Colleagues,
The Utah Women & Leadership Project (UWLP) has a number of announcements for November (yes, I realize I am a day early):
First, we are pleased to announce the release of three new resources:
Second, one last mention of our community event tomorrow evening at UVU with President Astrid S. Tuminez (UVU’s new president). Come and meet her for our “Unlocking Your Potential: Strengths, Communication, & Networking” evening, and then join one of three workshops (see more details on the flyer and RSVP online now). Also, you can live stream by checking our homepage (www.utwomen.org) for the link on Thursday.
Third, our partners are hosting some wonderful events this month as well:
Fourth, my new LinkedIn article is titled, “How Women Integrate Feminine and Masculine Styles of Leadership to be Successful.” See all my recent LinkedIn articles here. We also want to highlight a few videos from our March 2018 community event: Promoting Literacy in the Home and Community: We All Have a Part and Poverty & Homelessness in Utah. Also, remember that we have a webpage that links to local and state government boards, commissions, and committees. In addition, I serve on the board of Envision Utah and they have a fabulous new video focused on helping people understand how we can improve education in the state. It is titled It's My Education and It's Our Future. What a great reminder that the quality of education kids receive in our community doesn’t just affect them, it affects all of us.
Enjoy November!
Susan
Dr. Susan R. Madsen
Orin R. Woodbury Professor of Leadership and Ethics
Utah Valley University, Woodbury School of Business
Director, Utah Women & Leadership Project
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3 Tips For Overcoming ‘Hidden Growth Killers’ That Harm Your Business
A key part of any CEO’s or entrepreneur’s role is to make the “right” decisions, and then ensure they are enacted to advance the business. Yet their decisions and actions often miss the mark, frustrating the achievement of their aspirations.
It’s the voice in their head and other invisible factors at work.
“All CEOs and entrepreneurs have habits, beliefs and motivators – such as fear – that affect what they do, often unconsciously,” says Mark E. Green, a speaker, coach to CEOs and author of Activators: A CEO’s Guide to Clearer Thinking and Getting Things Done (www.Activators.biz).
Green says these “hidden growth killers” interfere with a business leader’s ability to make optimal decisions and then see them through via day-to-day choices and actions.
“This is why leading your business feels challenging, frustrating and even maddening at times despite the fact that you generally know what to do and how to do it,” Green says. “Your motivators, habits and beliefs influence how you think and act.”
Any CEO or entrepreneur who ever put off having a critical conversation or justified retaining a poor-performing employee has experienced their own “hidden growth killers” in action.
And it’s not just those at the top who are susceptible.
“Motivators, habits and beliefs operate similarly in the minds of your leadership team and every other person you employ,” Green says. “The cumulative cost is staggering.”
Fortunately, he says, there are research-backed techniques to counteract the “hidden growth killers” and more consistently align our decisions, choices and actions with our ultimate aspirations. Just a few of those are:
Reduce fear. “Until you identify and debunk your fears, they’re guaranteed to drive your thinking and behavior,” Green says. There are ways to prevent fear-based decision making. One is to name a specific fear and explore the logic and realistic probability behind it. In most cases, you’ll realize that it isn’t real enough to warrant impact on your thinking and behavior. Next, don’t rush into decisions. If you take the time to gather information and weigh logic more than emotion you minimize fear-dominated decisions. Finally, you should surround yourself with more accomplished people who are willing and able to challenge you to grow beyond your fears.
Slow down and get rational. “How we think and what we do are largely the result of habits, some good, some bad,” Green says. Those habits are engrained and automatic, so one way to overcome negative habits is to slow down. For example, many business leaders are in the habit of being seduced by their own busyness. Instead of working on the big-picture – such as assessing customer needs or thinking strategically – they become focused on solving something in front of them that seems broken. “Rather than give in to that urge, you can slow down and get rational,” Green says. Compare the value of one activity to another, weighing which has a better long-term payoff. Or determine if someone else could handle the immediate issue and be sure to get over any fear associated with proper delegation.
Leverage your past, both good and bad. “Your interpretation of the past affects how you view the present,” Green says. “Our perception of past events skews either negative or positive, which is why two people often remember the same event differently.” If you have a past-positive orientation, your past experience will tend to bolster your confidence. But if your orientation is past-negative, you might approach the same situation with fear and dread. Green says you can better leverage your past by contemplating a few questions. What good came from a bad prior experience? Are there alternative explanations for past events? How else can you look differently at what happened in your past? Shifting your thinking can be the key to your future success.
Green cautions that no matter how deliberate you are in your efforts to improve, even the most seasoned CEOs make mistakes and experience setbacks.
