Bathroom Lighting - Function Is Your First Priority

Home lighting means providing beauty as well as light, but unlike other rooms, your bathroom lighting should be first and foremost designed for function. But keep in mind that it can be beautiful as well.

The bathroom is where you and your family prepare yourselves to greet the world and so it needs the right kind of lighting. At the same time the modern bathroom is also a place to relax and where you go to read a book or simply to lie and wash away the cares of the day. Doing it right means achieving a balance between these two things - on the one hand a bright light for practical uses and on the other a softer light for more relaxing moments. In other words, combine task lighting for those practical moments, ambient lighting for general use and accent lighting for when you want to highlight certain areas..

We'll start with task lighting. It is not usual in bathrooms to have a vertical light with more direct lights over the vanity area. You might also want to have the shower area well lit since it is all too easy to slip on wet tiles. Many men also use the shower for shaving so this light will come in handy for that as well. The purpose is to provide brighter light in certain areas of the bathroom while daily cleaning and grooming tasks are carried out.

Most bathrooms will also include overhead or ambient light where some light is shed over the whole room. This type of lighting is16AA necessary so that you can see where things are, and have sufficient light in which to clean the bathroom and shower area. Some people prefer a series of down lights, strategically placed, to one overhead light. In many bathrooms this is all the lighting there is but if you want to do it right you may want to consider more than one light.

Accent lighting is a way of highlighting certain areas of the room, perhaps a painting or an ornament that you want to display. It sometimes helps to have a dimmer control with your accent lighting as this can be turned up or down depending on your mood. Accent lighting, properly used can add character to your bathroom.

It's also not a bad idea to install a switch that has it's own small light, so you don't have to worry about running your hand up and down the wall should you need to get up in the middle of the night.

The right bathroom lighting requires a lot of careful thought. Not everyone for example will want a harsh over the mirror light for when they are shaving or applying make up - but they may want some form of extra light while they carry out these tasks. Having overhead lighting fitted with a dimmer switch is useful when you want to relax for a while and prefer subdued lighting. A combination of different lights will make your bathroom functional as it needs to be, but also make it fit your moods as well.

To learn more about lighting your home visit http://www.contemporary-lighting-accents.com, a website designed to make your home bright and beautiful. You'll learn about proper use of different types of lights including pendant lighting, as well as ways to beautify the outside of your home with landscape and walkway lighting.

Master Stair Buiding

The Motivation Myth

"It is the ultimate management conceit that we can motivate people." Peter Scholtes, team effectiveness consultant and author

After six years at Universal Pictures, Harry Cohn formed Columbia Pictures in 1924. During the following decades he ran the company with an iron fist. His image as a tyrant was reinforced by the riding whip he kept near his desk to crack for emphasis. Cohn form of "motivation" led to the greatest creative turnover of any major studio. At his funeral in 1958, one observer suggested that the thirteen hundred attendees "had not come to bid farewell, but to make sure he was actually dead."

Some parents want their kids to be independent as long as they do everything they're told to. Some team leaders want their teams to be empowered as long as they follow directions. What some "leaders", call "motivation" is getting others to carry out their orders. Some seem to live by the philosophy that if I want any of your bright ideas I'll give them to you. Just do what you're told...and look like you're enjoying it. These forms of "motivation" are based on fear and force. If the punishment is strong enough and the policing rigid enough, they will lead to compliance. People will follow the rules and marching orders. But that's all. Energy, creativity, and extra effort will be minimal. So will ownership and commitment. The only passion tyrants and autocrats create are fear, loathing, and the desire for revenge.

The key problems of the Motivation Myth are clearly illustrated by a Farcus cartoon; a team leader is at the head of a conference table addressing her team with these words, "we need to improve morale, any of you boneheads have a good idea." The main cause of the problem seems pretty obvious. She just needs to look in the mirror. But obviously the obvious isn't always so obvious. Root causes and symptoms are continuously confused. The Farcus team leader is treating low morale as a problem to be solved rather than an indicator of much deeper issues. Clearly a key source of a deeper problem is her contempt for her team and her forcefulness. Her approach is like an auto mechanic reporting, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."

Many of the symptoms and root causes of motivation and morale can be clarified by understanding the doing versus being aspects of mobilizing and energizing. We need to get beyond "do to" programs and techniques. The big sticks of fear, punishments, and discipline or the carrots of incentives and rewards may work in the short term. But to keep them working, we need to continually increase the beatings or sweeten and vary the incentives. Eventually the beatings will burn people out and they will quit. Some will leave and find other jobs. Many will silently resign and continue to report for work everyday.

People should be fairly rewarded for their contributions. The absence of money can be demotivating, but its presence doesn't provide healthy, long-term motivation. Using money or types of incentives to get increased performance turns people into selfish, self-centered mercenaries who are increasingly tuned into WIFM (what's-in-it-for-me). Pride, teamwork, concern for customers, shared values, growing and developing, passion, meaningful work, and the like fade. These become hollow words that raise "the snicker factor" whenever they are heard.

Effective mobilizing and energizing goes well beyond "doing" programs to the "being" or culture of a team, organization, or any group including a family. That culture is a set of shared attitudes and accumulated habits around "the way we do things here." The culture provides the context or backdrop that either energizes or exhausts people.

