When I accompany my coaching clients to team meetings I often observe not teamwork but business-as-usual conducted in a group setting. Any actual teamwork achieved is a matter of luck. Although participants may leave with good feelings because we had a good discussion, got through the agenda on time or made decisions, those outcomes don't indicate that teamwork was present. Team functioning differs from group functioning, is capable of different outcomes and has different applications. Teams … [Read more...]
Good Listening, a Virtue of Character
As of last week, The Book of Life at The School of Life website had been viewed over 26 million times but its How to be a Good Listener chapter had just 51,655 views. No surprise there. The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff. Despite the ever-present need, "improving my listening practices" rarely appears among people’s common interests or priorities. It is impossible to overemphasize the immense need humans have to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be … [Read more...]
Aim to heal, not hurt
We can heal or hurt people simply by the judgements we make about them. When we extend healing to others, we also heal ourselves. The ability to choose between the discomfort of becoming aware of our judgemental habits of mind and the discomfort of being ruled by them, is a vitally important self-management practice. The small, tight-knit specialist peer group I belong to learned that one of us, (I'll call him Andrew - not his real name), appears to have committed and confessed to a repugnant … [Read more...]
Choose how you respond to pressure, disruption and uncertainty | Tom Watkins
Struggling to accept what we are sometimes faced with is a normal part of being alive, like a tax on being human works-in-progress. Our battles with reality are usually won, in the end, by reality. But have you noticed that for very many people, reality increasingly involves relentless pressure and frenzy? Three inescapable societal trends are behind this. Being overwhelmed by them is optional. Within the next twelve months you'll experience increasing pressure, disruption and uncertainty in … [Read more...]
Leadership – what’s new?
Given the extent of research into and writing about the practice of workplace leadership, it's remarkable that so many organisations, groups and teams perform with no better than average efficiency and effectiveness. Theorists disagree about causes and remedies but unite on the need to continue their research and publishing, adding to the plethora of conflicting approaches, mismatching "key principles" and "essential steps". Alluring promises of breakthroughs abound but there's much more … [Read more...]
IN and ON the business, misunderstood
Organisational progress, success and resilience are more likely when work in the business (doing the work) is sufficiently balanced with work on the business (improving how we work). But in reality, that balance is rare. This discussion describes common signs of that imbalance, its common causes, and what might be addressed to resolve them. Work in the business focuses on the Primary Task - the matters necessary for the organisation to stay in business. Work on the … [Read more...]
The best and simplest goal: get better
Can most of us, with enough persistent effort, get pretty good at anything? Probably. Effort, as psychologist Angela Duckworth has shown, counts twice: talent x effort = skill, and skill x effort = achievement. And though both talent and our willingness to exert persistent effort may be at least partially genetic, only a minority of our personality is inherited. High performers don’t rely on either nature or nurture, but on a combination of the two — and they are really good at … [Read more...]
Sharpen-up priority management (2)
So, you've clarified your purpose and now use a methodical approach to priority-management. What could possibly go wrong? The wheels will fall off a personal priority management system if we believe our worth and integrity depends on what other people may think of us; if we're not able to set and hold boundaries with people; if we tend to lose it (freak out, spin out or lash out) when we're under pressure; or if we have difficulty confronting and negotiating … [Read more...]
Sharpen-up priority management (1)
The foundation of effective priority management is the ability to clarify purpose and hold our focus on it. Both steps can be challenging. The first, because purpose is easily confused with current activities, dealing with agenda or completing to-do lists. The second, because we get caught up in our attitudinal compulsions (to be constantly busy or needing to be liked by others, for example), and effortless distraction is almost always a nanosecond away. There's no perfect approach to getting … [Read more...]
First, step off the treadmill
If we paused regularly and often enough to reflect on how we approach what we do, we'd soon improve our efforts and their results. That's a self-management no-brainer. But how and when can we get off the workplace treadmill for this? For many people, that's a serious dilemma. Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. [Margaret J. Wheatley] When I first ask coaching clients to add periodic self-reflection … [Read more...]