Workplace Inspirational Quotes

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

A woman always gives away the heart of her soul; to her husband and/or significant other, children, family, friends, and in the workplace. A woman goes through so much emotionally, physically, and mentally. However, most of the time it goes unnoticed.

In the modern workplace, you gotta be a jack-of-all-trades. Mastering your career is all about being adaptable, versatile, and always learning.

At home I am a man, at work I am a machine.

The excitement of opportunity and challenge inspires us to push for greatness.

Professional development is important, but let's not forget about the most important kind of development - personal brand development. Because in the modern workplace, it's not what you know, it's who knows you.

The workplace is like a battlefield, and you need to be a warrior to survive. So arm yourself with knowledge and fight for your place in the corporate world.

The feminism of equality, of toughness, of anti-discrimination, has been overwhelmed by one of victimhood and demands for special treatment....At a certain point, when we demand an equal ratio of men to women in certain fields, what we’re criticizing is not “the system,” but the choices that women themselves are making.....let’s keep our eye on the question of equal opportunity and stop obsessing about equal outcomes, lest we find ourselves trying to cure society, not of sexism, but of free choice.

When your heart is right, you want to bring out the best in others.

We, as human beings, enjoy freedom of choice. Your attitude is your choice!

I don't know what came first, the brown-nose worker or the arrogant boss; I simple hate it and I won't be part of it.

A woman lives under pressure on a daily basis. Nearly every day a woman is being criticized for the way she looks, thinks, acts, how she raises her children and her role in the workplace. She is criticized by other women, her husband and/or significant other, her children, family, and friends. Goodness gracious, when will a woman’s love ever be good enough? She's constantly beaten down by being told what she’s doing wrong, and barely hears what she has done right. Needless to say, she isn’t praised for her accomplishments; often, all she hears is criticism. I would love to see the detractors walk in her shoes for a while.

Most people think a beautiful woman doesn’t have to work as hard to get what she wants. And that might be true when she’s at a bar trying to get a drink, or when she’s in Home Depot trying to find someone to help her down the plumbing aisle. But it’s not true in the workplace. A beautiful woman often has to work twice as hard to be seen for who she is here. Because, unfortunately, there are still men out there who can’t see past beauty.

We must experience Heaven on earth; May your homes, surroundings and work places portray a safe clean environment.

Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it’s bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals.

The reason most of your staff are asleep and disengaged, is because you have boring, and bully managers, and no REAL Leaders to inspire and unleash potential.

Recognizing that you have a bias and blind spots is essential to personal growth.

Being real is the power skill of the century, but we’re taught to be otherwise in the places that should hold it most sacred: our families, schools, workplaces, communities, houses of worship, and governments.

turning the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside down to emphasize that everyone is responsible—able to respond— for living the constitution and getting the desired results while modeling the organization's valued behaviors.

Vivian Carlisle happened to her, like an avalanche or tsunami, as sudden and unforgiving as natural disaster. That was the thing about nature, though. It was frightening, dangerous, unpredictable–yes, all that. It was also inspiring. Even Beautiful.

that leaders inspire trust, be authentic, tell the truth, serve others (particularly those who work for and with them), be modest and self-effacing, exhibit empathic understanding and emotional intelligence, and other similar seemingly sensible nostrums.

Most of us want to be authentic. Yet, we are not who we think we are. We are made up of a rich array of facets and possibilities, many of which we ignore because we label them as “bad”. We create a cardboard cutout image of ourselves to look good to others. The discord between who we are and the image we have to live up to slowly kills our aliveness. When we suppress parts of ourselves, it lowers our mojo, sense of fulfillment, leadership effectiveness and impact in the workplace.

Life is a journey, a ride of endless means and emotions.

Douglas Stone and his colleagues give excellent advice on how to deal with some of the most challenging workplace encounters.

Can we create soulful workplaces—schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits—where our talents can blossom and our callings can be honored?

How do you know when the obstacles in your path have been placed by God to protect you, or by Satan to hinder God's purposes in your affairs?

Do you have a situation in which you're having trouble discerning whether God is protecting you or Satan is hindering you? Ask God to show you His way.

