Shrimp fossil-find 'new species'

Fossils discovered of 425m-year-old tiny shrimp-like creatures are of a species new to science, say experts.

Found in Herefordshire, the invertebrates were preserved by volcanic ash when the UK had a subtropical climate.

The fossils show the animals' shells and soft tissues, such as eyes and limbs, the Leicester experts say.

Prof David Siveter said the species, named Pauline Avibella in honour of his late wife, was a rare discovery.

'Beautiful bird' Continue reading the main story

Our ancient planet

  • At 425 million years old, these ostracods originate from the earth's Silurian period
  • It was when coral reefs first appeared and melting glacial formations meant a rise sea levels
  • There was also a rapid spread of jawless fish, and the first known freshwater fish also emerged

Source: BBC Nature

"The find is important because it is one of only a handful preserving the fossilised soft-tissues of ostracods [type of crustacean]," he said.

"[The fossils] allow unparalleled insight into the ancient biology, community structure and evolution of animals."

Avibella was chosen because it means beautiful bird, reflecting the fact the shell of these creatures looks like a wing to those that have studied it.

The 1cm-long fossils, found in rocks in Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, were reconstructed using a technique that involves grinding each specimen down, and photographing each stage.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20692019#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Insert Coin: PIPA Touch fingerprint reader lets phone owners authenticate most anything

In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you'd like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with "Insert Coin" as the subject line.

Insert Coin PIPA Touch fingerprint reader lets phone owners authenticate most anything

Mobile security beyond PIN codes and passwords is usually a tentative affair. There's fingerprint readers, but they're often specific to the device or the platform, and sometimes limited to just a handful of tasks. Team PIPA wants to raise funds for a more universal solution. Its PIPA Touch scanner can add biometric authentication to phones' lock screens, websites and other tasks through a developer kit, and a modular design lets it slip into cases for the Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices that should receive support. Security goes beyond most fingerprint readers, as well: while a basic swipe-and-done scan is an option, the truly cautious can require a multi-scan sequence that fends off just about any intruder.

Continue reading Insert Coin: PIPA Touch fingerprint reader lets phone owners authenticate most anything

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Source: PIPA Touch (Indiegogo)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/12/insert-coin-pipa-touch-fingerprint-reader/

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The Social Solution to Innovation Challenges - HBR Blog Network ...

Business innovation depends on speed. As my colleague Ray Poynter has observed, "the number one business need...is to get good answers to decision makers quickly enough for those answers to be useful to them."

Yet many of the business innovations that flowed from the first generation of internet adoption have had the perverse effect of slowing business down. There was a brief, shining, productive moment between the invention of the word processor and the advent of email, when we recovered all those hours we once spent with white-out and carbon copies, and had yet to lose those hours to email spam and mailing lists. Now, accelerated communications that came from desktop publishing have given way to arduous website overhauls; the mental freedom that came from mobile phones untethering us from our desks has turned into the mental drain of 24/7 accessibility and accountability.

Social media may provide the antidote to the brain drain.

It's not that social media gives businesses the real-time intelligence they need to work quickly. In fact, as demonstrated by the results of a study that Emily Carr University and Vision Critical conducted earlier this year, there's every reason to think the opposite. Our study found significant differences between social media "sharers" and social media "lurkers" ? differences that could lead a company astray if it took tweets and Facebook posts as indicators of what their overall customer base is thinking.

But listening carefully to social media can transform a business in another way: by creating the pressure for the real-time intelligence and real-time responsiveness that lead to meaningful innovation. There's nothing like a sudden uptick in social media mentions, whether positive or negative, to draw internal attention to an area of business opportunity or vulnerability. That's paired with an external expectation that you won't simply listen, but will actually respond ? whether by thanking people for their praise or addressing their complaints. In the event of a major social media crisis on the scale of the Qantas or Kenneth Cole debacles, you've got even more internal pressure to quickly analyze what went wrong, and even more external pressure to quickly provide a meaningful response.

