Play

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s email:

• Play

• The power of hand-written notes

• Thinking as a team sport

• Ask colleagues for help

• Benjamin Franklin as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

Play

Playfulness at work increases our:

✅  Creativity

✅  Collaboration

✅  Engagement

✅  Resilience

✅  Joy

We can be serious about our work without being too serious about ourselves. Staying playful is a great way to live a career.

COMMUNICATION

The power of hand-written notes

Hand-written notes connect at a deeper level than an email or text message. Recipients perceive them as more authentic and thoughtful. Their rarity makes them stand out. And they’re a tangible memento that are more likely to be kept.

Our notes to colleagues can be short. Arriving to a post-it note on a keyboard can bring happiness. A retiring CEO I coached in Hong Kong wrote a thank you card to each of his direct reports. Their feedback was that his words meant a lot.

Are there any colleagues who would value a note from you?

PRODUCTIVITY

Thinking as a team sport

There’s no work I enjoy more than brainstorming product ideas with colleagues. It can be 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 288. Many ideas are quickly abandoned. Others are explored, tested, and shared with clients. We play. We treat thinking as a team sport.

1 MINUTE TO LESS STRESS

Ask colleagues for help

Sometimes our ego stops us from asking for assistance. We don’t want to feel vulnerable. But we don’t have to do it all by ourselves. Here are three great reasons to ask colleagues for help:

1. When we feel overloaded, having colleagues assist us lowers our stress

2. Colleagues are more likely to subsequently ask us for help

3. People tend to treat us better once they’ve helped us. It’s known as the Benjamin Franklin Effect.

GET SMARTER

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was an American Founding Father, scientist, and diplomat. He made his fortune from publishing and printing businesses. Franklin was probably the first US franchisor by renting equipped printing shops to apprentices for 30% of the profits. A sample of his inventions included the lightning rod, bifocals, catheters, a stove, and swim fins.

The Benjamin Franklin Effect is a psychological phenomenon where doing a favor for someone increases positive feelings towards that person. Franklin discovered this when he asked a political rival to lend him a rare book, which improved their relationship. The effect is explained by cognitive dissonance: people justify their actions by aligning their feelings with them. Asking for small favors can be a powerful tool for building rapport and strengthening connections with colleagues.

Some of Franklin’s other wisdom: