David Meade's Insights

A colleague of mine attended a course two weeks ago hosted by David Meade. She got 5 helpful important points from the conference:

1.       Power of positive thinking – being told you are terrible at something will make you worse at the task, being told you are good (even when you are not) will make you perform better as you believe you are good at the task (research carried out by team of ballet dancers who were asked to play basketball. They were then randomly selected and told some were good and some were terrible at playing – even if they were really good. The ones who were told they were great outperformed the ones who had been told they were terrible).
2.       Awareness – when given a task be aware of the other things going on around you. It is amazing how you can miss the most obvious thing because you are so busy focussing on the task in hand. 
3.       Know when to take a risk – David Meade relayed the story of how he took the chance and left his University job to start a career doing Mentalist TV work. On his first appearance on the Stephen Nolan radio show, he was expected to be “car crash radio”. His determination and desire to succeed proved otherwise.


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Employee Management

Our CEO has been researching staff engagement recently and has come up with the following conclusions:

1. One of the most effective strategy to impact engagement across an organization: Start at the top

• It will be an uphill battle for everyone if your most senior teams are not true believers of the power engagement.

2. Define and refine your culture to engage: Keep your “culture to engage” in the front of employees’ and managers’ minds.

•  Make “culture,” “engagement,” and similar subjects frequent items for discussion.

3. Spot an Engaged Employee, engaged employees are:Authentic

• Employees who are themselves are more effective in the workplace.

4. One of the most important rules of Employee Engagement: Rules are meant to be broken.

•  Sometimes, you may find that it is necessary to break a rule to easily proved extraordinary service or just to make things work as they should.

5. Engage remote teams: Use web cams

•  An inexpensive web cam can be tied to your Instant Messenger. It is a great way to humanize people who are just names on a "cc" list.

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Change Management Issues

At the moment the company is researching change management issues and have discovered a lot of mistakes that caused failure. We noted five common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Not enough leadership - several leaders focus too much on management and too little on leadership.

Mistake #2: Lack of communication - change management communications need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce. It should be delivered in a two-way fashion that allows people to make sense of the change subjectively.

Mistake #3: Ignoring current corporate culture - when people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization’s success and progress, Mistake 3change can occur.

Mistake #4: Not envolving the employees - leaders must actively involve the people most affected by the change in its implementation. This will help ensure employees at all levels of the organization embrace the proposed changes.

Mistake #5: Lack of skills and resources - change does not happen through goals and exhortation alone. Like any business operation, It also calls for the right skills and resources, Organizations often simply fail to commit the necessary time, people, and resources to making change work. Paradoxically, successful behavior change often demands the very skills the change Is trying to create.


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Young Leaders Conference

The same colleague of mine attended another course last week. It was about young leaders and gleaned 5 key learning points:

The Young Leaders Conference was also one of the coursed I attended to two weeks ago. It was all worth it and I learned the following important points:

1.       Make a decision and stick to it – even if you know it will mean people may dislike you for it. If it needs to be done, stick to the decision and carry it through.

2.       Taking risks – a good leader should not be afraid to take risks – whether they be good or bad.

3.       Vision was again reiterated at this course, the importance of sharing the vision.

4.       Power of psychology/ persuasion. Think about how you put a suggestion forward. Say for example you have 5 ideas and there is one in particular you would like the person to choose. Place it at number 3 in the list. Research shows that the choice at number 3 is most likely to be chosen as by then the person feels they know what you are talking about and are drawn to number 3. If you have 4 ideas, still put it at number 3 and if you have 3 ideas, make up a first or fourth and place it again at number 3. (David Meade)

5.       Don’t hide away from the bad stuff – don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away when there are problems, deal with them head on even if you know the outcome could mean change.

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Common Purpose - Passion and Resonance

Passion and Resonance was the second topic discussion in the course, "Common Purpose" which one of my colleagues attended to last week. She got some helpful learning points from the discussion:

• "Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~ Donald Trump

          Communicating a business’ passion:

-          How is it we want staff to communicate?

-          Think about the content, be creative.

-          Engage in conversation with our customers through our website/ Twitter/ Facebook

-          Be strong, honest, true and accurate

• "Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about" ~ Steve Pavlina

• "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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Common Purpose - Broadening Your Vision

One of my colleagues underwent a lot of courses last week and one of them was entitled "Common Purpose – Broadening Your Vision". She learned 5 important points from this course:

1.       Baroness May Blood also demonstrated how humour and humility can take you far in life.

2.       Heard from Baroness May Blood, truly inspirational woman who clearly had a vision for what she wanted to achieve and showed the energy and determination to match it.

3.       Heard from Peter Dixon from Phoenix Gas, provided a very interesting insight into how a business needs a vision in order to achieve results. Results cannot be expected without the vision behind them.

4.       The day itself raised questions on our own visions – do we have a personal vision? and do we know what the true vision of the organisation we work for is?

5.       Paul Rooney from PWC gave an interested session on Leadership and who he looked to for leadership and vision both in his career and personal life.

As always we're busy devising more Irish employment law seminars

Good to Great

One of my colleagues told me about a great book he read, it's called, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. He took five key learning points from it:

1.     Stick to what you’re good at – The Hedgehog Concept. Good-to-great companies are those that consistently stick to doing what they do best and avoid getting distracted into new fields of business that are away from their core competencies.

2.     Good is the enemy of great. This is one of the reasons why so little becomes great, but ultimately good companies can become great companies if they push themselves and don’t settle for great.

3.     Pursue the big 3 traits. Good-to-great companies move ahead of their competitors by pursuing only those projects that have three traits;

        a.     What they can be ‘best in the world’ at

        b.    What drives profitability for their business model

        c.     What their people are deeply passionate about

4.     Do not get side-tracked on non-core ideas. Instead, good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding what lies within their Hedgehog Concept and ignoring everything that does not.

5.     Creating a good-to-great company takes time and is an iterative process rather than a blinding flash of inspiration. To guide this process, many use a ‘Business Council’ approach to gain the depth of understanding required to come up with a unique differentiating Hedgehog Concept.

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