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. …
The Habit Loop
I was recently reading The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins. If you haven’t seen her TedxSF talk, “How to stop screwing yourself over” it’s worth a watch. In the book she raises a concept introduced by Pulitzer-prize winning author, Charles Duhigg known as The Habit Loop. The Habit Loop is a process we complete unconsciously that produces an outcome. It’s the equivalent of a mental macro you might have to perform a set of steps in a spreadsheet. The three step process consists of a 1 – a cue or trigger that initiates the unconscious behaviour, 2 – a …
Everything is easy when you know how
Like riding a bike, everything is easy when you just now know to do it…. About 30 minutes into a recent one on one coaching with an executive, they shared that a colleague had recently raved about pivot tables in Excel. When the colleague tried to explain them, the executive told me of eyes glazing over, and head nodding but no comprehension. The executive shared that the concept of pivot tables remained one of those “mystery” in their mind. They wondered did they really need them and if so, how were they ever going to understand them? We chatted for …
It breaks my heart….
I am often called in to work one on one with executives in organisations on Excel spreadsheets. In most, cases the executives are experts in their industry (hospitality, medical, finance, motor vehicles) but their Excel skills aren’t where they need to be to effectively fulfil their management role. Some may have had executive support in a past role that handled anything with Excel, but many have simply gotten by with the limited knowledge they have but often at the cost of eating into their down time. It breaks my heart when executives don’t get the support they need to have …
Easy ways to increase your team productivity.
The impact of open plan offices on productivity is an ongoing debate. A recent Udemy workplace distraction report1 asked respondents what employers could do to reduce distractions. All of the suggestions made by the respondents could be initiated reducing distractions and increasing focus in enabling teams to work smarter not harder without costing a fortune. 37% said providing training on time management effective meeting skills etc. would reduce distraction. Whilst this may seem like “101” that everyone should know, reality is, in the “busyness” of our day to day operations and with an overwhelming work load, we often forget about …
It’s time to do something different
Don’t waste time and money sending your staff to training offsite! No one liked going to school, so why do organisations send their teams to generic training programs?? Because it’s easy! Much like sending emails, we send people off on programs and when they come back to the office and aren’t “experts” in something, then it’s not your fault, it’s their fault right?? As an educator who delivered generic one day training programs, I was saddened by the number of people who questioned their intelligence when they struggled to understand the applicability of topics we covered in a one day …
Corporate Memory
I received an email from a staff member at an existing client. She had taken on a change management role within this global brand and was reaching out to organise a telephone conversation. She wanted to get an overview of what exposure and work we done with the organisation in recent times so that she could determine where they, and we, were headed next. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, taking her through what we had done, dating back many years and also offered to send over supporting documentation that we had on file that would be …
You don’t need more work!
I recently worked with a sales manager who was a specialist in their industry. On a regular basis (twice a month) they would receive data from their IT department detailing sales by representative in a single Excel worksheet. The sales manager would save a copy of the file for each staff member, rename it with the staff member’s name, remove all the worksheets for other staff, then email the file to the relevant staff member for them to update current status of returns or claims. This task was done on average once a week. When the files were sent back the sales …