The pressure to learn and respond ever more quickly is not the only way that social media accelerates innovation, however. Social media can actually enable faster learning, faster thinking and faster decision-making ? if companies adopt the tools, culture and work habits that unlock the innovation-fueling potential of social. Here are 6 key changes:

Get over the inbox: More and more professionals report that email has become a significant drain on their daily productivity. Add to that burden the new challenge of reading and replying to tweets, wall posts and LinkedIn requests, and you've got the makings of a workforce that does nothing except read and respond to messages. While some professionals fall into that trap, more and more of us recognize that we now have to make deliberate choices about which communications actually merit attention, let alone a response. As we move beyond the "answer everything" imperative, we're liberated not only from distraction by social media but from the tyranny of the email
inbox ... freeing up your team to work on their most important priorities instead of the latest missive. To help your team make smart decisions about which messages need a reply (and how quickly), offer explicit guidelines about what kinds of messages can and can't go unanswered.

You can act as a role model yourself by letting your immediate colleagues know that you won't be answering every email, but telling them which medium (Twitter, SMS) or subject lines will always get a same-day response.

Get over link sharing: Sharing useful content is one way a company builds collective intelligence, but in its predominant form, the emailed link, it's also a major contributor to email overload. Get those links out of the inbox by adopting one or more social tools for circulating knowledge within your firm. Encourage your team to use Evernote for their note taking, and set up shared notebooks that team members can clip to (using Evernote's web clipper) to build a collaborative reading file. Set up an internal blog for link sharing, and give team members a button that lets them post links to that blog with a single click. Get employees into social bookmarking, and ask them to use a common tag for links they want to share within the company; if a lot of your shared resources are visual, consider using Pinterest to share images through a Pinboard.

While any of these can help free your team from the dreaded email pile-up, while fostering greater knowledge exchange, it can be hard to wean people off of their email-a-link habit: get them started by providing a post-by-email option, and their behavior will shift over time.

Get over life on the road: Online networks helped birth the global economy, and with it, the global road warrior: the professional who spends days or weeks each month traveling not only from state to state but from country to country. Worldwide relationships may give your company the eyes and ears to gather intelligence from around the globe, but it's hard for intelligence to turn into inspiration and innovation when your global team is depleted by life on the road.

Social networking tools like LinkedIn and Twitter have made it possible to build and deepen crucial business and client relationships without constantly getting on a plane, and social communication tools like Skype and Google+ Hangouts have made it ever-easier to hold meaningful conversations online. You can combine ubiquitous presence with happily productive employees by fostering a culture that treats video chat as a legitimate way to do business, and trusts employees to use their own best judgement about when they need to sit down with colleagues or clients in person instead of online.

Get over Track Changes: Circulating typewritten documents and asking colleagues to write in the margins may have been a pre-1990s nightmare, but if you're working with colleagues on document drafts, Word's Track Changes feature starts to look more unwieldy than those old interoffice envelopes. In a world with Etherpad and Google Docs, there is no reason for the suffering to continue. Write your draft on Word, but then please just post it somewhere that your colleagues can access. Without the mess and confusion of marginal notes, you'll be able to work quicker, write better and think smarter.

Get over your intranet: For well over a decade, companies have poured millions of dollars into building enterprise-grade intranets that are supposed to help employees collaborate more effectively, but more often meet with apathy or hostility. But the very employees who eschew your internal message boards during the day go on to spend their evenings on Facebook and Twitter, and the professionals who may be invisible on your collaboration platform are logging their tasks on Basecamp. Give up the futile mission of forcing employees onto your overpriced internal platform, and look at the social tools they are actually using: then figure out how to stitch those together into a toolkit employees will actually use.

