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Decision Time

I wrote this article for South China Morning Post Signposts column which appeared on April 5, 2008 in the Life section.

How do you know you are making the right decision?

Anson, a sales manager at a logistics company, has not been sleeping well for months. His firm merged with another last year and soon afterwards his boss, with whom he got on well, left the company. His new boss doesn’t appreciate the contribution and culture of his team. He feels his new boss is trying to dismantle all the good things they had before.

He loved his work and got on well with his colleagues. His performance was recognized and he derived great pride and satisfaction from his job. Now he is so miserable he is considering leaving.

He has a dilemma. If he stays, he will continue to feel miserable and unmotivated, which is affecting his work performance, psychological well-being and the quality of his life. If he leaves, he would only be doing so reluctantly. Why should he quit a job and a company he loves?

Anson is about to make a life-changing decision. How will he know when he has made the right decision? Can he make a good decision when he feels stuck between a rock and a hard place? There appears to be only two choices, both equally undesirable. Whenever we need to pick between two undesirable possibilities, we feel badly about whichever decision we make. In such a situation, you can use the four-options model to analyse what other choices are available.

Option 1: Change the situation
If Anson chooses to stay, he can proactively do something to make the situation better. He can talk to his boss and work with him to galvanize the whole team. He can seek help from colleagues who handled the merger transition well. He can consider transferring to another department.

Option 2: Change yourself
If he feels disempowered to change the situation, he can change himself. He can change his negative beliefs about the merger. He can change the way he feels about his boss. Instead of complaining about the merger, he can learn to look for opportunities presented by the merger. He can learn to see the strengths of his new boss and learn from them. He can focus only on situations within his control - ignore all the issues and focus on his job by staying away from the office politics and going out to engage his customers. Performance is the best way for him to demonstrate his worth and contribution.

Option 3: Tolerate the situation
Tolerating the situation can also be a legitimate option, if the other three options are not viable. The goal is to identify strategies to make the process less painful and easier to bear. Can Anson see any humour in the situation? Can he be more light-hearted about the situation? Can he accept the situation and divert his attention to an interest or project outside of work, or indulge in something he never had time to do because he was too busy with work?

Option 4: Leave the situation
The last option may be to leave the job. When considering this option, try to reach a good closure and look forward to the future with optimism and hope. It is not what happens to Anson but how he handles it that determines his emotional well-being. How can he reframe the situation in order to feel good about this decision? Can he see the advantages and benefits of his choice? What does he need to do to shift from a victim mindset? What does his future look like? What are his next steps?

Every situation is different and every person is different. There is no one right answer. This model enables one to explore all the options and pick the one that is right for him or her.

What would you do if you were in Anson’s situation? Which option would you choose? Write a comment if you are curious about Anson’s final decision.

Three Central Concerns of Positive Psychology

1. Positive emotions(happiness, pleasure, gratification, fulfillment)
2. Positive individual traits (strengths of character, talents, interests, values), and
3. Positive institutions(families, schools, businesses, communities, societies).

Connecting the three dots and we get the underlying theory: positive institutions facilitate the development and display of positive traits, which in turn facilitate positive subjective experiences.

What is positive psychology?

Is there a negative psychology? These are the two most common questions I receive when introducing positive psychology to business clients.

Positive psychology is a term coined Dr. Martin Seligman, Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Seligman is the founder of Positive Psychology, a new branch of psychology that focuses on the empirical study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. In other words, it emphasizes what is right with people rather than what is wrong with them, which has been the focus of psychology in the past. This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

Why should CEOs care about happiness and well-being?

The increasingly educated talent pool now expects more than a job that pays well. Employees now seek happiness, purpose and meaning through their employment. If their employer cannot help them fulfill these needs, they will find a new employer or create a mode of employment that makes this happen. It is not my intent to cast a gloom and doom outlook for big corporations that are working hard to retain their talent pool. However it is so common an occurrence that employers can no longer ignore.

You would have noticed by now that I use the terms ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ interchangeably. This is intentional because happiness, in the field of positive psychology, refers not only to hedonistic pleasures, but also to meaning, purpose and life satisfaction.

