Six questions you need to ask yourself to be the person you are destined to be – A presentation by Marshall Goldsmith.
Engage in this sincere presentation by Marshall Goldsmith and reflect on the six powerful questions he is prescribing. You may at-least start thinking in a manner that leads you to discover who you are meant to be. Enjoy the journey.
The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.
Developing Purposefulness in Team Members – My presentation at the Asian & African Retail Congress in Mumbai India,
A presentation made to leaders in the retail industry at the Asia & Africa Retail Shopping Center Congress. Practical application of leadership and personal develop ent methods delivered with powerful concepts and personal experiences.
As you watch this video, reflect on steps you are taking and further steps you can take to develop purposeful team members in Your organisation.
The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.
Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.
Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later
Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion
Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video
Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.
Ron Kaufman discusses his New York Times bestselling book Uplifting Service,
A proven path to delighting your customers, colleagues, and everyone else you meet. The book exposes a massive wound in a subject area that has become buried in weak distinctions, inadequate practices, and popular but shallow clichés. Ron explains the 5 key elements to build a self-sustaining service culture that can uplift an individuals, transform an organization, and ultimately change the world.
As you watch this video, reflect on steps you can take to engage the fickle minds of your children, team members and yourself.
The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.
Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.
Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later
Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion
Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video
Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.
In my blog post on the 7th of May 2014 titled ‘How great is your team?’ I promised to go into details of the 11 different aspects that make a great team. The first eight aspects regarding ‘Burning Platforms’, ‘Team alignment around critical goals’, ‘Clearly agreed way of working?’ ‘A great decision making process’, ‘Information flow is encouraged’, ‘Great leaders don’t mince their words’, ‘Positive Crisis’ and ‘ Great Conversations’ have already been posted in this blog. Here is the ninth installment; ‘Radical Action Conversation’.
Radical Action Conversations are authentic. They go beneath the surface and deals with ‘adaptive’ issues that hinders real execution. Such conversations deals with engagement issues, honesty issues, relationship issues etc. that people may generally try to avoid to maintain false harmony. It encourages team members to be in ‘Adult’ mode rather than ‘Parent’ or ‘Child’ mode as described in ‘Transactional Analysis’. Such conversations are about identifying and dealing with assumptions team members make in their decisions, prejudices, actions, relationships etc.
Consider this. Your organization is working on a product launch that requires coordination between planning, manufacturing, marketing, sales, legal, finance and supply chain teams. The project is running late and at the current speed the launch could be delayed by more than 2 months. This can give a major advantage to the competitors who are working on a similar product to meet the same need of the customer.
The discussions at the management meetings are very technical. They speaks about the delay in finding the right raw materiel, delay in gearing up distributors and delay in configuring machines in the factory. The team discusses this and decides on some steps to speed up, but the situation is the same at the next meeting. The team resorts to unproductive conversations such as fake, dormant and aggressive conversations to avoid facing the real issues. See my blog post ‘Great Conversations’ for more details of unproductive conversations.
This becomes a radical conversation when the team starts talking about the adaptive aspects such as the trust issues between the marketing and sales manager, the integrity concerns of the supply chain manager and the competency concerns of the factory manager. The team starts focusing on facts, when the focus changes to transforming rather than debating reality, when there is willingness to challenge and explore assumptions, when tough decisions are made based on these conversations and when clarity of accountabilities and commitments are achieved. Discussions at future meetings focus on tracking actions decided, agreeing on course corrections required and ensuring execution with both discipline and speed.
Such Radical Action Conversations will see relationships growing rather than cliques being fostered and team capability clearly growing through the engagement. Radical Action Conversations requires skill and courage and it takes a lot of effort to develop team with this capability. However this is not just useful but essential for a great team!
How many times a week do we look at our smart phone? Do we look at it first thing in the morning? Do we look at it before 7.30 a.m.? Do we look at it during meetings? Do we feel lost without our devices? I am sure the answers to these questions might not only be interesting but it will start us thinking.
Study UK’s Daily mail (www.dailymail.com) surveyed 2,000 smartphone owners about their tech habits. They found the average user now picks up their device 1,500+ times a week, reaches for their phone at 7:31am in the morning, checks personal emails and Facebook before they get out of bed, use their phone for three hours and sixteen minutes a day and almost four in ten users admitted to feeling lost without their device. (see the 4 mts video below about these dangers)
Technology has given us so many options of interest that our mind keeps wondering from one to another at an alarming rate. We may be at a meeting and our smart phone alerts that it’s a friends’ birthday and we pick the phone to wish her. When we open Facebook to do it, we see a friend request from an old friend. As we start accepting it, we see a photo posted by another friend. Then we remember there is a customer meeting and we may be late to get home and we start messaging someone at home to pick up a child from school, and then she tells you to bring some extra cash as the plumber was coming to fix a leak the next day. All this happens in about one and half minutes. Therefore we live in a world where our mind gets more and more fickle.