Get over your firewall: Your enterprise I.T. team may be the biggest obstacle to implementing any of these innovation-enhancing changes, since many social web applications by definition live on the cloud and outside your firewall. While there are tough questions to ask about the trade-off between embracing social tools and ensuring the security of your data (and in some cases, legal constraints on those choices), companies too often sideline cloud-based applications without even asking those tough questions. Challenge your I.T. team to make the business case for keeping everything inside the firewall, so you can weigh their concerns against the business benefits of any social tool you might embrace; compare your internal security protocols with the provisions of the social software providers you are assessing, so you can determine whether external equals less secure. You may find that some social applications truly aren't worth the risk, but the evaluation process itself may inspire your I.T. team to to expand the social toolbox they support.

Together, these practices can help your organization turn the corner on social media as a driver of internal business innovation, and help heal some of the pathologies that have inadvertently emerged from the first generation of web-based business. That's not the end of the story, of course: as social tools get incorporated into the core of how we do business today, they will inevitably cause their own forms of pathology and sclerosis. But if we do better with social today, we'll be better prepared to change and adapt tomorrow.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2012/12/the-social-solution-to-busines.html

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From fish to man: Research reveals how fins became legs

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Vertebrates' transition to living on land, instead of only in water, represented a major event in the history of life. Now, researchers reporting in the December issue of the Cell Press journal Developmental Cell provide new evidence that the development of hands and feet occurred through the gain of new DNA elements that activate particular genes.

"First, and foremost, this finding helps us to understand the power that the modification of gene expression has on shaping our bodies," says Dr. Jos? Luis G?mez-Skarmeta of the CSIC-Universidad Pablo de Olavide-Junta de Andaluc?a, in Seville, Spain. "Second, many genetic diseases are associated with a 'misshaping' of our organs during development. In the case of genes involved in limb formation, their abnormal function is associated with diseases such as synpolydactyly and hand-foot-genital syndrome."

In order to understand how fins may have evolved into limbs, researchers led by Dr. G?mez-Skarmeta and his colleague Dr. Fernando Casares at the same institute introduced extra Hoxd13, a gene known to play a role in distinguishing body parts, at the tip of a zebrafish embryo's fin. Surprisingly, this led to the generation of new cartilage tissue and the reduction of fin tissue?changes that strikingly recapitulate key aspects of land-animal limb development. The researchers wondered whether novel Hoxd13 control elements may have increased Hoxd13 gene expression in the past to cause similar effects during limb evolution. They turned to a DNA control element that is known to regulate the activation of Hoxd13 in mouse embryonic limbs and that is absent in fish.

"We found that in the zebrafish, the mouse Hoxd13 control element was capable of driving gene expression in the distal fin rudiment. This result indicates that molecular machinery capable of activating this control element was also present in the last common ancestor of finned and legged animals and is proven by its remnants in zebrafish," says Dr. Casares.

###

Freitas et al.: "Hoxd13 contribution to the evolution of vertebrate appendages."

Cell Press: http://www.cellpress.com

Thanks to Cell Press for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125841/From_fish_to_man__Research_reveals_how_fins_became_legs

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Automation Alley to host webcasting event featuring Orange Dragin ...

Automation Alley, Michigan?s largest technology business association, is pleased to co-sponsor a presentation on webcasting and webstreaming ?with Orange Dragin Group, LLC and MetroTel Communication, LLC, Thursday, Dec. 20, 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at its Troy headquarters.

The free event, titled ?The Powerful Tool of Webcasting ? Add it to your Social Media,? will take place in Automation Alley?s Atrium and video conference room, where representatives from Orange Dragin, a full-service video production company, and MetroTel Communication, which offers video conferencing solutions, will provide interactive demonstrations.

?Our state-of-the-art video conferencing technology is a valuable tool for companies like Orange Dragin and MetroTel Communications,? said Automation Alley Executive Director Ken Rogers. ?Webcasting is important in enhancing a company?s image and social media presence.?

To demonstrate the technology, participating companies will be chosen to prepare a 30-60 second introduction of their company?s products and services to be produced as a live webcast and presented with an archived video segment for future use.

