Why is it that some people thrive when change happens, and others seem to do so badly? Change at work is almost the only constant left, yet many of us are really bad at handling it; missing the opportunities that change often presents.
In this podcast, Richard and Ricky explore what we can learn from the people who have handled change well. What can all learn from their behaviours to ensure that the next time we face change at work, we can make the most of the situation?
Developing teams is costly and time-consuming; at Thinking Focus, we know how important your people are to you and how important it is to show that your development dollars and pounds hit the mark.
Our extensive experience in leadership and management development has taught us the four conditions for success pivotal to every group development programme we run. It requires a collaborative approach with clients, which means they have to step up, their participants, and us.
Together, we can create an environment where participants thrive and achieve demonstrable ROI significantly over and above the programme cost, conservatively a minimum of 5X in almost all cases.
Want to see how challenges can work for your organisation?
Why not book a call, and we can discuss how it works and if it’s right for you.
Do you want to know how to deliver feedback effectively at work?
In this video, we will share with you five tips on how to deliver effective feedback that will be respectful and helpful to you and your employees.
Learning how to deliver feedback effectively is essential if you want to be a successful manager of people! We’ll show you how to deliver feedback to help your employees grow and learn. We’ll also discuss the importance of feedback in the workplace and give you some helpful tips on how to give feedback effectively!
Do you know how to make your performance chats easy every time?
All managers love it when they have to give great feedback; that’s easy, providing it’s purposeful that is! However, many managers struggle to hold people accountable during routine feedback or performance meetings. Managers ruminate ahead of giving feedback, catastrophising the team member’s reactions. So they sugarcoat the message, which has no impact and, guess what, leads to no uplift in performance or change in behaviour.
There is a way to make it easier: developing a psychological contract, or as we call it, the expectations chat. This chat aims to establish how the line manager and team members can get the best out of each other, which means giving feedback. So why not agree upfront on how you do that and get the two-way permission agreed upon while there are no issues in the relationship?
In this video, we share a simple four-step process that will make every performance chat easy and straightforward every time.
You can’t manage time, so STOP trying to manage time and do this instead…what we mean is start managing yourself against the time and make better choices rather than trying to do everything.
Warren Buffet, among many others, argues that we self-sabotage when we allow ourselves to be consumed by things we care less about – they actually drag us down and distract us from achieving what we really care about.
Talent conversations come in many shapes and sizes. Talent is more than just how good you are today; it also encompasses how well you fit into the plans for tomorrow. Your plans, the organisation’s plans, and their plans….
What could possibly go wrong?
Ricky and Paul tackle the conversations that leaders need to have to help the people around them understand where they are right now, what is expected of them and where they need to develop. Talent conversations may not be easy, but with a bit of structure and thought, they can be positive and constructive interactions that help people grow.
Do you know why failing to involve others is a huge problem?
Well, as they say, the answer is on the inside; in this video, we share how a major client project suffered a huge delay and was almost catastrophic due to failing to involve others, neither the right people nor at the right time.
We share four essential questions and offer more than 50 reasons for how you could involve stakeholders in your project/goals.
Working out who the talented people are sounds easy, but it turns out to be quite complex for many leaders. Loyalty and liking get in the way of tough decisions, and potentially get confused with performance. We also ignore issues when they are small, making them really difficult to deal with once they become a problem.
In this podcast, Paul and Ricky explore a model used by a lot of organisations to help them think about talent, and the different ways that people need to be managed to get the best out of them. The model, affectionately known as the nine-box talent grid, explores two distinct factors: current performance and future potential. Performance is all about what they are doing today, whereas Potential considers what the organisation needs from them tomorrow. How can we use this model to get the right people in the right place, and manage our people effectively?
Creativity starts with knowing how to ask yourself better questions to become highly creative.
Get this right, and you will be unstoppable and be able to solve almost any issue or problem; not just that, you will be able to accomplish so much more and more quickly too!
Developing the skills and growing the people around us is, all too often, perceived as something that HR or L&D own. The perception is that this has very little to do with day-to-day activities, maybe even getting in the way of doing the work. Yet, without building the skills to do what is needed now and what will be needed next, it is impossible to achieve our goals.
In this episode, Ricky and Paul propose that talent management is a leadership issue. From setting the expectation of what skills are going to be needed to encouraging people as they grow, only leaders can create the environment and define a culture of growth. If you can attract the right people and remove the wrong ones, you have a much better chance of achieving your vision.