Understanding why and what you can do about it is fundamental to every #manager’s success. We ask and answer the following questions:
Do you struggle with addressing underperformance in your team?
Find it challenging to identify the root causes and have those difficult performance conversations?
You’re not alone. Watch as Ricky simplifies the complexities of underperformance and provides practical solutions to help managers and leaders like you.
In this video:
Explore four core reasons behind underperformance.
Discover actionable strategies to tackle knowledge gaps, skill deficiencies, lack of tools, and mindset issues.
Learn how managers can create environments that promote high performance.
Demystifying the B2B Sales Process means simplifying and removing the guesswork from sales in a B2B world.
Sales professionals, are you ready to turn the sales process from a constraint into your strongest ally?
In this video, Ricky Muddiner dives deep into how a well-defined sales process isn’t just a series of steps but a powerhouse tool that can revolutionise your approach, save you time, and massively boost your effectiveness.
With over 30 years of sales experience across B2B and B2C sectors, I’ll break down common misconceptions and reveal how to harness the true potential of your sales process. Whether you’re on the frontline or leading a team, you’ll discover tailored strategies that fit your specific needs.
What You’ll Learn:
How to build and refine a sales process that actually works for you.
Identify and utilise critical steps to win deals more consistently.
Techniques to train, coach, and manage your sales team more effectively.
Don’t miss out on these actionable insights that have helped teams scale their sales efforts worldwide.
Check out these additional resources. Share this with your team and network to spread the value! https://bit.ly/6TipsforaKillerSalesProcess https://bit.ly/ExampleSalesProcess https://bit.ly/LevellingupyourSalesLeadersSalesManagerandSalesTeamsPlaylist
New Manager Playbook: Mastering Management Essentials
Have you just landed your first managerial role, or are you looking to refresh your leadership skills?
Our “New Manager Playbook” is your ultimate guide to starting strong and steering your team to success! Ricky Muddimer shares our expert strategies, which cover everything from setting the right tone and fostering collaboration to unlocking your team’s full potential.
What’s Inside?
Essential skills for new managers Strategies for building trust and respect Tips for evaluating and adjusting team dynamics Techniques for enhancing team performance Whether you’re navigating your first managerial role or managing a new team, our playbook provides actionable insights and practical tools to make your leadership journey a triumph. Download now and transform your managerial challenges into opportunities for growth and success!
Choosing where to focus your time and money is probably the most challenging question to answer. You face many choices every day, but how do you decide which deserves your attention?
Learn how to make better decisions using the Cost vs. Benefit Matrix.
This powerful tool helps you assess your options objectively, visualize your thought process, and weigh the positives and negatives of each choice.
In this video, Graham Field shares the essence of the matrix, its applications, and how to use it in real-life scenarios. You’ll also get a free downloadable template to make better decisions today. Suitable for anyone looking to enhance their decision-making skills.
By the end of this video, you’ll have a robust framework for navigating decisions with greater confidence and precision. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more valuable tools and strategies.
How to make better risk-based decisions is a question for anyone who needs to assess risk. Using critical thinking tools is one way to make better choices. The Risk vs. Likelihood Matrix enables you to navigate uncertainty with confidence.
Welcome to the Risk vs. Likelihood Matrix, your guide to making informed decisions amid uncertainty.
This matrix helps you categorise risks based on severity and probability, prioritise actions, and allocate resources efficiently. Whether spearheading a project, contemplating investments, or making personal choices, this tool aids in clarifying complex scenarios and guiding your actions with confidence and precision.
Access a complimentary downloadable template to apply the matrix to your personal and professional endeavours. Remember, knowledge is power when it comes to decision-making. Start using the Risk vs. Likelihood Matrix today!
