The message to organizations is this: You have to increase the number of categories of contributing, or the types of career paths, which people can experience as successful. You cannot restrict esteem to the fewer and fewer who will be climbing up the management ladder. You need to have the majority of your people feeling like winners.
Judith M BardwickTrust is perhaps the most critical single building block underlying effectiveness. Without trust leaders do not have followers. Without trust, leaders are impotent despite great rhetoric or splendid ideas. Trust rests on the belief among followers that the leader is transparent: What you see is what there is. Trust means followers believe there is no duplicity; no manipulation just to satisfy the leader's ego. Very simply: The effective leader is transparent; that's why that person is trusted.
Judith M Bardwickmotivation is highest when the probability of success is 50 percent: We don't get involved if the task is too easy or too hard.
Judith M BardwickI think the characteristics of really effective leaders when people are frightened and depressed are the same qualities that leaders need when people are optimistic. The difference is when people are frightened the need for these few qualities becomes much stronger because frightened people are desperate to have someone they can trust and believe in and who seems to be able to create a better future.
Judith M BardwickIf the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty. Very simply, uncertainty is reduced when people are told what's going on and what will happen to them. In the vacuum of no news, people imagine the worst. Since disappointment is much easier to handle than anxiety, then, good news or bad, honesty is honestly the best policy.
Judith M BardwickThere are still many women - and their spouses and children - who view a reflected self - I'm Mrs. Smith, not Mary Smith - as psychologically healthy. Those people are not motivated to change. But it is really dangerous to live through others'. What ever your circumstances, it is not a good idea to be wholly dependent on responses from others to like, respect or love yourself. Your children will grow up and start their own families; the divorce rate has remained at 50 percent for decades.
Judith M Bardwick