“Remain purposeful and take it in stride,” he says. “In the marathon you’re running to scale your business, your willingness to stretch and grow, to do the work and to stick with it are what really matter.”
About Mark E. Green
Mark Green, author of Activators: A CEO’s Guide to Clearer Thinking and Getting Things Done (www.Activators.biz), is a speaker, strategic advisor and coach to CEOs and executive teams worldwide. He has addressed, coached and advised thousands of business leaders, helping them unlock more of their potential and teaching them how to do the same for their teams. He is a Core Advisor to Gravitas Impact Premium Coaches
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Is China a “Responsible Great Power”?
By Mel Gurtov
799 words
President Xi Jinping would like everyone to pay attention to how China is exerting leadership in world affairs as a “responsible great power.” While the Trump administration is in retreat, Xi is taking full advantage of the leadership vacuum. He has, for example, emphatically supported globalization in response to Trump’s narrow nationalism, promised many billions of dollars in aid to developing countries that have signed up for the Belt and Road Initiative, promoted energy conservation and solar power at home, tried to play the honest broker in the North Korea-US dispute over nuclear weapons, and contributed importantly to UN peacekeeping missions. Xi can certainly claim that China is a major player on the most pressing international issues, but how responsible a great power is it?
China’s international record has a number of significant blemishes. It has defied a ruling of an arbitral tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that censured China’s military buildup and ecologically damaging activities in the disputed South China Sea islands. It has tried to create an air defense zone in the East Sea (Sea of Japan) to keep US, Japanese, and other aircraft out of another disputed area. It has been putting pressure on Taiwan’s government to dissuade it from any movement toward independence or increased official contacts with the US.
Here I want to focus on two other rather blatant demonstrations of international irresponsibility. Both relate to large-scale violations of human rights: the mass incarceration of Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province and support of the Myanmar (Burma) government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority. China’s failure to acknowledge these major abuses of human rights is consistent with Xi’s repression of dissent at home and concentration of power in the party-state, both to an extent not seen since the Mao era. But these are not ordinary abuses: They involve large, homogenous populations whose cultures are being systematically wiped out.
By now the Xinjiang roundup of Muslim families, perhaps a million people in all, has been widely reported and internationally condemned. The “reeducation centers,” sometimes also dubbed “counter-extremism training centers,” have been captured on satellite photos and video. Uyghurs, who are still the ethnic majority in Xinjiang, have been imprisoned in an effort, justified as counter-terrorism, to change their language, religion, and way of life—in short, ensure that their primary identity and loyalty is to the Chinese party-state. Now that the party’s secret is out, some Chinese officials have painted an entire population as enemies of the state who must be under surveillance at all times. It’s an Orwellian situation, with face-recognition cameras everywhere, the rule of law entirely absent, and tens of thousands of Han Chinese minders dispatched to villages to live with and report on Uyghur families.
In Myanmar, the most recent United Nations investigation casts the situation as “an ongoing genocide.” More than 700,000 Muslim Rohingyas have been driven from their homes into Bangladesh. Myanmar tried, with China’s support, to block the lead investigator’s briefing of the Security Council. He said: "The Myanmar government's hardened positions are by far the greatest obstacle. Its continued denials, its attempts to shield itself under the cover of national sovereignty and its dismissal of 444 pages of details about the facts and circumstances of recent human rights violations that point to the most serious crimes under international law." The investigator suggested referring the matter to the International Criminal Court.
Sadly, the UN special investigator on human rights in Myanmar reports that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and de facto leader of the country, "is in total denial" about the brutal military campaign of rape, murder and torture of Rohingya. "Right now, it's like an apartheid situation where Rohingyas still living in Myanmar ... have no freedom of movement," the special investigator said. "The camps, the shelters, the model villages that are being built, it's more of a cementing of total segregation or separation from the Rakhine ethnic community."
China’s support of the Myanmar government’s intransigence is founded on the noninterference principle, a perfectly respectable principle except when it becomes a convenient excuse for ignoring terrible events next door by pretending it’s wrong to speak out. Criticism of the military is not “helpful” and the situation is “complicated,” Chinese officials have said. They have called for “dialogue,” as though the rampaging Myanmar military has the slightest interest in talking. “Dialogue” is China’s alternative to Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that China has voted against since 2007.
Most likely, Chinese policy is motivated by Beijing’s treatment of its own ethnic minorities: avoid internationalizing inhumane behavior outside China that is going on inside China. Evidently, support of human rights for all is not part of being a “responsible great power,” whereas support of crackdowns on innocent minority peoples is.
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Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.
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