Psychological safety is the cornerstone of high-performing teams and thriving workplaces, enabling open communication, creativity, and innovation. However, even well-intentioned leaders can unknowingly erode this environment through specific actions or habits. Whether dismissing feedback, micromanaging, or prioritising results over relationships, these behaviours can stifle collaboration and suppress team morale. The resulting impact isnât just limited to strained relationshipsâcompanies face diminished learning, reduced creativity, and a decline in overall productivity. This article dives into the subtle ways leaders may undermine psychological safety and provides actionable insights to help leaders foster an atmosphere of trust and openness where employees feel empowered to contribute and take risks without fear of judgment.
The concept of psychological safety is pivotal in today’s corporate environment, as highlighted by Amy Edmondson’s influential work The Fearless Organization. While its benefits are clearâfostering innovation, engagement and a no-blame cultureâleaders often hinder the implementation.
Understanding Psychological Safety
Psychological safety creates a corporate culture that values transparency and sees mistakes as learning opportunities. It encourages individuals to voice concerns and share ideas freely, which is crucial for driving forward-thinking and innovation.
Consider the alternative: a culture of fear and shame that drives problems underground, misses learning opportunities and increases the risk of systemic issues. It is human nature to avoid looking foolish and being shunned. So mistakes are hidden and we let things slide.
Learning From History
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the global aviation industry faced substantial safety issues, declining consumer confidence and air travel numbers. They had little choice but to tackle their safety issues head-on. This required airlines to come together with a common goal to make everyone who flies as safe as possible.
Introducing a nonpunitive reporting policy required pilots to share incidents and near misses within an agreed timeframe. This policy was pivotal to improving standards, making air travel one of the safest forms of travel.
Why Do Businesses Choose To Focus On It?
Businesses now see psychological safety as a beacon for high engagement and empowerment, unlocking hidden potential while making an environment less risky. This pursuit is admirable and noble, but it needs the courage and conviction of leaders to see it through. It is also a journey, not a destination.
What Causes Psychological Safety To Fail?
Teams constantly change, and therefore, dynamics shift. Our primal responses see new people as threats, unknown entities that cause uncertainty and anxiety. Much of this is subconscious, so we might not even realise it’s happening. When you add in internal competition, ego and misaligned goals, the cracks soon appear, and performance levels drop.
Egotistical leaders who place their needs above the group destroy psychological safety. Their obsession with winning causes people to feel unsafe. A more selfless leadership focused on performanceâthat faces the facts, sharing thoughts, good and badâcan lead to a better future.
How leaders react is crucial, too. When things happen, is their response disproportionate? Or are they balanced, calm and methodical? The personal pressure level will determine a leader’s response, and their feelings can influence whether it’s in proportion.
The leader’s intent may be to tackle the challenge a-on, embrace the learning opportunity and come together to work through it. However, add in the complexity and demands from boardrooms, stock markets, media and the workforce, and that intent may waver. The scale and nature of these pressures can easily bias any leader’s decision-making.
How leaders intellectually spar with their people can be dangerous. It can be healthy to stretch, test and explore with their people, but if they have to “win” the argument, they will likely intimidate their people, who will probably then stay in their lane and play it safe.
I sympathise with those in public roles who are particularly susceptible to this; the risk of failure is so high personally and professionally that adopting a psychological safety culture, while intellectually sensible, can be risky as mistakes and failure are spun in the public eye by the press with a witch hunt as they demand someone to be held accountableâthat’s not conducive to psychological safety and definitely a need for strong leadership.
What Happens When Psychological Safety Is Failing?
The absence of psychological safety causes decline, whether it be an existential problem that causes the leader’s downfall or a slow decline.
Without learning and growth, people don’t innovate, take risks or be creative. People who previously felt safe can now feel exposed and seek new opportunities elsewhere, which means losing talent and recruiting becoming harder.
Employees can become less engaged and feel undervalued, marginalized and underappreciated, so delivering organizational goals becomes much more challenging.
Increased stress and anxiety directly impact decision-making. People play it safe, looking for ways not to lose instead of playing to win. Playing to win means being prepared to lose, but knowing failure means learning and growth. In other words, you either win or learn.
The irony is that a psychologically safe culture surfaces issues and allows for debate, discussion, shared learning and more collaborative problem-solving. All of which raise standards across an organization, decreasing risk and driving up performance.