Join Automation Alley, Orange Dragin and MetroTel to experience the benefits of webcasting and Web streaming. Automation Alley Headquarters is located at 2675 Bellingham in Troy.

For more information, contact the Automation Alley Resource Center at (800) 427-5100 or info@automationalley.com, or visit automationalley.com. Contact Moe O?Shaughnessy of Orange Dragin? moe@orangedragin.tv?? to RSVP or just Click and Register Now

About Automation Alley

Automation Alley is a technology business association driving the growth and image of Southeast Michigan?s economy through a collaborative culture that focuses on workforce and business development initiatives.

Since its founding in 1999, Automation Alley has expanded to include nearly 1,000 businesses, educational institutions and government entities from the city of Detroit and the surrounding eight-county region. Automation Alley promotes regional prosperity through entrepreneurial and exporting assistance, workforce development and technology acceleration.?

About Orange Dragin

Orange Dragin is a Full Service Video Production Company Located in Troy and Specializes in Live Event Management with Multi-Camera Recording Coverage, Multiple Day Conference Planning and Design with Webcasting and Streaming capabilities. Other services include; Digital Video Editing with the Latest Editing Software and EFX, Green Screen Stage Designed for Corporate messages, Product overview, and Commercials. Quick Duplication and Transfers of all media types with custom labeling, 3D Graphics & Animation. Doing business Nationally for over 20 years. Equipment and Staffing available at a moments notice.

Click here to be introduced to Automation Alley

Source: Automation Alley/Orange Dragin Group, LLC

Source: http://www.greeningdetroit.com/2012/12/10/automation-alley-to-host-webcasting-event-featuring-orange-dragin-group-and-metrotel-communication-llc/

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Thumbs down to deferred payment offers

12 hrs.

This holiday season, you will be flooded with ?special financing? offers: ?Buy now and pay no interest on your purchase for six, 12 or even 18 months ? if paid in full.?

A new survey from the website Card Hub.com finds that nearly two-thirds of the major retailers are offering a deferred interest plan this holiday shopping season. Some are from the store itself, others are provided by a store-branded credit card.

It?s mighty tempting to buy this way, especially when you don?t have the money for a big purchase. ?Why not let them finance our new TV or computer or refrigerator?? you say to yourself.

Before you take the plunge ? make sure you understand how that ?no interest? offer works. It?s different from the 0% interest rate promotions used by some credit card companies to get new customers.

With a 0% credit card, the interest is waived during the introductory period. After that, the regular interest rate applies to any remaining balance.

With a retailer?s deferred interest program, if you don?t pay off the balance in full by the end of the term, the regular interest rate applies to the entire purchase.

That?s right, they go back and retroactively charge you interest on the balance you?ve already paid off, as if you?d never been offered that zero percent financing.

?That?s just crazy,? said Card Hub CEO and founder, Odysseas Pappadimitriou. ?This is one of the most glaring ?gotcha? practices that exist in consumer finance today. No customer would think that a store could do this. That?s what makes this so dangerous.?

And if this happens, the interest rate you pay will be painful.

?It will be much higher than if you had a low-interest credit card,? said Gerri Detweiler, a personal finance expert with Credit.com. ?Most deferred payment offers start at 17 percent interest and go as high as 25 percent or more.?

Look at the numbers. Let?s say you buy a $1,000 TV and take advantage of the six-month deferred interest offer. After that, the regular rate of 25 percent kicks in. You expect to pay off the set during that grace period, but something comes up and it takes you nine months.

In this scenario, you?ll be charged 25 percent interest for nine months: $108. It?s as if the no-interest financing never existed.

If you?d purchased that TV using a traditional credit card with a 14 percent APR, you?d only pay $60 interest during those nine months. That?s a big difference and it gets worse the longer the term of the deferred interest.

The bottom line?
The best way to avoid this trap is the old-fashioned method of buying things when you?ve saved up the money to pay for them.