Today, be proactive about forgiving those who have been the source of pain in your life.

The most dangerous enemy of your career is your comfort zone at work

Wisdom in the workplace means to inspire creativity, learning, and progression, but discourage unprofessionalism and negativity.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6).

You build yourself for the 'Workplace' rather than the other way round

Women need to keep asking for what they’re worth, and leaders need to make sure women are paid the same, whether they ask for it or not.

If you go to the workplace thinking that you are a mere employee, you can only be an employee. If you go with an Entrepreneur consciousness, you can definitely become an Entrepreneur

Engaged, productive employees do not work in a vacuum. They need workplaces that help them bring out the best in themselves—mosh pits of creativity where energy and inspiration can flow freely.

I think people don’t think I work, because I wear stilettos and look damn fine. But that’s discrimination against stilettos and against looking damn fine! And I object to this form of discrimination!

The suffering that started off challenging our being and our ideas of what life is and should be ends up opening our heart, expanding our identity, and connecting us forever to the human family and life.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board of the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

[W]e are the ones to blame for enabling and even nourishing the toxic workplaces. In continuing to cooperate with a profoundly unhealthy and exploitative employment system, we become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.

What do you hope girls take away from watching [Agent Carter]? I would hope that young girls can see that they don’t have to sacrifice their femininity to be taken seriously in the workplace. But also they don’t have to rely on their physicality or their appearance; that it’s just as important, if not a lot more so, to be able to use their intelligence, their wit, their humor and their warmth to be able to get where they want to and to achieve their goals in life.

God often uses failure to make us useful. When Jesus called the disciples, He did not go out and find the most qualified and successful people. He found the most willing, and He found them in the workplace. He found a fisherman, a tax collector, and a farmer. The Hebrews knew that failure was a part of maturing in God. The Greeks used failure as a reason for disqualification. Sadly, in the Church, we often treat one another in this way. This is not God's way. We need to understand that failing does not make us failures. It makes us experienced. It makes us more prepared to be useful in God's Kingdom -- if we have learned from it. And that is the most important ingredient for what God wants in His children.

Seriously: Do you want to spend your working life simply being satisfied? When you look back on 50 years spent in business, do you want to be able to say, “Well, I was satisfied"?? No! Make happiness your goal. As in, “Let’s make this a workplace where people are happy to work." As in, “I’ve been working for 50 years now, and it absolutely rocks! To me work is challenging, stimulating and just plain fun.

I feel that quarantine has brought me closer to other people, to everyone. Like, we are all finally on the same page now. I have spent my life attending to, and cultivating, my inner world. Moving outwards from what is within my heart and within the deepest recesses of my mind. "From-in-to-out" has always been my mode of living. I have always looked at everyone else and thought that they fill their hearts and their minds with static noise, so much noise. They feel things, but then they can just go and drown all of that in work immersion; they have pressing issues on their minds, but they can just go and drown the sounds of their own thoughts in a one-night-stand; they have wounds on their spirits, but they can evade feeling those wounds and healing them, by blowing themselves into larger-than-life projections in the workplace, at school, on social media. So much noise, just so much noise. I feel as though, all my life, I have been screaming at the world, begging people to go inward, to face their angels and their demons, to know themselves. Now in quarantine, I think everyone is forced to do exactly that. The world is forced into a quietness that should of happened long ago, every day, all the time. A quietness of retreating into the knowledge of, and the acquaintance with, the mind, the heart. I feel that now, at long last, everybody else is on the same page as myself. Being alone in quarantine is not mentally or emotionally or spiritually difficult for me. This is because I know the person I am with, I know me. And I like her.

But primarily, the evolution of management is stewardship. A steward takes her responsibilities to guide, coach, mentor, and lead her team with awareness of how her presence helps and hinders. A steward doesn’t manage. She inspires. She motivates. She inquires. She notices. She supports. She partners. Supervisor Larry Robillard of Zingerman’s explained that his role is to facilitate greatness in his people through his actions and words.4 This isn’t an arrogant statement. It’s delivered with genuine care for people.