Why You Need To Hold Your Nerve
The alternative to psychological safety doesn’t bear thinking about; a false harmony pervades, and blind spots grow. It makes no sense only to hear what you want to hear; the reality is that bear traps are lying in wait!
Psychological safety doesn’t guarantee a worry-free journey, but the issues can be in plain sight, and your people will be more likely to want to be a part of the solution.
It takes real effort to remain rational and calm when things around you are failing. However, we can train ourselves to look for the learning in the chaos over time. But you must fight your body’s natural fight or flight response, develop strong self-talk and create a narrative that finds the learning once you let the emotions dissipate.
As Kipling said, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.”
Being human means making mistakes. Being superhuman might just mean having the courage to embrace and learn from them.
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on 27th February 2024
Ricky has been a regular contributor to the Forbes Councils since 2023, where he shares his perspectives on all things leadership, change, culture and productivity, all with Thinking Focusâ unique perspective on metacognition, or as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking.
Purpose: why your success depends on it dives into the concept of purpose and its critical role in driving success both personally and professionally.
Discover how understanding and aligning with your purpose can transform your approach to work, motivate teams, and lead to remarkable achievements.
Have you ever wondered if there’s more to your job than just tasks and deadlines?
Uncover the power of purpose and how it can turn routine into passion, driving you and your team towards success.
Journey to Success: Follow my journey as a Manager, where starting from scratch with a new team, we achieved our annual goal in just ten months. Learn how a clear purpose and a compelling vision inspired my team to overcome challenges and exceed expectations.
Purpose is our driving force; it’s why we do what we do. From global charities like Oxfam to iconic brands like Coca-Cola, we explore how purpose fuels dedication and inspires contributions beyond the ordinary. Discover why purpose is a frontline manager’s secret weapon for motivating teams, making strategic decisions, and fostering a culture of resilience and productivity.
You will gain practical tips and strategies for embedding purpose in your leadership style. Learn how to articulate a vision that resonates, recruit team members aligned with your mission, and continually reinforce the importance of purpose in achieving organizational goals.
Learn how to focus on your goals and why your work goals must pass this test.
In this video, we unpack the holy trinity; the secret to focusing on your goals is the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘can I’. These are three hugely important components of any goal. Without these three solid foundations, you will learn how weak your goals are a major issues and how you are leaving the success of you and your team to chance.
Get your holy trinity in check, and you will not only make your planning more effective but also significantly increase your likelihood of success.
Look out for a terrible joke, too; my apologies! What are you waiting for?
Dive in and learn how to make your goals more robust.
Productive teams know how to work together; what helps the high-performing teams is a shared operating system, much like your PC.
A shared operating system allows people to get the work done, but using a unifying set of core principles (like apps on a PC) creates shared understanding. Imagine if you used a slide deck tool incompatible with the Microsft PowerPoint used by a colleague or customer; how frustrating would that be? How much time would be wasted decoding and figuring it out?
There is no decoding with a shared operating system; we all know how we do stuff, so we’re straight into what matters. With a common set of ‘how we get stuff done’ principles, it enables teams to shortcut and accelerate their productivity and increase output.
When it comes to boosting productivity, many people focus on external tools, systems, or processes, hoping these will unlock greater efficiency. However, the real key to sustainable productivity lies withinâthe âpilot in the box.â This metaphor highlights that itâs not the technology or resources at your disposal but the individual driving them that determines success.
This article explores the critical role of personal mindset, habits, and decision-making in achieving peak performance. It delves into how a growth-oriented mindset, intentional behaviours, and the ability to adapt to challenges are far more powerful than any external solution. By taking ownership of oneâs mental focus, creating disciplined routines, and fostering self-awareness, individuals can transform how they work, making every tool and resource exponentially more effective. The message is clear: productivity isnât about what you have; itâs about how you use itâand the pilotâs role is irreplaceable.
In an age where new productivity tools and apps emerge daily, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the next shiny toy or methodology will magically make us more productive; I know I have. I love a new gadgetâwho doesn’t?