?Debt is debt, regardless of any deferment of interest,? noted John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com. ?Getting into deferred interest debt still means you're in debt, period. The fact that the interest is deferred should be meaningless to the smart consumer.??

Play it smart. If you are going to charge it, avoid financing from retailers or their co-branded credit cards and rely on traditional credit cards.

If you qualify for a card that offers zero percent interest on new purchases, Card Hub suggests the Slate Card from Chase (no interest on new purchases for 15 months) and the Citi Diamond Preferred Card (no interest on new purchases for 18 months).

My two cents?
The ability to charge interest on balances that have already been paid is abusive and should be stopped. The CARD Act already prohibits this with most credit card offers. Why is this allowed for these transactions? It?s a giant loophole that needs to be closed, either by Congress or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Herb Weisbaum is The ConsumerMan. Follow him on Facebook and Twitteror visit The ConsumerMan website.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/thumbs-down-deferred-payment-offers-1C7529220

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When Daily Stress Gets in the Way of Life - NYTimes.com

I was about to give an hourlong talk to hundreds of people when one of the organizers of the event asked, ?Do you get nervous when you give speeches?? My response: Who, me? No. Of course not.

But this was a half-truth. I am a bit of a worrier, and one thing that makes me anxious is getting ready for these events: fretting over whether I?ve prepared the right talk, packed the right clothes or forgotten anything important, like my glasses.

Anxiety is a fact of life. I?ve yet to meet anyone, no matter how upbeat, who has escaped anxious moments, days, even weeks. Recently I succumbed when, rushed for time just before a Thanksgiving trip, I was told the tires on my car were too worn to be driven on safely and had to be replaced.

?But I have no time to do this now,? I whined.

?Do you have time for an accident?? my car-savvy neighbor asked.

So, with a pounding pulse and no idea how I?d make up the lost time, I went off to get new tires. I left the car at the shop and managed to calm down during the walk home, which helped me get back to the work I needed to finish before the trip.

It seems like such a small thing now. But everyday stresses add up, according to Tamar E. Chansky, a psychologist in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., who treats people with anxiety disorders.

You?ll be much better able to deal with a serious, unexpected challenge if you lower your daily stress levels, she said. When worry is a constant, ?it takes less to tip the scales to make you feel agitated or plagued by physical symptoms, even in minor situations,? she wrote in her very practical book, ?Freeing Yourself From Anxiety.?

When Calamities Are Real

Of course, there are often good reasons for anxiety. Certainly, people who lost their homes and life?s treasures ? and sometimes loved ones ? in Hurricane Sandy can hardly be faulted for worrying about their futures.

But for some people, anxiety is a way of life, chronic and life-crippling, constantly leaving them awash in fears that prevent them from making moves that could enrich their lives.

In an interview, Dr. Chansky said that when real calamities occur, ?you will be in much better shape to cope with them if you don?t entertain extraneous catastrophes.?

By ?extraneous,? she means the many stresses that pile up in the course of daily living that don?t really deserve so much of our emotional capital ? the worrying and fretting we spend on things that won?t change or simply don?t matter much.

?If you worry about everything, it will get in the way of what you really need to address,? she explained. ?The best decisions are not made when your mind is spinning out of control, racing ahead with predictions about how things are never going to get any better. Precious energy is wasted when you?re always thinking about the worst-case scenarios.?

When faced with serious challenges, it helps to narrow them down to specific things you can do now. To my mind, Dr. Chansky?s most valuable suggestion for emerging from paralyzing anxiety when faced with a monumental task is to ?stay in the present ? it doesn?t help to be in the future.

?Take some small step today, and value each step you take. You never know which step will make a difference. This is much better than not trying to do anything.?

Dr. Chansky told me, ?If you?re worrying about your work all the time, you won?t get your work done.? She suggested instead that people ?compartmentalize.? Those prone to worry should set aside a little time each day simply to fret, she said ? and then put aside anxieties and spend the rest of the time getting things done. This advice could not have come at a better time for me, as I faced holiday chores, two trips in December, and five columns to write before leaving mid-month. Rather than focusing on what seemed like an impossible challenge, I took on one task at a time. Somehow it all got done.

