I attended a party where one of the guests was intent on bragging about his latest accomplishments. I watched as he moved from group to group trying to get people to listen to his story. As soon as he started talking about himself, one by one, people in the group would excuse themselves and move on. He would then move on to another group only to have the same thing happen. By the end of the evening, he was standing by himself. The lesson here is a difficult one. While all of us want to tell our story, the painful truth is no one wants to hear it. At the same time, those same people are dying to tell their story to someone who cares. So, if you want to become the life of the party, give up on the idea of trying to tell your story and give other people the opportunity to tell theirs. If you can discipline yourself to do this, you’ll quickly start to attract a crowd.
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Recommended Reading
Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard
Transform Your Workplace!
Imagine a company where people are excited about coming to work and giving their best efforts every day. In this innovative and engrossing business parable, Harry Paul and Ross Reck show managers at all levels how they can immediately and easily increase productivity by tapping into the discretionary effort of the people who work for them. Starting from the most basic aspect of business reality—that people intentionally regulate the amount of effort they put into their jobs based upon how they feel they’re being treated—the authors point out that the most important part of the job of every manager, team leader, supervisor, and executive is to treat people in such a way that they become excited about applying all their discretionary effort toward performing their jobs.
At the book’s center is the story of Nancy Kim, a human resources director at a magazine that is struggling with all the problems associated with unhappy employees—low productivity and morale along with high absenteeism and turnover. After she openly challenges the CEO’s new management-by-the-numbers system, she’s charged with turning the situation around immediately. Filled with real-world studies, Instant Turnaround! shows anyone how to turn the workplace into a destination—a place where working hard feels like hardly working because it’s engaging, enjoyable, and fulfilling.
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