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 …
Executive Presentations
Presentations Whilst it may not be top of an executive “what keeps me awake [every] night” list; preparing for, putting together and presenting presentations for shareholder or board meetings or pitches regularly turns executives into a sweaty mess. The pressure to get the message across in their designated time, in a fashion that doesn’t draw snores of boredom, nor require the magnifying glass of Inspector Watson to read, is heavy. Some executives outsource their presentations to a marketing team or support staff. Whilst it provides brand consistency, “on the fly” editing at 3am can be a challenge if you don’t …
Vision – Planning
It’s the last day of 2018 and time to become visionary! When people think of vision, they generally think of long term strategy, however vision can apply to our every day. Vision is about PLANNING to be productive rather than HOPING to be productive or allowing the day to happen to you rather than be designed by you. You can do this by identifying the key things you want to get done and focusing on achieving them, minimising distractions. Extend it further by getting yourself and your team focused every day. It may be as simple as keeping each other …
Collaboration – Mastermind
In 1937, Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich. In the book, Hill wrote about the value of masterminds. All mastermind is, is a group of people that get together and share and collaborate for an express purpose of getting better. In educational terms there are a lot of similarities between a mastermind and a community of practice. In his book Workplace Learning, Principles and Practice, Robert W. Rowden suggests the following: …
Risk Management – Information Overwhelm
According to a 2018 www.forbes.com article, there is 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. [https://tinyurl.com/y9owrda8] Whilst technology has been a part of our business lives for so long, organisations and their teams struggle with managing the sheer volume of information we receive daily. …
Communication – Nice, Need, Must Know
It’s easy to try to jam too much into your emails, but I use the M-N-N method when I’m emailing. The M-N-N stands for Must, Need and Nice. Often what happens when people write emails is they get like verbal diarrhoea. And they basically just take every thought that they have in their head and they jot it down and they click send! And then they wonder they get no response from the person they are sending it to or no action is done. It’s because nobody knows what you want them to do. We seem to be very quick …
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
The Rolling Stones sang you can’t always get what you want. When I start working with clients they often tell me they can’t get what they want with their Excel worksheets. It’s often as result of being too ‘close’ to the data. They know the outcome but either aren’t sure how to get there, or are missing one or more steps. Sometimes you need a fresh set of ‘eyes’ to provide some alternatives or options which can fast track your productivity. This of course is what you need. So if you can’t get what you want, maybe you should try …