Possible Thinking

Many worriers think the solution is positive thinking. Dr. Chansky recommends something else: think ?possible.?

?When we are stuck with negative thinking, we feel out of options, so to exit out of that we need to be reminded of all the options we do have,? she writes in her book.

If this is not something you can do easily on your own, consult others for suggestions. During my morning walk with friends, we often discuss problems, and inevitably someone comes up with a practical solution. But even if none of their suggestions work, at least they narrow down possible courses of action and make the problem seem less forbidding. ?If other people are not caught in the spin that you?re in, they may have ideas for you that you wouldn?t think of,? Dr. Chansky said. ?We often do this about small things, but when something big is going on, we hesitate to ask for advice. Yet that?s when we need it most.?

Dr. Chansky calls this ?a community cleanup effort,? and it can bring more than advice. During an especially challenging time, like dealing with a spouse?s serious illness or loss of one?s home, friends and family members can help with practical matters like shopping for groceries, providing meals, cleaning out the refrigerator or paying bills.

?People want to help others in need ? it?s how the world goes around,? she said. Witness the many thousands of volunteers, including students from other states on their Thanksgiving break, who prepared food and delivered clothing and equipment to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Even the smallest favor can help buffer stress and enable people to focus productively on what they can do to improve their situation.

Another of Dr. Chansky?s invaluable tips is to ?let go of the rope.? When feeling pressured to figure out how to fix things now, ?walk away for a few minutes, but promise to come back.? As with a computer that suddenly misbehaves, Dr. Chansky suggests that you ?unplug and refresh,? perhaps by ?taking a breathing break,? inhaling and exhaling calmly and intentionally.

?The more you practice calm breathing, the more it will be there for you when you need it,? she wrote.

She also suggests taking a break to do something physical: ?Movement shifts the moment.? Take a walk or bike ride, call a friend, look through a photo album, or do some small cleaning task like clearing off your night table.

When you have a clear head and are feeling less overwhelmed, you?ll be better able to figure out the next step.



This is the first of two columns about anxiety.

Source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/dont-let-stress-get-in-the-way-of-life/

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UK police arrest 6th person in sex abuse probe

LONDON (AP) ? British police on Monday arrested another suspect in the sex abuse probe spurred by allegations against the late BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile.

The Metropolitan Police said officers arrested a man in his 60s on suspicion of sexual offences. The man, who was not identified, was taken to a London police station for questioning and was later released on bail until January, Scotland Yard said.

Six people have been arrested while a seventh has been questioned. No one has been charged.

The arrest is the latest in Operation Yewtree, a broad investigation into child sex abuse spurred by the case of Savile, a popular BBC children's program presenter who has been accused of serial sex abuse of underage girls. Police say there may be several hundred victims of Savile, who died last year aged 84.

The Savile allegations have embarrassed the BBC, which has been accused of failing to report on investigations into Savile's alleged crimes. BBC Director-general George Entwistle was forced to resign last month over the broadcaster's handling of the scandal.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-police-arrest-6th-person-sex-abuse-probe-182737538.html

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Video: Panel discusses Clinton?s future

A Second Take on Meeting the Press: From an up-close look at Rachel Maddow's sneakers to an in-depth look at Jon Krakauer's latest book ? it's all fair game in our "Meet the Press: Take Two" web extra. Log on Sundays to see David Gregory's post-show conversations with leading newsmakers, authors and roundtable guests. Videos are available on-demand by 12 p.m. ET on Sundays.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/vp/50136416#50136416

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Coaching Managers to Manage Themselves FIRST!

In his book ?First Things First,? Steven Covey wrote ?Where there?s no Gardener, there?s no Garden.?

