Saturday 19 March 2016

Productivity tips

Working Smarter: 11 Things Ultra-Productive People Do Differently

The amount of time we have to get things done in our day is limited. We all work within the same 24 hour day, yet some people do a fantastic amount of quality work in those same 24 hours.

On the flip side, others can barely beat down the urgent tasks knocking on their door so that they can work on the main projects.

What makes the difference? How do the ultra-productive get so, well, productive?

It is a combination of factors, but we have distilled them down into 11 key concepts & rules. Follow some of these rules and you’ll see a difference, follow all of these rules and you’ll be doing more with less in no-time flat.

11 Productivity Tips

 

Thursday 10 March 2016

Investing in work teams

Everyone gets if you want to succeed, then you need to invest in sports teams . Sports teams have skills coaches, psychologists, health and fitness experts and everything is geared up to improve performance.

In the case of work teams, generally so little is done to develop the team performance. Team building events, as much fun as they are, really do not directly impact on the performance of the team.

I was very lucky to have spent 22 years working for NestlĂ© Purina, a company that did get it. We created a team development programme, which I continued to develop when I left and set up Release the Magic.

Celebrating my first five years in business, I have renovated and invigorated the High Performing Team Programme and started to roll out the new version from the beginning of 2016.

This year we will be able to offer the following programmes where we provide the team coaches:

  • High performing team kick off workshop
  • Performance Coaching for Teams
  • Working Simpler, Smarter and Quicker as a team
In addition we will be offering programmes to empower other people to run our programmes:
  • High Performing Team Coach
  • Team Leader - developing high performing teams
If you want to find out more, please watch this 10 minute video. Thanks!

 

Wednesday 2 March 2016

The 10 Key Skills

As part of the High Performing Teams programme I will be developing coaching modules that can be used as part of the Know and Grow Our Skills workshop. 

The skills I will be focusing on will be:-


  1. Managing Conflict - being able to deal effectively with day to day, work place challenges.
  2. Communicating with Impact - able to deliver compelling messages to people in whatever format used.
  3. Influencing Others - able to win the hearts and minds of people through skilled strategies and skills
  4. Managing People - able to get the best out of individuals and teams.
  5. Personal Effectively - able to manage time, focus on what really matters and deliver maximum value.
  6. Problem Solving - able to break problems down into their component parts and implement lasting solutions.
  7. Decision Making - able to weigh up all the criteria and make the best solution with the minimum of time delay.
  8. Emotional Intelligence - able to understand the emotional impact of own behaviours and 
  9. Performance Coaching - able to coach the best from others by skilled use of  the key coaching skills and the ciaching toolbox.
  10. Facilitation Skills - able to use the skills and tools of facilitation to get the best from teams and groups.

Tuesday 1 March 2016

Dealing with Conflict

In my training and coaching practice I come across many people who say not dealing with conflict is one of their biggest struggles. We use a coaching Root Cause tool that lays bare the recurring problems that people experience. It identifies the root cause of the problem, but so often people, because the can't deal with conflict, feel powerless to make changes. This invariably means they live with their issues and the stress that doing nothing brings! 

Here is what Huffington Post had to say ... 

"Most people don't like conflict. A recent study of CEO's found that fear of conflict was one of the seven deadly sins CEOs won't admit. The problem is, avoiding conflict doesn't reduce tension, if anything, it escalates it. Issues become bigger, resentment grows, people become disengaged, and feel powerless to solve their problems. A reluctance to deal with conflict is hugely detrimental to business. Good ideas remain unspoken, people create silos, and leaders don't get the information they need because everyone is afraid to bring up potentially contentious issues. 

The post mortem on any business failure almost always reveals critical information went unaddressed because somebody was afraid to discuss it. 
Avoiding conflict also wreaks havoc on relationships. Have you ever been around someone who was frustrated or angry, but doesn't want to talk about it? They ooze resentment."
Conflict is a reality of life, so learning to manage conflict is an essential and very valuable skill that people can learn.
For many years we taught Managing Conflict as part of an amazing Influencing People training course we ran. We provided people with 5 strategies and a process for managing conflict and it worked marvellously well.
The strategies were based on the two key ingredients:-
  • Levels of cooperation
  • Levels of assertiveness

The process to follow was called R.E.S.U.L.T.



Learning to manage conflict effectively is a very empowering experience. Our method of teaching today is through a wonderful supportive coaching programme in which we take people through the theory. Then guide and coach them through dealing with their specific conflicts. This way they start to build up their managing conflict 'muscle' and resolve to never back away from a conflict unless they have chosen to do so as part of their strategy!