The prophet Jeremiah says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). The problem with most of us is that we are unwilling to seek God for the answers—we are too lazy to spend time in prayer and fasting, focusing intentionally on God. Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, said: I believe the power of fasting as it relates to prayer is the spiritual atomic bomb that our Lord has given us to destroy the strongholds of evil and usher in a great revival and spiritual harvest around the world. The longer I fasted, the more I sensed the presence of the Lord.

The world is changing faster than ever in our history. Our best hope for the future is to develop a new paradigm of human capacity to meet a new era of human existence. We need to evolve a new appreciation of the importance of nurturing human talent along with an understanding of how talent expresses itself differently in every individual. We need to create environments—in our schools, in our workplaces, and in our public offices—where every person is inspired to grow creatively. We need to make sure that all people have the chance to do what they should be doing, to discover the Element in themselves and in their own way.

So often when God places a call on one of His children, the ability to answer the call requires a separation between the old life and the new life. We are called away from the old in order to prepare our heart for what is to come. This can be a painful and difficult separation. Joseph was separated from his family. Jacob was sent to live with his uncle Laban. Moses was sent to the desert. Perhaps God has placed you in your own desert period. Perhaps you cannot make sense of the situation in which you find yourself. If you, like Paul, will get intimate with God during this time, He will reveal the purposes He has for you. The key is pressing into Him. Seek Him with a whole heart, and He will be found.

Don’t you dare forget this place, they said. I think you’ll eventually maybe make something of yourself out east. One reason why I’m letting you go. But don’t you ever, ever, ever become one of those people nose in the air, calling all this—Tig gestured around wildly—flyover country. Thinking we’re just about beer and cheese and serial killers and corn. Things happen here. Happened here. This place is part of why the rest of this stupid godforsaken nation has child labor laws and workplace safety and unemployment insurance. Why we have weekends and an eight-hour workday. We had forty years of actual socialist city government, democratically elected, here. Only city in the nation. FDR was inspired by what happened here. When he dreamed up his lil New Deal and shit. Milwaukee, baby. We have real history. Remember us right.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

Before leading us onto the path of success and glory, the Universe tests how serious we are to pursue our dream...how passionate we are. And, it has a very interesting way to find out. Example, after much cajoling and inspiration, when we start our fitness regime, exercising, yoga, etc, our body starts aching on 2nd or 3rd day...so much so that we find it difficult to walk...and as a result...we stop our fitness regime. So, nature filters us out. Then there is the 2nd level of filtering. Within 10-15 days of embarking our fitness regime, we come across a situation when we are required to travel or attend a function or report at workplace early or work till late in the evening. After this gap of 3-4 days, many people don’t resume exercising. When you want to pursue your dreams...you will be deprived of resources and will find yourself surrounded by naysayers and negative thinkers. Result: You stop pursuing your dreams. The key is – “Never ever give up”. Believe in Yourself. Let the Universe know that you will pursue your dream and goal, no matter what.

The alternative to late-stage capitalism, which is what we’re describing here, sometimes termed really existing capitalism, which, as we’ve begun to discuss already, often actually means socialism for the rich and brutal or gangster capitalism for the rest. The alternative to this is not a planned economy run by an authoritarian state, which is often portrayed in the obverse sort of mythology as communism or really existing socialism. For example, in the former USSR or Russia today, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and so on, virtually all of those experiments, many of which were Marxist or socialist inspired, were really a state capitalism in a slightly different inflection than the state capitalism we see elsewhere in the world. That’s not the alternative. The alternative that we’re thinking about is an economy that’s run by the producers, that is the workers themselves, through a democratization of the workplace. We say we value democracy very highly and yet we don’t institute it in the places where we spend most of our lives. That is, the workplace is a very authoritarian kind of environment and we don’t really question that.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange—no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity—of local colour, texture, custom, life in general—from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only!—that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked. 2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards,

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

In a TED talk watched by over a million people, Wolfram (2010) proposes that working on mathematics has four stages: Posing a question Going from the real world to a mathematical model Performing a calculation Going from the model back to the real world, to see if the original question was answered The first stage involves asking a good question of some data or a situation—the first mathematical act that is needed in the workplace.

