Five Mistakes Leaders are Making

Leadership Lessons

Leadership is a lonely place; when you lead for long enough, you are likely to make mistakes; this video shares five common mistakes that leaders make, often without realising their impact.

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How do I create psychological safety in our meetings?

Continuing our series on facilitation, Paul asks Rob and Richard how they create the trust and ‘safety’ required to get honesty and openness from workshop participants.

Creating a safe space is one of the primary responsibilities of a facilitator.

If you get the environment and dynamic wrong, it may cause people to close down, limiting the ideas, challenge and acceptance of the group. Getting it wrong makes the facilitator’s role harder.

A series of simple interventions, from the room layout to the first few minutes, can make all the difference, even though the group may not even notice you are doing it.

What do you need to think about when planning a team workshop?

The Thinking Focus team have facilitated workshops all over the world.  We facilitate thinking for companies large and small, as well as charities, and government bodies; if you have something that you need the team to think about, then the team can help.

In this short series, Paul talks to Richard and Rob to understand how master facilitators work, giving you some inside tips on how to be a better facilitator, so you can get better outcomes in the meeting you are running.

This first podcast explores the thinking of the facilitator when they are planning the workshop, from the goal to the group; what do you need to know?

How do you switch off autopilot?

We spend most of the time with our brains on ‘autopilot’.  We are thinking at a subconscious level, causing us to act without being truly aware of what we are doing.   This handy little trick helps us get through the day, making the most of the energy available and freeing up our conscious mind to work on the more important stuff, like ‘what’s for dinner?’.

Rob and Ricky explore in this podcast how you can turn off this automatic process, so you can take conscious control of the things that you really need to think about, not just respond to.

Growth Mindset – Why you’re failing to hit your goals!

With a Growth Mindset, you learn from failure and why you fail to hit your goals with the FoooDo Model from Thinking Focus. This video shares four easy steps to turn failure into better results.

For more on FoooDo, our mental model and thinking tools for getting stuff done and achieving your goals, check out this video:

Use these questions to identify why you’re not getting the results you want or expect. Develop a growth mindset and turn failure into better results for you and your team.

Did you get creative and explore the art of the possible?

Ask yourself…

  • Did I create many ideas that I could choose from, possible things I could do, and ideas of the kind of things I might need.
  • Did I think about the things that might get in my way and how to overcome them?

Why is reflection so important for embedding learning?

Every time we learn something new we have to connect that to our world, to understand how that new piece of information or skill will work for us.  Knowing is not enough, we have to integrate the new into our existing understanding of the world.  That takes reflection.

In this podcast, Ricky and Rob explore why reflection is so important and offer up different strategies that will help you reflect, and therefore embed, your learning.

Motivation – how to get the best from your team (and yourself)

Motivation is essential if you want to get the best from your team that is. How to get the best from your team comes from understanding what motivates them and how they like to work.

Do you know what motivates the members of your team?

For more on motivation, watch this video:

Why Are My People Not Stepping Up?

Have you considered why your people are not stepping up?

This video is a 90-second summary of our first LinkedIn article, which asks why my people are not stepping up.

We explore how your leadership shadow can limit your people more than you ever imagined. The shadow of a leader makes it hard to step up; it feels too hard, so they don’t.

Stepping up is expected of every leader, and we hope our people follow suit, but your shadow and your behaviour get in the way.

Motivation at work – the basic needs for a more productive team

To get a more productive team, you need an understanding of motivation at work.

This video explores the basic needs of a more productive team and how more effective motivation can help you achieve it with your team.

For more on motivation, watch this video: