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 …
You may already have what you need you just don’t realise it.
I work a lot inside organisations with their teams and one thing I’ve observed a lot lately is the fact that they don’t realise how much knowledge is sitting in a room and instead choose to go Google to look for answers. I was recently working with a client and we had 13 people from within organisation in one room they had all invested three hours of their time and we were working out what were the things that they needed to know, or wanted to know to make their life easier. As we had conversations and discussed different ideas, …
Never underestimate the importance of planning
On a recent trip to the US, I visited the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock Arkansas. Spread out over three floors, the library houses all manner of information related to the Clinton Presidential era including a reproduction of President Clinton’s oval office – with replica furniture and artifacts. Of the many items on display that chronicled the Clinton era was a glass case that housed two pages of one of President Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. The State of the Union Address is delivered by the President of the United States to Congress at the beginning of each …
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 …
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 …