A client of mine once joked, “If your employer likes you, the rest is history, the raise and everything else will come.” That intangible attitude in the workplace is what sets apart those who get promoted and those who don’t.

Sustain a positive outlook. Cultivate a can-do spirit, and you will be an inspiration to employees. And, when that's a tall order, fake it until you make it! • Be known as a fair person. Employees want to be treated fairly, and you must take the necessary steps to make sure they feel that is the case. • Keep an eye on morale. Morale at the workplace can be affected positively or negatively by an incident that, although it might seem insignificant to you, might be very important to your employees. A contented group of employees will do more and better work than an unhappy group. • Set an example. If you want your employees to work hard and succeed, then set an example by doing so yourself. Be a spectacular role model! • Take responsibility for your actions. If something goes wrong and it's your fault, step up to the plate and acknowledge whatever it is that went wrong and why. • Maintain your sense of humor. Don't take yourself too seriously, and don't be in such a hurry that you haven't got time to tell or listen to a positive (tasteful) story. Studies suggest laughter and good humor go a long way in helping employees function well in the workplace. • Acknowledge good work through praise. Everyone wants to hear “well done” now and then, so make sure you acknowledge good work. Say it privately and say it within earshot of others, too. • Give credit for ideas. If one of your employees comes up with a great idea, by all means give that person the credit he or she deserves. Don't allow anyone to take an employee's idea and pass it off as his own. (Managers are sometimes accused of stealing an employee's idea; be scrupulous about avoiding even a hint of such a thing.) Beyond the basic guidelines listed above, a good manager must possess other positive qualities: • Understanding: Conventional wisdom dictates that you walk in someone else's shoes before you judge her. Keep that in mind when dealing with people in the workplace. • Good communication skills: Keep your communication skills in good working order. You might want to join speaking organizations to learn how to be a better public speaker. But don't stop there. You communicate when you send a memo, write e-mail, and lead a meeting. There's no such thing as being a “perfect” communicator. An excellent manager will view the pursuit of this art as a work in progress. • Strong listening skills: When was the last time you really listened to someone when he was talking to you? Did you give him your full, undivided attention, or was your mind thinking about five other different things? And when you are listening, do you really know what it is people are trying to tell you? (You might have to ask probing questions in order to get the message.) • Leadership: Employees need good leaders to help guide them, so make sure your leadership skills are enviable and on-duty. • Common sense: You'll need more than your fair share if you expect to be a good manager of people. Some managers toss common sense out the window and then foolishly wonder what happened when things go wrong. • Honesty: Be honest and ethical in all of your business dealings — period! • A desire to encourage: Encouragement is different than praise. Encouragement helps someone who hasn't yet achieved the goal. Employees need your input and encouragement from time to time in order to be successful, so be prepared to fill that role.

What is workplace optimism? If you think it’s viewing the proverbial glass half full through rose-colored glasses and thinking positive thoughts, you’re mistaken. It is more than a positive attitude. Workplace optimism shapes attitudes. It shapes a person’s and even a team’s spirit. It is the spark that fuels esprit de corps. It evokes positive emotions in team members toward their work and others. Workplace optimism is a characteristic of climate. The climate feels optimistic. People are inspired by their work and the possibilities inherent in it. Workplace optimism is the belief that good things will come from hard work. Research shows that you can transform the work experience by focusing on the best positive potential realities.9 Rather than spend time focusing on what’s wrong or missing in the workplace, you can choose to focus on what’s right and possible in the workplace. Rather than ignoring the climate, you can observe how it’s influencing work quality and relationships. You can transform the work experience by simply recognizing and leveraging human nature.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned are beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Just as we have created a society in which it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette in the Kennedy Center lobby, we can create a society where it is unthinkable that a child suffers abuse, fails in school, becomes delinquent, or faces teasing and bullying. We could have a society in which diverse people and organizations work together to ensure that families, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods are nurturing and that our capitalistic system functions to benefit everyone.