The Garden can be a place of great energy and great solace, a place to work and to reflect.?In the garden we can plough, sow, tend, nurture and ultimately harvest.?

However the Garden will not flourish if the Gardener is ineffective in managing themselves and the Garden. In an organisation a Manager cannot expect to manage the work and results of other people successfully if they cannot manage themselves first.

In my coaching conversations with Leaders and Managers I encourage them to create and work in their own garden.

Self management should be the Manager?s Number One priority.

As an Executive Coach, I am often asked by the Manager ?Coachee? for coaching to be better in planning, managing and organising themselves, improving work/life balance, delegation, giving effective feedback and strategies for stress management.?

Managers discuss their feelings such as struggling, being overwhelmed, not able to delegate enough, guilt about hours spent at work, challenged by staffing problems and so on.

Some Managers are so focused on their own battles and survival that they have less energy to give of themselves in leading, managing and developing others.??

What are the Essentials for Coaching a Manager in Self Management?

1.?The Coaching process must be a conversation with Coachee objectives and actions. Coaching objectives specifically in the area of self management are essential. The Coaching process needs to demonstrate and replicate ?self management? itself with goals and actions, positive focus and motivation, discipline, reflection and reward and celebration.

2.?The use of assessment and survey tools can be very effective for creating self awareness of personal style. Throughout their lives and careers, many Managers do not understand how other people perceive them. A diagnostic or assessment instrument can be a great starting point to increase self awareness around style and behaviours. The ethical and responsible use of all diagnostic and assessment tools, especially in debriefing, is a key competence for a Coach.

3.?It is important for a Manager to understand how his capability for self management impacts either positively or negatively on his abilities to manage his role, function and build relationships. We focus on self management in relationship to management functions such as Leadership, Planning, Organising, Coaching and giving feedback, Getting Results and Building Relationships with Stakeholders.?

4.?Coaching provides a space for Managers to slow their pulse and reflect especially on their own thoughts, actions and behaviours.?Powerful and focused questions from the Coach can facilitate the Manager reflecting on specific events and their actions from different perspectives. The space for reflection and talking through issues can also help the Manager to be more creative with options and solutions.

5.?Coaching facilitates the Manager identifying self management strengths, obstacles and challenges and options for risk and experimentation. Strengths emphasised can be affirmed by the Coach. The outcomes of risk taking and experimentation can be shared for review, problem solving, affirming and celebrating with their Coach.

6.?A Coaching conversation should always come to a close with clear actions. When a Manager has some objectives about managing themselves better outcomes can be realised however it appears that sustainable change occurs when the Manager views their own process more as a marathon rather than a sprint.??

7.?Each Coaching conversation is a building block for the next. As a Manager owns his issues, experiments and takes action the Coach is ready to provide support, affirmation and positive reinforcement of efforts made and changes that proved successful.?The Managers? levels of confidence increase.?In addition seeking feedback from others such as Managers, peers and staff supplements the recognition and support from the Coach. This augurs for more sustainable change in the identified areas for improvement, development and growth of the Manager.

8.?In Coaching we ask the Manager to become the successful Gardener working in their own Garden first. In this Garden the Gardener speaks to him or herself in positive ways, says ? well that was dumb? when forgetting to fertilise in Spring, uses words of encouragement to keep going when digging a soil that is dry and rock hard and to have optimism to sow and nurture again after a storm has destroyed all the crops. And finally the Gardener can reflect upon and celebrate the bumper harvest that feeds himself and others in his life.

In Australia Lisa Baker, ACC, has a long held passion for facilitating individuals and organisations to find their own ideas, solutions and realise potential. Whether providing business coaching, coaching and building teams in organisations, to facilitating with a CEO to lead and implement major change, you will find Lisa energised and sharing her infectious optimism. For more information go to www.kaleidoscopeconsulting.com.au.

Source: http://icfheadquarters.blogspot.com/2012/12/coaching-managers-to-manage-themselves.html

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