To some people, happiness is a luxury that only the affluent can afford. Others frown upon the notion of happiness because of its association with being selfish, simple or stupid. Happiness, as it turns out, not only feels good, but is often good for you and for society. It is associated with a wide variety of tangible benefits, ranging from improved health, to better marriages, to increased chances of attaining personal goals and succeeding at work. Research shows that happy people live longer, succumb to fewer illnesses, stay married longer commit fewer crimes, produce more creative ideas, work harder and better on the job, make more money, and help others more. Although happiness is most commonly thought of as a destination, a state we work toward, it is also a resource or emotional capital we can use in the pursuit of other attractive outcomes. It is in this context that I believe we as business leaders, should pay attention to the happiness and well-being of our employees and all other stakeholders of our business.

About Us

Yee-Ming Tan, executive coach and founder of Third Thinking, has extensive leadership development, corporate culture change, mindset and resilience development in the Asia Pacific region.

With close to twenty-years of human resources and leadership development experience in Asia Pacific and having lived and worked in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong and China, and studied in the US, Australia and New Zealand, Ms Tan has a unique blend of Western approach and Asian sensitivity in her work. This ensures the delivery of sustainable results in personal growth and development as well as acceptance of this work at the emotional level of the people she works with. She speaks English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Ms Tan provides executive coaching to senior executives in the Greater China region. Her clients tend to be multinational companies and the areas of focus are leadership development, organization development, resilience and mindset development. Her clients include companies like Cathay Pacific, Goldman Sachs, L’Oreal, Microsoft, Standard Chartered Bank and Schenker.

She works with executives who aspire to bring out the best in themselves through personal mastery, and also in other people through cultivating inspiring leadership vision and effective impact. Her coaching partnership style allows clients to broaden their perspectives, leading them to new insights, new behaviors and powerful results. Helping clients to face their fear is her signature strength.

Her approach is anchored in positive psychology, a field of study that is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to achieve optimal performance and flourishing at work and in life. She is one of the first executive coaches in Asia Pacific to have completed the prestigious Master in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her book 漣漪詞－11個改變人我關係的正向思考 Start Your Own Ripple Effect, published in 2007 in Chinese, takes the readers through a journey of self reflecting and self understanding, and provides useful tools for personal development and transformation. She also publishes a series of tools, RippleCards, for people who choose to cultivate greater well-being in their lives and to share this with those around them.

Survey: Happier At Work

As part of the research for my second book, I posed this question "What is the one thing you do to make you happier at work?" to three friends (an investment banker, a headhunter and a human resources director) at a dinner party last week.

The answers they gave and the enthusiasm they showed for this question piqued my curiosity so I decided to pose this question to a wider audience.

I'm in two minds about letting you know what these three persons told me. I know you'll be curious yet I don't want their responses to influence your own response. Anyway, here are their responses:

• Friend A developed an awareness of his own fear and how it manifests in his behaviours. He learned to deal with his own fear and learned to behave constructively to lessen the fear in people who work with him.

• Friend B let go of her fear (losing her job by not being good enough or not being on the boss's good book etc). She did this by formulating a realistic strategy to "What is the worst that could happen to me if I lose my job?"

• Friend C mentioned that she cannot change many of the stressful and negative events at work but by focusing on the well-being and growth of her team members, the reward of watching other people grow more than compensate for the negativity around her.
  

I'm inviting you to share your experience and co-create this book with me. I want to know what people actually do rather than what they believe or think they should do. I will share all your tried and tested interventions in my book without revealing the identities of the contributors.

There are only 3 questions in this survey and it will take no more than 5 minutes of your time. So please be my daymaker: make my day by completing this survey!

Survey in English

Survey in Chinese

As a gesture of appreciation for completing this survey, I will send you a gift, RippleThanks, a set of thank-you cards that you can use to make other people happy at work, by catching them doing the right things.

Our Services

Third Thinking specializes in coaching leaders and their teams on the art and science of applying positive psychology to build happy, high performance teams.

- Executive Coaching
- Coaching Skills Workshop
- Coaching Corporate Culture

What our clients say about us?

...professional approach and knowledge of both the Western and Chinese culture that contributes to the success of our program.
L'Oreal

The “before” and “after” are incredible…… Now they are confident and proactive in organizing the business activities.
Shekou Container Terminals

Your coaching is a cornerstone for us to get better as effective leaders.
Microsoft

Ming would push me to think hard on what could I do differently or do better and gave me time to practice. The result is conspicuous and is very visible to my peers and my team members.
Standard Chartered