The Importance of Self-Esteem For The Workplace

I’d like to share some quotes from Jay Conrad Levinson, The Guerrilla marketing Guru:
•On average, around the world, an innovation in digital technology is copyrighted every three seconds. That’s no misprint; that’s a fact.
•More than half of many companies’ revenues, from technology to food service to banking, come from products and services that didn’t exist two years ago.
•On average,multi-national corporations listed on the New York and Tokyo stock exchanges lose half their customers within five years, half their employees every four years, and half their investors in less than one year.
With that kind of change, and it’s growing, we need something strong to respond to this

And the strongest response is an organizational culture that supports high performance, personal accountability and the creative initiative needed to manage change. That organizational culture is the same as an organizational culture that supports self-esteem.

The same conditions for self-esteem are the same conditions for:
Innovation And Creativity
High Performance Behaviors
Change Readiness
Bringing Out The Best In People
Operating Better Under Pressure

Highly effective leadership cannot happen without high self-esteem. And, by the way, if you’re thinking that your self-esteem is already pretty high, I guarantee you, it can be higher. Just as there is no limit to the amount of joy one has there is no limit to the amount of self-esteem that an individual can have. Hopefully, they are both life long pursuits.

By self-esteem I mean the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. This means trust in your ability to think, learn, make appropriate decisions, and respond effectively to new conditions. Behavior is a reflection of self-esteem and a mind that does not trust itself cannot produce decisive action.

So what are some of the conditions at the workplace that support self-esteem?
-Opportunities for continual learning and upgrading of skills
-Exploration of what made superior work possible, which will increase the chance it will happen again
-Exploration of what made mistakes happen, without blame, which will decrease the chance they will happen again
-Avoiding micromanaging, the enemy of autonomy and creativity
-Keeping managers focused on what needs to be done instead of on personalities
-Encouraging frankness, candor and nondefensiveness
-Clear and firm performance standards
-Support of perseverance
-Promotions based on merit rather then seniority
-A safe environment for disagreement
-The clear message that interest is in solutions, not in blaming or excuses
-Providing enough resources, information and authority to people so that they can do their jobs
-Measuring results against clearly defined objectives
-Acknowledging mistakes and letting the appropriate people take responsibility for them

There are more, and I’m sure you can think of some as well. But in this time of rapid and continual change, it is essential to realize that paying attention to self-esteem is essential to having a competitive edge.