Every one is NOT like you!
When I was a child, my mother used to espouse the old adage… “You can’t please all of the people all of the time.” Whilst we know that not everyone will like you, it’s important to also know not everyone is like you. What’s the difference? Often when I speak to people about sharing ideas or information with their team, all I hear is frustration. For example, a finance manager who tried to upskill one of his team members by presenting her with, what was for him a life changing book, on how to use various Excel features. A few …
Brain Dump
With so many tasks, expectations and deadlines it is easy for things to fall through the proverbial gaps if you don’t have a strategy for collecting, sorting and categorising the importance of tasks to be done. When you don’t have a strategy, or it is very loose, the results can vary, from missing important deadlines, being unprepared for meetings or worse, feeling anxious and stress resulting in grumpiness when you get home or trouble sleeping. Whilst working with a global brand we explored the concept of a brain dump. A brain dump is simply an allocated block of time where …
I wish I’d known….
I recently shared a graphic from business management platform solution provider Domo.com that visually presented the results from it’s Data Never Sleeps 2017 findings which Forbes.com quoted as being 2.5 quintillion bites of data. One of the challenges facing anyone in a leadership role is understanding and interpreting the “big data” that technology can produce. Whilst having more information at our fingertips is often presumed to be better than less, reality is if you can’t, or don’t know how to, analyse it, it really doesn’t matter. I was doing some one on one coaching with an executive in an organisation …
Making reports easy!
With so much reporting needed today, one of the challenges can be taking data in Excel and putting it into a Word report. Using a simple copy and paste is one of the most common things we see users do. But what if you need to insert larger sections of data that are landscape mode instead of Word’s traditional format, portrait?? Section breaks in Word enable you to change the layout of the page from portrait to landscape and back to portrait again. You can potentially save yourself hours of frustration in report preparation knowing this one element of Word. …
Close the Loop on Risk
CAccording 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 …
Are you a professional??
A few years ago I saw Jerry Seinfeld perform in in his home town of Manhattan. I’d seen the documentary, The Comedian on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it as it provides an excellent insight into how, despite his professional success he is always working to make his performances better. He is known for his meticulous crafting, trialing and refining of content and I on this night, I was in awe of his ability to observe common everyday actions and activities and shine a light on them in a different way. As a professional speaker, trainer …