What Happens if it Breaks?
I was recently working with a client who had a manual process that their team would go through to produce regular reports in Excel. It wasn’t a high level or challenging process, it was basically do this step, then do that step and so forth until they reached the end and the resultant “report” was created. Whilst this worked a bulk of the time, problems arose when something wasn’t quite right, and they needed to troubleshoot the formulas or they recognised that results were not what they should be. All they had been shown was a process. They never understood …
Do You Know Your Peak Time?
At 5am every day, alarm or no alarm my body tends to wake me up. A sleep in for me is 7am which might occasionally happen on a weekend or public holiday. I love to get up and exercise, then after my first coffee (a freshly ground, single origin from a Fair-Trade roaster) I’m ready to go! I focus on my highest priorities first thing so they can be ticked off my ‘to do’ list and then deal with everything else after that. By about 4pm I’m starting to slow down, and by about 6pm I know I am at …
Sometimes it’s just a NO!
I recently received a call from an organisation wanting me to speak at an upcoming event. They had been referred to me by someone in their organisation who had seen me speak previously and thought they would reach out to check on my availability and fee. We arranged a call to find out a bit more and for me to determine if I felt like I was a “fit”. This is something I do with EVERY potential client. In our conversation we discussed what they wanted as the outcome from the event, which, although it was like my topic, was …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
