Collaboration
Ever driven somewhere only to arrive and realise you don’t actually remember HOW you got there? I don’t mean how, you actually got there, you know that you drove there, but you have no conscious memory of the drive. It’s almost like you travelled on “auto pilot”. A common route you take turning each corner and arriving at your destination unconsciously. So every year, I go to the United States to attend a professional speakers conference. A few years ago it was in Orlando the Walt Disneyworld Resort. Going there was exciting, but I wanted to share with you something …
Plan B, C, D & E
On the odd occasion when I present at conferences or events something goes wrong. On this occasion we’d tested everything, the audio and the data projector prior to me presenting and everything was working fine. There was a break before I started and I took the opportunity to check everything again….glad I did because the data projector had gone all blurry. My first thought was the focus had been knocked, so I checked that, no everything was OK. We restarted my computer and the data projector but still blurry. With 5 minutes before we were due to start, I ran …
Sharing is Caring
According to an article by fortune.com, This Is the Top Reason People Quit Their Jobs—It’s Not Money, executive job board Ladders found in a survey of 16,500 members that the two most cited reasons for people leaving a role were boredom and long hours. Boredom doesn’t just happen. It progresses over time through long hours resulting in frustration and staff “switching off” because they’ve had it. When I work with executives and their teams, one of the most common things clients say is, “we used to have someone who did that, but they left.” Sometimes it isn’t until a team …
Is Your Workplace Stressed
Whilst delivering the last of several inhouse workshops for state sales teams of a national organisation on managing email and Microsoft Outlook, I asked when they thought it was acceptable to STOP responding to emails each day. Not surprisingly it triggered discussion but the response of one of the manager’s surprised me. The manager jokingly [sic] said “If it is one of mine, I expect them to answer straight away.” Whilst I assumed it was a joke as a murmur of chuckles resonated through the group, I realised he was half serious! Whilst today we have 24/7 connectivity, it doesn’t …
Don’t Just Do It!
In our world of 24/7 connectivity, increased expectations and rush to get “stuff” done, we often go for quantity over quality and when we do, we take risks. Berkshire Hathaway Founder and investor Warren Buffett is quoted as saying: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”. I agree, but with technology at our finger tips we often take on the Nike mantra “Just Do it!TM ” in an effort to get through the increasing volume of “stuff” to get done, when reality is, we should be focusing on the quality of our actions. …
Presenting to Persuade
I first heard of WIIFM from one of my Australian mentors Winston Marsh. It stands for “what’s in it for me?” It’s often a measure by which people make a choice about whether to do something or not. For example, what is the payoff or what do I get in return? When I work with organisations and their teams to help them leverage Microsoft PowerPoint to present internally or externally, I always raise WIIFM x 2 as a foundation piece to think about BEFORE planning a presentation. When presenting information in a business context most people consider WIIFM to be …
Plan Your Week For Success
Recently, whilst planning my activities for the week, I started thinking about a CNBC article I read last year that referenced an Arianna Huffington interview with Malcom Gladwell. In the interview, he shared that he is at his most productive in the first three hours of the day. Author, Daniel Pink in his book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, shares the concept of determining our most productive hours of the day based on a concept, Larks, Owls and “Third Birds”. Larks those at their most productive in the morning, owls at night and “third birds” as those in …
Minimising the Excel Risk
Clients often come to me looking for help with a new staff member. The scenario is usually the new staff member, when asked in the interview process about their level of skill with Excel, responds that they at an intermediate or advanced level. Whilst decisions about whether to employ someone or not don’t normally rest solely on the response to this question, for a manager, it can be frustrating to have to re-train a new hire in order to get them to the level they need to be at, to do the job they have been employed to do. Not …
Trust in Your Body of Work
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell outlines the 10,000 hour rule. The principle is that 10,000 hours of practice is what is needed to become world class in any field. For many executives, their knowledge or expertise in their industry probably exceeds this. Yet, when it comes to presenting information or a pitch to a board, shareholders, clients or other influencers, it can be challenging to determine what to include and what not to include. Whilst recently working with an executive to prepare a regular presentation that had become “tired”, instead of talking about what to INCLUDE, we spoke about …
Drive Change in Your Team
It can be pretty tempting to blame software, or other people for the reasons why our we don’t do what we want to do. Reality is the only way to get better and drive change to increase productivity, performance and profits and reduce risk, stress and frustration is to drive change ourselves. Many executives think that they key to getting more done is to do more, but where does it stop? Most executives I coach on productivity with technology don’t need to know a lot. They just need to make a change. It’s generally not a big change, just a …
