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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
It’s all in the preparation
I’ve been speaking, training and consulting for over twenty years and one of the things that still surprises me is the comments I get from participants about my presentations. I’m regularly told “gee you make everything seem so easy”, or “how do you remember all that?”. There is no real secret to presenting, making things look easy or remembering things. It just takes practice. I recently presented a program for a client to educate their organisation on some new software. I was familiar with the programs and whilst I could have just turned up and spoken about the programs to the audience, I …
What do your colleagues know?
I recently worked with a digital marketing manager and one of her team. They were reviewing two sets of data that needed to be compared and decisions made to determine if the data was up to date. They were both quite skilled with Excel…..and that was the problem. They were exploring creating a complicated formula that would check one to the other when I was asked for feedback. A few clarifying questions and some simple suggestions that didn’t require formulas of any kind, enabled them to have a short discussion and support each other in finding a simplistic solution that …
Don’t you get nervous?
It’s a question I’m often asked after I present at a conference or conduct an in-house professional development program for a client. Whilst I’ve been presenting or training for over 20 years, I still get butterflies in my stomach before I present. I’ve grown to understand that this Is a good thing. It means I’m excited and keen to give all that I can to my audiences to help them get more productive! What I also recognise is this it is not the same for everyone, especially if you only present once every now and then. So what I do …
Communicating Change
I once worked with an organisation who had spent several million dollars implementing a new video conferencing system. They came to me to discuss training for their staff and wanted to know how much it would cost. I asked the question I always ask and that was what was their budget? You see if you don’t have some framework to work within, the options are almost unlimited. You could go from giving them a link to a website to download some free resources through to a 12 month program of providing them with tools and resources to engage, knowledge share …
