Have a stake and a voice in defining the culture – a kind of “cultural equity.”
• Share in the profits – based on their measurable contributions. To satisfy this need, you will have to redefine the balance and resolve the conflict of interest between your employee/customer and your shareholders. This is a tall order.
• Have a say in determining whether and to what extent they can construct their work schedules, i.e. remote, hybrid or in the office; plant; warehouse; laboratory, etc.
• Be responsible for achieving the results that contribute to their compensation Yes, most people wantto have a stake in outcomes. It makes them feel relevant. Relevance is an important part of cultural inclusion. Inclusion begets commitment and ownership.
• To know that they matter and that what they do helps make a difference.

You’ve most likely heard or read about all of these. But what we’ve experienced is that most leaders are picking just the one or two that they’re willing to address, i.e., being locked in the level of consciousness that created the problem.

In upcoming blogs we’ll start to unpack these elements and explore ways to address them.

To explore more about transformation in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.     

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Without that kind of diversity, you will be leading in an echo chamber. What might feel like creativity is merely your voice, your ideas coming back at you. Group think prevails.

However, merely hiring people with diverse views is only the first step.  The easier one.

Your greatest challenge/opportunity is welcoming their differentness, and regularly seeking their perspective – truly listening to them.  If you fail to accomplish that, cultural diversity will be a revolving door. People will come. They will be marginalized. They will leave. And you might conclude that, in your organization, diversity is a bad idea. But you’d be wrong.

So, what should you do? Ask some what would it take questions.

• What would it take to truly accept people with diverse views, and diverse ideas?
• What would it take to listen to those people, especially when their ideas contradict cultural norms, traditional beliefs and historic behaviors that have shaped your success – up to now?

And when you discover answers to those questions, then ask: What would it take to infuse those answers into the fabric of your culture?

This is a tall order, a huge ask. When you consider the magnitude of this challenge, we think you will have a sense of what cultural adaptability is really about, and why the real meaning of transformation should never be trivialized.

To explore more about transformation in upcoming posts, follow us at Axies Group on LinkedIn.    

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