Having a mentor makes workers happier in their jobs.
According to CNBC/SurveyMonkey Workplace Happiness Survey1 conducted earlier this year, workers who have a mentor are more likely to be happy in their job. In my work with clients, my goal is to add value so when I leave the organisation it is in a much better state than when we first started. I view having mentors, and formal and informal knowledge sharing frameworks as keys to retaining staff, increasing engagement and fast-tracking productivity. When workers feel engaged and valued they enjoy their work more, and when they enjoy their work they are more productive. When an organisation has a …
Has your tech ever gone wild?
Occasionally stuff happens and I call it “Tech gone Wild”. When in the US we hired a car to drive from JFK airport in New York up to Boston to visit a friend. We got upsold in a great way at the car rental counter to a brand new vehicle with an inbuild GPS system, heated AND air conditioned seats, the whole works! Whilst a GPS system in a vehicle isn’t unusual these days, in this car it was different. We got into the car and started to set things up for our drive, move the mirrors, the seats etc. …
There is no “ab cruncher” for technology!
I regularly go into organisations and meet frustrated people, and as a result, I get frustrated! Why do I get frustrated? Because so often people made things harder than they needs to be. Everybody is looking for the “Ab Cruncher”. The one piece of technology, the tool or the process that is going to make our lives perfect. Then when that happens when I just sit back and enjoy the ride, right? That’s how it works isn’t it? Not at all. Reality is everyone is looking for the magic pill or thing that will fix everything. It does not exist. …
Respect
It’s natural walking on the street or driving a car to be respectful of those around us. We keep left or right, depending on what part of the world we are in. This respect ensures that most of the time we know what to expect. When working with teams, I often meet staff who express frustration when their everyday programs change or don’t do what they expect them. For better or worse technology is here to stay. Realistically our everyday technology is simply hardware or software designed to fast track tasks in our lives and increase our efficiency so we …
You may already have what you need you just don’t realise it.
I work a lot inside organisations with their teams and one thing I’ve observed a lot lately is the fact that they don’t realise how much knowledge is sitting in a room and instead choose to go Google to look for answers. I was recently working with a client and we had 13 people from within organisation in one room they had all invested three hours of their time and we were working out what were the things that they needed to know, or wanted to know to make their life easier. As we had conversations and discussed different ideas, …
Never underestimate the importance of planning
On a recent trip to the US, I visited the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock Arkansas. Spread out over three floors, the library houses all manner of information related to the Clinton Presidential era including a reproduction of President Clinton’s oval office – with replica furniture and artifacts. Of the many items on display that chronicled the Clinton era was a glass case that housed two pages of one of President Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. The State of the Union Address is delivered by the President of the United States to Congress at the beginning of each …
Needle in a Haystack
I’m sure you’ve heard the cliché about looking for something but not being able to find it referred to as looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s a metaphor I sometimes use to describe how we tend go about trying to solve problems. In a lot of instances, we look for a complicated answer. We think is the answer was easy, we would be able to see it straight away. The challenge becomes the fact that we are exposed to so much information every day that our brain is trying to process, and reality is sometimes we just can’t …
Is it time??
I recently spent a day in a room with 15 of my professional colleagues learning from them, sharing ideas and insights to make ourselves and our businesses better. I commit to doing this several times a year. I am also in several mastermind groups and attend professional industry conferences both in Australia and overseas. I’m often asked why? Connecting with others who ‘get’ what you do, whether it’s your team mates, industry buddies or even friends invigorates, inspires and energises me. It’s like pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete and rebooting yourself. I do it because everyday I wake up to …
The Art of Conversation
When was the last time you had a real, totally focussed conversation with colleagues or clients? After a conference in the Dallas, my husband Paul and I drove down to eclectic Austin, Texas. During a Segway tour of the city, the guide mentioned a secret bar. After the tour, I found it online and made a booking to visit that night. At our designated reservation time, we turned up to the address provided. It was a run down building with a rickety fly screen door with tears in the wire. We pressed the relevant button to gain entry. A slot …
Is near enough good enough?
Time is the most precious commodity in business today. It is the one thing we cannot get more off no matter who we are. So doesn’t it make sense that we maximise our time as best we can? I was recently working with an executive who was putting together customised quotes in Excel for clients. The monotonous cutting and pasting of data was driving him crazy and in a market with slim margins, he was worried about the time it took to get the quotes done along with the risk of errors if he picked up the wrong code number. …