Over many years, I have wasted so much money searching for that something special to make me more productive. I would use them until the next shiny, “fantastic new tool that solves all your productivity issues” arrived.
While systems, software and processes play a role in organising and streamlining tasks, when you boil it down, “it all comes down to the pilot in the box.” Now I realise that is a Top Gun: Maverick quote, but it sounds so cool I just had to weave it in somewhere. I mean that it’s down to me, you, us, the masters of our destiny, to change our mindset, habits and behaviour.
1. Mindset: The Power Of Perception
Our beliefs and attitudes can either propel us forward or hold us back. As popularized by Carol Dweck, a growth mindset means believing in the potential for development and seeing challenges as opportunities. When faced with a task, someone with a growth mindset doesn’t get bogged down by the fear of failure; they see it as a learning experience.
Conversely, constantly seeking the “perfect” system might be symptomatic of a fixed mindsetâthe belief that productivity is an inherent trait rather than something we can develop.
Thus, cultivating a mindset that embraces challenges, remains curious and is resilient in the face of setbacks can be more crucial than the intricacies of any productivity system.
2. Habit: The Rhythm Of Consistency
Every time we turn to a new system or software, there’s a learning curve. Often, once we’re familiar with a tool, we move on to another, forever chasing the promise of enhanced productivity. This constant shifting is a productivity trap in itself. But what if the secret to productivity isn’t in the tool but in the routine?
Habits, once formed, require less mental energy. They become second nature, allowing us to execute tasks efficiently without the cognitive load of decision-making. For example, regularly reviewing tasks could be more beneficial than any software in which those tasks are stored.
Creating positive habits, such as daily planning or setting specific times for checking emails, can profoundly impact your productivity more than perpetually switching between tools and systems.
3. Behavior: Actions Speak Louder Than Tools
Even with the best software and processes in place, our behaviour ultimately determines productivity. Procrastination, for instance, can’t be solved by any app, no matter how sophisticated. It requires introspection, understanding the root cause and taking corrective actions.
Behaviours like setting boundaries, learning to say “no” and prioritising tasks based on importance rather than urgency can drastically improve productivity. These u, rooted in self-awareness and discipline, can determine how effectively we use any system or tool.
Tools Are Tools: People Drive Productivity
Instead of constantly searching for the next big thing in productivity tools like me, it might be time for us all to look inward and realise that weâthe “pilot in the box” of our mind, not the toolsâare the primary drivers of our productivity.
The intricate dance between habits, mindsets and behaviours is far more profound than any external tool or system we might employ in our quest for productivity. These elements, deeply rooted in our neural pathways, cognitive structures and past experiences, are critical in determining our daily actions and overall effectiveness.
Mindset: Mindset shapes our perceptions and responses to challenges. A growth mindset encourages resilience and biologically primes the brain for adaptability and problem-solving. By embracing this mindset, you can take a proactive approach to tasks, fostering continuous learning and improvement.
Habits: Habits tap into the brain’s propensity to conserve energy. As they become ingrained, they free up our cognitive resources, allowing us to focus on novel tasks and challenges. By consciously establishing routines that align with our goals, we can harness this neurological efficiency for productivity.
Behaviour: By understanding the psychological impetus behind behaviours like procrastination or distraction, we can develop strategies to mitigate them. This introspection enables a more holistic approach to productivity, where we’re not just ticking boxes but addressing core issues that might hold us back.
In the hustle of the modern world, it can be tempting to reach for tangible, external solutions to enhance productivity. Yet the most potent tools lie within our minds. By delving into our habits, mindsets, and behaviours and tailoring these elements to serve our goals, we can unlock a sustainable, effective, and profoundly fulfilling productivity level.
This article first appeared on Forbes.com on 14th November 2023
Ricky has been a regular contributor to the Forbes Councils since 2023, where he shares his perspectives on all things leadership, change, culture and productivity, all with Thinking Focusâ unique perspective on metacognition, or as we prefer to say, thinking about thinking.