Attributes of great place

1. Design working environments that are safe, comfortable and appealing to work in. In offices, include a range of physical spaces that allow for privacy, collaboration, and simply hanging out.
2. Provide healthy, high quality food, at the lowest possible prices, including in vending machines.
3. Create places for employees to rest and renew during the course of the working day and encourage them to take intermittent breaks. Ideally, leaders would permit afternoon naps, which fuel higher productivity in the several hours that follow.
4. Offer a well equipped gym and other facilities that encourage employees to move physically and stay fit. Provide incentives for employees to use the facilities, including during the work day as a source of renewal.
5. Define clear and specific expectations for what success looks like in any given job. Then, treat employees as adults by giving them as much autonomy as possible to choose when they work, where they do their work, and how best to get it accomplished.
6. Institute two-way performance reviews, so that employees not only receive regular feedback about how they're doing, in ways that support their growth, but are also given the opportunity to provide feedback to their supervisors, anonymously if they so choose, to avoid recrimination.
7. Hold leaders and managers accountable for treating all employees with respect and care, all of the time, and encourage them to regularly recognize those they supervise for the positive contributions they make.
8. Create policies that encourage employees to set aside time to focus without interruption on their most important priorities, including long-term projects and more strategic and creative thinking. Ideally, give them a designated amount of time to pursue projects they're especially passionate about and which have the potential to add value to the company.
9. Provide employees with ongoing opportunities and incentives to learn, develop and grow, both in establishing new job-specific hard skills, as well as softer skills that serve them well as individuals, and as managers and leaders.
10. Stand for something beyond simply increasing profits. Create products or provide services or serve causes that clearly add value in the world, making it possible for employees to derive a sense of meaning from their work, and to feel good about the companies for which they work

Welcome to the new Bluesky Blog

Dear CEO’s

We at Blue Sky have always been deliberating on how to provide more value to our association and while we continue to power your enterprise on several fronts, we are adding one more value service to this bouquet. I believe each of us is driving a successful and high powered organization. Possibly in this ambitious pursuit, we may inevitably get so obsessed with the process of building that we blind ourselves to learning and knowledge beyond the perimeter of our sphere.

The Bluesky Corner office Blog is a hub where relevant information and insightful learning is uploaded at regular frequency which will not only be useful for your personal enhancement of knowledge but could have some useful takeaways and learning’s to run your corporation more effectively also a centre where exchange of views with other CEO’s within the Bluesky fold are possible. I would encourage each member to be as participative as possible and make this blog rich with learning’s.

Alternatively if you have any interesting articles or information you would like to share, please feel free to send the same to either Shruti at shruti@bluesky-hr.com or myself at d.vaz@bluesky-hr.com who will be the moderators for the blog.

The URL for the blog is http://www.bluesky-corneroffice.blogspot.com/. You may join in as a member or merely comment on each posting, though we would love to have you as a regular member. For this purpose you will need to login using a gmail id/yahoo or twitter.

Drop us an email if you have any queries or difficulties in loging in.

Separately let us have your comments and suggestion on this initiative.

Don

Three Traits Every CEO Needs

No matter how successful or seemingly secure any business appears, there are no longer periods of calm seas for leaders in any industry. A broad statistic reinforces this fact emphatically: More than half the companies that were industry leaders in 1955 were still industry leaders in 1990. But more than two-thirds of 1990 industry leaders no longer existed by 2004.

Leaders today need to be at home navigating a ship through 40-foot waves — oceans that will never again be serene — and still be able to guide their crew safely from port to port. They must remain highly effective in an environment of extraordinary, ongoing stress.

In researching my new book, Better Under Pressure, my colleagues and I sought to identify the qualities that define leaders who excel in this environment of duress. We gathered performance data for approximately 200 candidates being assessed for the CEO role at major U.S. corporations. These candidates were divided into three groups, with the top-performing quartile labeled "highly successful," the middle two quartiles characterized as "average performers," and the bottom quartile as "highly ineffective."

What emerged was startling. Certain attributes — three in particular — were highly consistent within the top performers, regardless of industry or job type. Clearly, this mental architecture was responsible for the execution ability of the most effective executives operating under pressure. What's more, these attributes were almost totally absent among the bottom-performing quartile.

To further my investigation, I then conducted in-depth psychological interviews with more than 60 current and retired CEOs to help clarify the role each of these factors played in their leadership. One core conclusion emerged: the best CEOs had been, and continued to be, distinguished by their ability to manifest the very best from their workforce. In my interviews with the CEOs, it became even clearer that the three attributes had become even more important by the beginning of the 21st century.

To perform their best in today's turbulent atmosphere, leaders must possess this highly unusual set of three traits that often run counter to natural human behavior. These attributes are catalysts for the mastery displayed by the world's best CEOs — and, together, they add up to a new definition of leadership:

1. Realistic optimism. Leaders with this trait possess confidence without self-delusion or irrationality. They pursue audacious goals, which others would typically view as impossible pipedreams, while at the same time remaining aware of the magnitude of the challenges confronting them and the difficulties that lie ahead.
2. Subservience to purpose. Leaders with this ability see their professional goal as so profound in importance that their lives become measured in value by how much they contribute to furthering that goal. What is more, they must be pursuing a professional goal in order to feel a purpose for living. In essence, that goal is their master and their reason for being. They do not ruminate about their purpose, because their mind finds satisfaction in its occupation with their goal. Their level of dedication to their work is a direct result of the extraordinary, remarkable importance they place on their goal.
3. Finding order in chaos. Leaders with this trait find taking on multidimensional problems invigorating, and their ability to bring clarity to quandaries that baffle others makes their contributions invaluable.

In my work assessing candidates for CEO positions in the country's top companies, I look for people who demonstrate all three capabilities. No organization should hire or promote into a leadership job someone who doesn't have the full suite, and each is a must-have for any aspiring leader today.

The good news is that these three capabilities can be learned. People can change. By learning about these attributes, you can become aware of them and choose to build them in yourself. And this can help you bring out the best in those you lead.

Real leadership is recursive: It's a continuous process that starts with a leader and is echoed in that leader's people. My research has shown that the best leaders work with the people they lead to seek their mutual maximum potential together; they co-create their success.

Leaders who embody realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and the ability to find order in chaos can use these catalysts to craft contexts in which they and others can realize potential. We are all born with an innate urge for triumph, but are not born aware of this need or how to meet it. It is up to a leader to create a work environment in which every employee can experience the deep satisfaction of triumphing in pursuit of a worthy goal.

The most critical responsibility leaders have is to help their people flip the switch of engagement toward realizing their potential as human beings. When leaders create a context for people to realize their potential, they create a virtuous cycle that elicits people's best selves — the selves that induce the gratification we all feel when we overcome significant challenges and realize our potential.

This is how a leader creates an organization that harnesses the utmost effort and resiliency from all employees. In today's business environment of ever-escalating competition, such an organization is the only kind that is built to survive.

Justin Menkes is an acclaimed author and expert in the field of C-suite talent evaluation. His latest book, Better Under Pressure, was just released by Harvard Business Review Press.