On a recent trip for a conference, I had lunch with one of my clients at a restaurant in the casino complex. We were discussing organisational culture as we entered the restaurant, so as a learning experience and a bit of fun I asked my client to “guess the culture”. Her observations were: When we […]
Think back to your early experiences as a manager – your “Management 101 class”. You were probably given some training or direction on goal setting. It was likely a variation on the SMART acronym, and you would have been told that goals are good because having targets motivates people. All good and useful stuff. However… […]
In working with leaders, and facilitating leadership programs, one of the key things I am hearing is that leaders are increasingly critically time poor. I had the pleasure of spending 2 days recently with a group of women leaders in a program and the key theme that came out was how valuable it was to […]
Confrontation and conflict between people is as old as…well…people. Any time you have humans operating together there are going to be times when people disagree, don’t get on, have differences of opinion or just plain can’t stand each other! So how should conflict be managed in teams? It is a mistake to think that no […]
My last blog was a case study on the drivers of discretionary effort. In this post I want to talk about how to leverage those drivers. Before we begin, read my last post here. 1 – Create a clear and compelling purpose. As we saw from the case study, this needs to be simple and […]
Earlier this week I facilitated a session with a client to capture learnings from a significant crisis. To cut a long story short, we have had some devastating bush fires here in Tasmania and my client lost substantial assets in the fire. As a provider of an essential public service there was considerable pressure to […]
I was meeting a business contact for a coffee recently and we started talking about getting the best out of people. My contact works in an industry that can be quite hierarchical and rules driven and can struggle to engage people. The question we talked over was “how do you get people to work harder”? […]
Towards the end of 2012 I was working with organisations and teams to create shared purpose and values because they wanted to make a fresh start in 2013. Purpose and values are vital in creating employee engagement (to the team and the organisation) because they take what people do day to day and connect that […]
Whether you are gearing up for a business transformation in 2013, spending the holiday season with demanding relatives, or even getting ready for the apocalypse at the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21 (*smile*) here are some tips for building your resilience. Firstly, resilience is the ability to bounce back or recover well […]
I followed the Lance Armstrong saga with interest, mainly because I facilitated a large culture change program for a business where we used a motivational video about teamwork starring Armstrong and the US Postal team. The video was enormously inspiring and covered his journey through testicular cancer and back to being on the very top […]