Ticker TV Insight- Interview with Mike Loder on authenticity in the workplace
Last week I was interviewed by Mike Loder on Ticker TV in what was a really interesting discussion. To listen to the interview see the link below or read the full interview transcript.
Employee Engagement: Five things you need to know
In October last year, Gallup published the 10th Employee Engagement Meta-Analysis, the world’s largest study linking business performance outcomes to measures of employee engagement. The study revealed the same results consistent with previous iterations - Teams, or business units, scoring above average (in the top 50% of the database) more than double their odds of success compared to teams scoring below average on engagement. More specifically, highly engaged teams outperformed their poorly engaged teams by 10% customer loyalty, 23% profitability, 18% productivity and a staggering 81% absenteeism. After reliably replicating this finding over a 20+ year period, there is no denying the importance, and significance of ensuring the engagement of your team/business sits at the apex of your business's strategic objectives.
Are you addicted to saying yes?
Last week while eating my breakfast, coffee in hand still letting my body wake-up for the day my daughter asked me a great question. “Where’s your dream holiday destination?” Without thinking too deeply I responded “Kakadu for a Barramundi fishing tour”.
Her eyes widened a bit and she nodded in acknowledgment. I then said, “you know where Kakadu is right?”. She gave me a slight nod….then a smile…then said “I actually don’t know”.
I asked her why she nodded if she didn’t actually know where it was. She laughed and said “I don’t know…I just did”. While innocent, it highlights how easy it is to fall into the habit of simply agreeing or saying yes to everything.
Where's your coach?
One night I got hooked into watching a Table Tennis match that was a nail biter, and they were playing to get into the quarter-finals. After an intense game, they were all tied up for the deciding set and that’s when I noticed something strange. Between sets, they are allowed to have a quick chat with their coach to talk strategy, go over the game plan, and reset their thinking. For one player, there was no discussion, nor strategy talk….he didn’t have a coach!
Is that really true?
How much of what you say is true? To even attempt to answer that question, you first need to be keenly aware of the words and phrases you are using. This is especially important if you are in a leadership role with significant influence.
Can you state your purpose?…Or is that not practical enough for you?
To have a purpose is to have resolve, determination, and an intrinsic reason to act. It enables intention to meet action so what you do, has meaning. When someone is clear on their purpose, they have a spring in their step, an air of confidence about them that is powerful, unique and engaging. Without purpose, time can stretch so a moment morphs into a day, and a day bleeds into a week and before you know it, you are chunking time in decades or more, and while a lot has happened most of it wasn’t really intentional. It’s so easy to get caught up in the fast lane that you end up getting carried with the momentum of everybody else…so much so that you forget about purpose altogether. It’s how our brains ensure we survive, like a herd of Wildebeests running from danger, all moving in the same direction to limit their chances of being attacked. Much of society and culture is about moving with the herd to ensure survival. The problem with this? if you do happen to get isolated or marginalised, you’ll need your purpose more than ever.
Break-ups are ugly: Why losing your job and being dumped by your partner can feel the same
Right now, there a plenty of people are losing their jobs, facing uncertainty and feeling like their worth has been questioned…and let’s be honest…it has. When leaders of organisations facing challenging times have to make the tough call to let people go, they don’t do it lightly. In fact, regardless of how ruthless some people can be, terminating employment is still up there as one of the toughest conversations you’ll ever need to have with somebody. Nobody likes it, it’s never easy and the person on the receiving end is usually devastated.
How to express yourself without losing your SH!T
Following on from a conversation I had with a client recently, we discussed a uniquely human challenge that all humans face. That is, how do we honestly express ourselves without losing control to the point of yelling, screaming or engaging in a physical display or our emotions. In other words, how can you express yourself without losing your sh!t?
Do you 'Serve' or do you 'Save'?
When working in the human services - I’m talking about psychologists, Human resource professionals, counsellors, executive coaches, or social workers- there is a common thread that unifies them all in what they do; to be of service to others. While this sounds fulfilling, and it is, it’s often confused with ‘saving’ others and as you can imagine there is a huge difference.
Unearthing Your Creative Intelligence
A couple of weeks ago I was a guest on James Barrow’s Podcast, the B-side, which is all about finding insights that help unlock your creative potential. We had a great chat covering a large variety of topics which really got me thinking about creative intelligence or the ability to go beyond what you know to create novel and interesting ideas. During the conversation, James asked me to share something that people don’t know about me. My first response was that I’m pretty open and tend to write about my experiences in my weekly blog so there wasn’t much that I hadn’t already shared. That’s when I remembered a whole chapter in my youth that I’d completely forgotten about, one that was all about creative intelligence and inspiration. If you’d like to listen to the whole episode you can find it here.
Toxic Triangles: Why your team keeps failing
When the team was at its worst and I was contemplating my next step, a conversation I’d had with a mentor a few years earlier sprang to mind. I had been explaining to him my challenges with one of my colleagues which most likely sounded like me having a ‘bitch session’. I could see he was growing tired of the conversation so he cut me off by asking “Has this colleague of yours given you a license?”…I replied, “Ummm…sorry, not sure what you mean”. He then said, “The way you are speaking about them, it’s as if they’ve given you a license to talk shit about them”. Realising what he was getting at I said “Yeah…but I’m not sure they are willing to listen to some of my challenges…and it would just turn into an argument anyway”. He replied with “It doesn’t matter, unless you’ve earned your license by having the conversation with them first, bitching and talking crap about each other is toxic for the culture…you’ve got to cut it out”. I was taken aback, I’d never really considered myself to be the bitching type before, but he was right. For the next couple of days, I got really conscious of my behaviour and I noticed how many conversations I was having that I was ‘unlicensed’ to have. I felt terrible, I had unwittingly been part of creating a toxic culture. Having recalled that lesson, here I was again, caught up in a toxic culture where people were talking about each other, not to each other.
Taking the F'ire' out of your feedback
With such massive disruption to the normal flow of work, it’s likely that some of the less ‘urgent’ tasks have taken a back seat over the past few months while the world has been reeling with the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent economic fallout. One of these ‘non-urgent’ but ‘important’ tasks is providing feedback on performance, particularly when performance isn’t aligned with expectations.