Excerpted from Jim's fourth bestseller, Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success. View the book's unique format and content, Introduction and Chapter One, and feedback showing why nearly 100,000 copies are now in print at http://www.growingthedistance.com Jim's new companion book to Growing the Distance is The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. Jim Clemmer is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth. His web site is http://www.clemmer.net/articles

Overcomingadversityandleadershipprofileofblendawi

Inspire a Vision

In the fall of 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke at Rice University about the nations young space program. A year earlier, in the first year of his presidency, Kennedy had pressed hard for huge expenditures for the program, and he had set a seemingly impossible goal: man would go to the moon by the end of the decade.

Rice University is in Houston, a place that was to be central to the space program, so it must have seemed like a good place to talk about why we were spending all this money on a project whose goals were more than a little obscure to many people at the time.

I re-read that speech every once in a while because its a fantastic example of how leadership can inspire and enlist others in a vision. On that day, President Kennedy didnt say a word about how we were going to get to the moonhe didnt know how. The technology, fuel, and communication necessary for such an undertaking had not yet been invented. Instead, he sketched out a vision of what he felt we needed to accomplish and why it was important:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

I revisit the speech because it helps me better understand the role of the modern-day CEO, a person who is called on to enable others to deliver the goods to the board of directors, the shareholders, the customers, and other stakeholders. The best top executives do this with only one hand because the other is busy orchestrating a vision of the future, the kind of vision Kennedy talked about in his 1962 speech at Rice.

Short strategies, long vision

As Kennedys speech demonstrates, vision and leadership have always mattered. But those qualities are even more valuable today. One reason is that the half-life of any business strategy is much shorter than it used to be. Companies used to talk about the importance of good five-year plans; today, its difficult to follow a five-year plan because the rules of the game may change in less than half that time. And that reality has had an enormous impact on the way the professional development field is viewed.

Executives tend to be skeptical about the value of professional development training, tired of the flavor of the month approach. Many believe that people in the professional development field embrace one message one minute and something entirely different the next.

Im not offended when I hear that criticism because I think it contains an element of truth. The fact is, professional development tactics change frequently because the playing field changes so rapidly. We do change direction, and its because the way we do business changes so fast. That has become a simple reality in my business, but it is now a reality in every business.

One thing that doesnt change is the need for a clear and simple vision, a bottom-line directional view of the futurethe whys of business, if you will. Establishing that vision is one critical step; inspiring that vision is another. But those two steps wont ultimately matter much if the message doesnt get repeated, forcefully and frequently, to everyone up and down the organization. The process doesnt end at the point that the management team buys into the objective; the message has to become a drumbeat, a mantra that burrows itself into the entire organizations fabric.

Team members need to hear that drumbeat over and over again, until it becomes second nature behavior. Whatever the organization doesevery step, every initiative, every strategyhas to be aligned with that vision.

So when a CEO thinks about training for an organizations top executives, the emphasis must be on the kind of culture that will be required to turn the vision into something tangible. We shouldnt be simply seeking a smoother process or an up-tick in efficiency; instead, our focus must be on moving everyone in the same direction, and knowing why were going there.

If the training program really does its job well, it will also instill a serious dose of passion about the organizational vision and message. Inspiration is what its about, so lets not be afraid to inspire.

If top executives arent likely to benefit a great deal from conventional management training, and if the ground rules for visualizing the future keep changing, exactly what sort of training is likely to help people at the top run their companies? Here are some ideas:

Learn to inspire and enlist others in the vision.

You may have a very clear picture of where you want your company to go, but its going to be extremely difficult to get there if the other team members arent on board.

Exhibit passion, and demand it in others.

Any vision worth believing in should really matter, and it should generate a healthy dose of excitement. When you talk about your shared vision, the ground should tremble a little and your heart rate should go up. If it doesnt, somethings wrong.

Set the bar high.

Once people see the vision you describe, getting there may seem impossible. But if the shared vision really means something, people can do seemingly impossible things. And doing that together feels great.

Give people permission to challenge the process. People cant do things if they arent empowered to do them. Its not about thinking outside the box anymore; its about acting beyond the box. So empower them.

Set the stage.

Every organization has a culture. CEOs and executive leaders are the architects of the culture and contribute greatly to it whether they mean to or not. Since you are going to establish much of your companys culture anyway, model the way. Think about what you want the company culture to be, and make it so.

Communicate values.

Everything from the culture of the company to the feelings of self-esteem possessed by the employees spring from the values that the company embraces and cares about. And values come from the top.

The media loves to focus on colorful CEOs, and although some enjoy the attention, many of the best corporate leaders are people most of us have never heard of. The really good ones are those that take an active role in mentoring and coaching at every level of their business. Thats what creates good corporate cultures, and corporate cultures are what set the stage for success.

Nicholas D. Conner is Vice President of Program Development and COO of TeamBuilders.

For nearly twenty years he has enjoyed sharing his experience and expertise with organizations that include small business to Fortune 20 Companies.

His unique facilitation style combining humor with knowledge creates workshops that are both entertaining and insightful. Nick is one reason why TeamBuilders client list reads like a Whos Who of global business.

EXPERIENCE AND EXPERTISE Nearly twenty years of designing and facilitating sophisticated workshops in Team Synergy High Performance Teams, Mergers and Acquisitions and Change, Leadership Synergy, Leading & Coaching for High Performance Teams and Self-Managed/Self-Directed Work Teams.

Myers Briggs Type Indicator Level Eight Facilitator-MBTI, MBTI Step II, MBTI Executive Coaching

Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership-Kouzes and Posner

The FiveStar Team Performance Indicator

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