Bakke recounts an earlier anecdote that explains how his view on work was shaped from early childhood—one of a strand of many experiences that would determine his vocation to create organizations that make work fun and fulfilling: On this particular day, my mother had organized the evening work in her usual style. The kitchen was abuzz with activity. I was 16 years old and charged with cooking creamed peas for supper. My younger brother was carrying wood from the shed to the storage area next to the kitchen. Kenny’s older sisters [Kenny and his sisters were foster children at the Bakke home] were clearing dirty cooking dishes and setting the table with dinner ware. …. No one was paying attention to Kenny. …. Suddenly the two-year-old … picked up the spoon on his tray. “I want jobs, I want jobs, I want jobs,” he chanted as he pounded his spoon. I think this little guy with a crooked smile and troubled past was saying, “I want to contribute. I can make a difference. I want to be part of the team. I’m somebody. I want to have fun working, too!” Over the years, I have reflected on that moment and come to believe that it captures the early and substantial influence Mom had on my concept of fun in the workplace. Somehow, she created an environment in which everyone was energized, not from fear of punishment or promise of reward, but from a desire to accomplish something positive. She had unbridled confidence in our ability to accomplish the tasks at hand. … She gave us enormous freedom to work and make decisions. Somehow she made work so attractive that even an abused two-year-old wanted desperately to pitch in for the sheer joy and excitement of it.41

But when control is the goal, it can negatively affect other parts of your culture. I’ve known many managers who hate to be surprised in meetings, for example, by which I mean they make it clear that they want to be briefed about any unexpected news in advance and in private. In many workplaces, it is a sign of disrespect if someone surprises a manager with new information in front of other people. But what does this mean in practice? It means that there are pre-meetings before meetings, and the meetings begin to take on a pro forma tone. It means wasted time. It means that the employees who work with these people walk on eggshells. It means that fear runs rampant.

Caroline’s project faces extreme uncertainty: there had never been a volunteer campaign of this magnitude at HP before. How confident should she be that she knows the real reasons people aren’t volunteering? Most important, how much does she really know about how to change the behavior of hundreds of thousand people in more than 170 countries? Barlerin’s goal is to inspire her colleagues to make the world a better place. Looked at that way, her plan seems full of untested assumptions—and a lot of vision. In accordance with traditional management practices, Barlerin is spending time planning, getting buy-in from various departments and other managers, and preparing a road map of initiatives for the first eighteen months of her project. She also has a strong accountability framework with metrics for the impact her project should have on the company over the next four years. Like many entrepreneurs, she has a business plan that lays out her intentions nicely. Yet despite all that work, she is—so far—creating one-off wins and no closer to knowing if her vision will be able to scale. One assumption, for example, might be that the company’s long-standing values included a commitment to improving the community but that recent economic trouble had resulted in an increased companywide strategic focus on short-term profitability. Perhaps longtime employees would feel a desire to reaffirm their values of giving back to the community by volunteering. A second assumption could be that they would find it more satisfying and therefore more sustainable to use their actual workplace skills in a volunteer capacity, which would have a greater impact on behalf of the organizations to which they donated their time. Also lurking within Caroline’s plans are many practical assumptions about employees’ willingness to take the time to volunteer, their level of commitment and desire, and the way to best reach them with her message. The Lean Startup model offers a way to test these hypotheses rigorously, immediately, and thoroughly. Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately. By starting small, Caroline could prevent a tremendous amount of waste down the road without compromising her overall vision. Here’s what it might look like if Caroline were to treat her project as an experiment.

Can we create organizations free of the pathologies that show up all too often in the workplace?

The absence of real kitchens in our organizations is a powerful revealer of how we think about our workplaces.

the leadership industry also has its share of quacks and sham artists who sell promises and stories, some true, some not, but all of them inspirational and comfortable, with not much follow-up to see what really does work and what doesn’t.

Everything that looks like a loss may be an extraordinary, successful life waiting to explode.

In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived.

