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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

Managing conflict at work

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 […]

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Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

Leveraging the drivers of discretionary effort – six key things to consider

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 […]

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Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

The drivers of discretionary effort – a case study

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 […]

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Change Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork

You can’t make people give you discretionary effort

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”? […]

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Leadership Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

A new start in 2013 – the importance of purpose and values

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 […]

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Change Emotional Intelligence Leadership Teamwork

Building your resilience

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 […]

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Leadership Organisational Culture Teamwork

Reflections on organisational culture

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 […]

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Brain Science Emotional Intelligence Leadership Teamwork

The art of paying attention

Today I read two articles that I found interesting – one about the myth of multitasking and the other about emotional contagion. They got me thinking about just how powerful paying attention is as a leadership tool. The article on multitasking described how biologically we are incapable of attending to multiple tasks – our brains […]