Some feel this is beneficial as it helps us to do many things rapidly, become knowledgeable in many fields, be able to handle more things than ever before, be able to respond fast, be connected with more friends more often, find new opportunities be more efficient, smarter, successful etc.
Remember the last time you were engrossed in a conversation? Conversation where real issues were discussed! Conversations that were authentic! Conversations that were value adding! Conversations that made time stand still! Conversations that made things happen! Conversations that got continued! These are the conversations that make great teams.
In my blog post on the 7th of May 2014 titled ‘How Great is Your Team?’ I promised to go into details of the 11 different aspects that make a great team. The first seven aspects regarding ‘Burning Platforms’, ‘Team Alignment Around Critical Goals’, ‘Does your Team have Clearly Agreed way of Working?’ ‘A Great Decision-Making Process for a Great Team’, ‘Information Flow is Encouraged’, ‘Great Leaders don’t Mince their Words’ and ‘Positive Crisis’ have already been posted in this blog. Here is the 8th installment regarding the 8th aspect; ‘Great Conversation’.
Have you ever wondered what makes a movie interesting? It is the crisis in the movie, even when it is a comedy or an animated children’s film there is some crisis and you will realise how boring that movie could be without that crisis. Similarly meetings become interesting when there is a crisis to deal with. A project becomes interesting when there is a crisis to deal with. A team becomes interesting when there is crisis between team members.
In my blog post on the 7th of May 2014 titled ‘How great is your team?’ I promised to go into details of the 11 different aspects that make a great team. The first six aspects regarding ‘Burning Platforms’, ‘Team Alignment around Critical Goals’, ‘Does Your Team have Clearly Agreed Way of Working?’, ‘A Great Decision-Making Process for a Great Team’, ‘Information Flow is Encouraged’, and ‘Great Leaders don’t Mince their Words’ have already been posted in this blog. Here is the seventh instalment regarding the 7th aspect; ‘Positive Crisis’.
Coming form an Asian background, we sometimes become over-cautious about the impact our communication makes on others, especially those senior to us. Therefore we end up saying things others want to hear, saying things that are not fully accurate or not saying things. This article tries to highlight some of the reasons behind this and some practical steps great leaders take to overcome it.
In my blog post on the 7th of May 2015 titled ‘How great is your team?’ I promised to go into details of the 11 different aspects that make a great team. The first five aspects regarding ‘Burning Platforms’, ‘Team Alignment around Critical Goals’, ‘Does your Team have Clearly Agreed Way of Working?’, ‘A Great Decision-Making Process for a Great Team’ and ‘Information Flow is Encouraged’, have already been posted in this blog. Here is the sixth installment regarding the 6th aspect; ‘Candour with Respect’’.
Great leaders do not just encourage candour with respect but they insist on it. Candour is a quality that is essential for a winning team. Jack Welch in his book ‘winning’ mentions that candour was a vital quality for any GE leader. Candour is about speaking out the truth with courage even if it would create conflict or hurt someone else. Good communicators also know how to select the right words, tonality and body language to make it as positive and productive as possible.
Great leaders insist on candour using the following mind-set, thinking and behaviours,
We love to hear good news! When bad news comes our way some times we tend to get upset, our body language and tonality shows that we are not pleased with the information and some resort to further unproductive behavior of shooting the messenger! Shooting the messenger can be in many forms. Some would question the messenger and ask them to justify the information. Some others may ridicule them as being negative or incompetent. Some others may even resort to retribution in the form of impacting their rewards and recognition negatively. However great teams have great leaders who behave positively and encourage information flow! In my blog post on the 7th of May 2014 titled ‘How Great is Your Team?’ I promised to go into details of the 11 different aspects that make a great team. The first four aspects regarding ‘Burning Platforms’, ‘Team alignment around critical goals’, ‘Does your team have clearly agreed way of working?’ and ‘A great decision-making process for a great team’ have already been posted in this blog. Here is the fifth installment regarding the 5th aspect; ‘Information flow is encouraged’. Great information flow requires the following mind-set, thinking and behaviours; Continue reading “Great Information Flow to Make Your Team Fly!”→
Ranjan De Silva 