I have called you to walk a specific path. I will bring the fruit to you. All you will have to do is pick it up and stay on My path for you. That is what it means to abide in Me.” The people of Israel conquered the Promised Land as a result of obedience, not sweat, toil or natural talent. In our work-life call, God desires to give us fruit from our calling when we fulfill the unique purpose for which God made us. When something unusual happens in our daily life experience, it is a time to tune in to our spiritual antennae. God is often at work. We need to abide completely in His presence and purpose for our life so that we can pick the fruit He desires to bring into our path.

Saul answered, “But am I not a Benjamite, from the smallest tribe of Israel, and is not my clan the least of all the clans of the tribe of Benjamin? Why do you say such a thing to me?” (1 Samuel 9:21). “But Lord,” Gideon asked, “how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family” (Judges 6:15). But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11). When God calls, you will probably be in the most unlikely circumstances to receive that call. You will be in the midst of a crisis, you will lack resources and you will not have the skills you think you need. This is the way of God. God works this way because He wants you to know that your call is based on His ability, not yours. When you think it is based on you, you possess a false humility, which is unbelief and disobedience on your part.

I’ve known many managers who hate to be surprised in meetings, for example, by which I mean they make it clear that they want to be briefed about any unexpected news in advance and in private. In many workplaces, it is a sign of disrespect if someone surprises a manager with new information in front of other people. But what does this mean in practice? It means that there are pre-meetings before meetings, and the meetings begin to take on a pro forma tone. It means wasted time.

Sin makes our armor vulnerable to attack from Satan, who then gains permission from God to attack us in the area where we have failed to uphold righteousness. If we break down in moral purity, Satan comes in and establishes a stronghold. If we give place to bitterness and unwillingness to forgive, we break fellowship with God and others. If we become money-focused, we fall into greed and deception. Sin is a vicious cycle that leaves us weak and vulnerable to ever more sin.

Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. PHILIPPIANS 2:4

Listening is an art, and you'll find a whole new world by exploring that art.

Courage is essential in a management context and, above all, in leadership.

Knowing how to manage requires one to know how to start a movement rather than just to follow it. And one must take a firm position when necessary.

or rather cause us to hunker down in little bunkers of self-involvement? And when we find ourselves confronted with a less-than-ideal work environment, do we merely trade our large spirits for the smaller comforts of job security, or, like Captain Tushin, find some way to infuse the mundane madness of the workplace with the spark of our own inspiration?

A leader should not try to avoid tension, crisis, or confrontation.

Fear can force employees to execute projects, but it cannot energize people. Fear is crippling and inhibiting, and it is one of the most dehumanizing forces in the workplace.

Especially for women, it’s appealing and inspirational to hear a clarion voice calling for our right to self-actualization, given the millennia of female oppression. Until shockingly recently, and even still today, the relation of the sexes has reliably meant the silencing of female identity, desire, and goals. Even in the precincts of enlightenment and privilege, women often feel that we’ve handed over our entire minds to caring for others. We understandably feel put-upon, deprived, and resentful. Scholars provide ample evidence of the costs of workplace bias, and the corrosive effects on relationships of gendered divisions of labor. Getting in touch with our anger is a first step to positive change. But our challenge is to work toward solving the problems in the actual relationships in front of us. We reclaim genuine space for our identities not by rushing headlong into simplistic remedies, but by engaging in the less glamorous spadework of paying attention to our feelings, clarifying what matters to us, asserting our point of view, and negotiating for change. There

When a workplace culture is purposefully created to be respectful and inspiring, employees are happier, more productive, and more engaged.

•​Communicating your purpose and values. Employees are inspired when they work in organizations whose purpose and values resonate with them. •​Providing meaningful work. Most employees want to work on projects that inspire them, align with what they are good at, and allow them to grow. •​Focusing your leadership team on people. How leaders relate to their employees plays a major role in how everyone feels about their workplace. •​Building meaningful relationships. When employees like the people they work with and for, they are more satisfied and more engaged in their work. •​Creating peak performing teams. People are energized when they work together effectively because teams achieve things that no one person could do on their own.

