Enabling your team’s creativity

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Have you ever been in a meeting where your boss tells all of his/her direct reports that ‘we need more creativity’ and expects that as you walk out of the door there will be an instant change? In these times of efficiency, productivity, streamlining, judgement and busy-ness, our creative selves can get squeezed out. In such environments, where is the space for enabling new ideas to seed rather than be trampled on? How can we expect to see the spark of something new and exciting to engage our customers and consumers in a way that provides mutual benefit?

If you are a line manager with a team relying on you to provide the conditions for them to be at their best, how might you create the conditions for creativity?

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Learning how to handle change – YOUR way

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Have you ever felt change was happening to you and there was nothing you could do about it?

Did you find a way to handle it or let it run its course?

The well-known saying ‘change is the only constant in life’ has no doubt been felt by us all. Given this, it can be helpful to understand your own approach to dealing with change and whether it works for you. This article shares my own experience of recent change and how it has provided me with a 4 letter acronym for how to handle the next change that I feel needs to be handled. As a result, I hope that you may also find it useful to create your own. (more…)

How to make behavioural change stick

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Credit: Ivanko_Brnjakovic

What is it about changing our behaviours that can makes it so difficult to maintain? Think back to the last time you deliberately worked on changing a behaviour in order to be more effective at work. How did it go? If you weren’t successful, can you put your finger on why? If you were, what was it that made it work for you?

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Not drowning but waving – how to succeed in your new role

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(Photo Credit: Searsie)

Have you ever started a new role full of excitement and then a few weeks in wondered what on earth you had done? Perhaps you feel that way now? The initial enthusiasm after the interview process can sometimes wane as you start to feel out of your depth.
It puts me in mind of the poem by Stevie Smith ‘Not waving but Drowning’.

Perhaps, on the surface, you are putting on a brave face. Perhaps, if you don’t pro-actively do something differently during the rest of what could be thought of as your ‘transition’ period, the following lines from the poem may feel particularly apt in a month’s time:

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

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The four letter word that helps you succeed

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Dropping out of University could have taken the path for my life downhill. I still remember the feeling of failure, the feeling of shame that I had let those I loved down, and the feeling that there would be no coming back from this. It felt as if everything I had been working towards suddenly seemed pointless.

I managed to pull myself up from quite a low place and go back to University a year later, however, in my second year I felt that I was perhaps studying the wrong subject. I recognised at that point success for me would be to consider the year and a half I had left as a relatively small amount of time in the scale of things and that I was only one and a half years away from getting a degree. At the time I studied, unemployment was high and I felt that having an engineering degree would see me more likely to get a job. As such, it was probably better to show I had sticking power, or GRIT,  than to quit a second time. Easy it was not. A life lesson? Definitely.

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Forget Resolutions – Choose Revolution!

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Do you want more of the same in 2017 or is it time to not only figuratively sweep all of those papers off of your desk but perhaps even throw the desk out of the window too?

Have I been on the seasonal sherry you might well ask? Well no, actually.

It’s more a result of some end of year reflection on my part and a feeling that, much as in business, sometimes revolution, rather than incremental evolution is the only way to bring about much needed positive change. (more…)

Whose list will you be on?

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Woman writing in notebook during breakfast, top view

You may have heard the saying that people come into your life for a reason.

The general idea is that there are times in our lives where we interact with someone either professionally or personally and that interaction has a profound effect on us – either because it help us in some way or the person role models something that we learn from or because it hurts us in some way or the person role models something that we decide we never want to do to someone else.

I’ve had my own experience of both of these types of situation. (more…)

When to listen to stories .. not just tell them

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It’s at this time of year that older teenagers who have finished their schooling start something new whether that’s moving on to the next level of education at school, leaving to go to college, taking an apprenticeship or starting in the world of work. It can be an exciting time … and sometimes it can be a tough time – potentially leaving behind what you know to try something new and feeling like you have to know what you want from your career at a time when you may not even be too sure about who you are.

We face times like these throughout our lives, sometimes at our own instigation, for example applying for a new job in a different organisation, and sometimes not, for example having a role made redundant.

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The strength to go on

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(c) Scott Norris Photography http://scottnorrisphotography.com/

Are you feeling pressures at work that are starting to affect you outside of work? Are you facing problems in your work that seem insurmountable? Perhaps you are fine but are observing a team member struggling and wondering how best to support them?  If so, read on as I share tips to help you build resilience in yourself, or others. (more…)

Moving sideways to get ahead

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Are you in the first five years of your career? Chances are you feel an impatience to progress up the ladder, are wondering when your efforts are going to be noticed, and generally think you are ready for bigger things. Why do I say that? Research shows that Millennials (born between the years of 1980-1999) expect, and are motivated by, fast career progression and are frustrated with perceived lack of progress at work. Research also indicates that Millennials change jobs and employers much more than other generations early in their careers (see references for more information). (more…)