I’m a morning person. Like to get up around 6. Turns out my career is likely enhanced by my proclivity to be up with the roosters.
If you’re a night owl, on the other hand, you might be more creative and intelligent than us up-with-the-sun types, but your rhythms are out of sync with the corporate clock.
“When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards,” writes Christopher Randler in the Harvard Business Review article, The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm. Randler is a biology professor at University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany
Randler’s research shows that morning people often have the following traits, which can lead to business success:
They earn better grades in school.
Early risers anticipate problems and act to minimize them.
They’re proactive.
Proactivity seems to be the key to all this. Morningsters are more likely to agree with statements such as “I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself” and “I feel in charge of making things happen.”
Evening people, while creative, intelligent, and funny, can also be pessimistic, neurotic, and depressed, according to Randler. They are also out of sync with the hours kept by business and schools, which are in full operation while they doze.
One can learn to become a morning person, but Randler is not sure that would lead to greater productivity.
“There’s evidence that something inherent may determine proactivity,” he says. “Studies show that conscientiousness is also associated with morningness. Perhaps proactivity grows out of conscientiousness.”
I don’t know what to make of this research. As a manager, should I be thinking of ways to get more productivity out of my vampires? How do I bring their attributes of humorousness, etc., into the entire organization?
I’ll have to sleep on that one. What do you think?
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Source: BNET
A Learning a Day 