Apparently for bunch of cultural norms across the globe, women must exert twice the effort & absorb trice the hassle at the workplace to pave the way for their careers and make peace with the fact that as per tones of researches they will eventually be blamed! I just cannot accept that!

For that particular session, everyone said they picked it because of the word entitled in the descriptor. They’d all encountered people who acted entitled at Pixar—people who insisted on having their own piece of equipment, even if it could be shared, or who groused that they couldn’t bring their dogs to work. “This is a job,” one animator said. “A great job. We are well paid. These people need to wake up.” What was most striking to those in attendance at the “Great Workplace” session was how much they had in common. The Systems guy told a story about answering a frantic call for tech support. He rushed over to assess the problem, only to be told by the aggrieved artist that the machine should be fixed during lunch—because that’s when it would be most convenient for her. “I need to eat lunch, too,” he told the group, as everyone nodded their heads. The chef told a similar story about a last-minute request to cater a working lunch that came without any acknowledgement of the hassle (and hustle) it would require of her staff.

Strengthen Your Company’s Culture Contrary to what you might have read, you don’t have to provide free food, massages, or ping-pong tables to inspire a great company culture. Workplace surveys after surveys show that what people desire most is making an authentic human connection with their co-workers feeling that their work matters, and having some autonomy over their own time. Tapping into trends can help you strengthen your company’s culture in all these areas.

The cruelty of unrequited love isn’t really that we haven’t been loved back, rather that our hopes have been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone whom we will have to keep believing in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free. In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the ‘incumbent problem’: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent – ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations. When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well. The corrective to insufficient knowledge is experience. We need to mine the secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better than the incumbents we already understand.

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

Too many leaders with business acumen and not enough people acumen.

In the future workplace and connected world, your digital personal brand is the only thing you will have.

Woodism - “The only competitive differential in business is culture—create a CULT that inspires the best in everyone!

Leaders are no longer expected to just enhance the bottom line; many are now being given the sacred duty of spiritually awakening, emotionally healing, and courageously leading from a platform of inclusion, wholeness, and connection.

Being a Connected Leader transforms loved ones into soul mates, families into havens, groups into cohesive teams, and workplaces into gateways that usher us and those we serve into possibility.

Empathy requires bravery; it scoffs at anything less

Empathy needs boundaries

I do not mean to imply that psychological safety is all you need for high performance. Not even close. I like to say that psychological safety takes off the brakes that keep people from achieving what's possible. But it's not the fuel that powers the car. In any challenging industry setting, leaders have two vital tasks. One, they must build psychological safety to spur learning and avoid preventable failures; two, they must set high standards and inspire and enable people to reach them. Setting high standards remains a crucial management task. So does sharing, sharpening, and continually emphasizing a worthy purpose.

The Mantra of Teamwork: When there's resistance, there is friction. When there's friction, there is fire. When there's fire, there is breakdown. When breakdown befalls, teamwork crumbles.

The journalist Dan Lyons joined a tech start-up after being downsized from Newsweek in 2012, and the experience inspired him to write a book about how Bay Area norms have infected the American workplace, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. Nominally egalitarian but oppressive in practice, the start-up spirit insists that everyone be super psyched about their jobs all the time. No one is actually loyal to the organziation in the sense of intending to work there for longer than five years, but what employees lack in commitment, they must make up for in enthusiasm. This mandatory passion is made worse by the smartphone. No one is every off duty anymore. The BlackBerry’s original tagline was “Always On. Always Connected.” Bizarrely, this made people want to buy it.

Some try to tell themselves that they tried to make changes from within the system the best they could. Unfortunately, however, anyone who has had the chance of working inside brutal, unjust, and systematically racist and oppressive institutions knows that trying to make changes from within is not only a myth, but more likely than not, the huge, sophisticated and unjust institutions will change you to conform to their agenda rather than the other way around. At best, if one tries to make changes or challenges brutal workplaces, one would either lose their job, or – if lucky enough – would simply remain static and never advance in their job or pay. In other words, they will remain poor and powerless, which, by definition, significantly limits any possibility for challenging, let alone, changing such institutions or corporations from within.