November 20, 2020
When leaders commit to building an inclusive organisation, they tend to start with the company mission, vision, values, and a promise to ensure everyone in the organisation has a voice. But if they don’t change the way they communicate every day with their employees, leaders are missing a crucial piece.
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November 13, 2020
Telling a compelling story is how you build credibility for yourself and your ideas. It’s how you inspire an audience and lead an organisation. Whether you need to win over a colleague, a team, an executive, a recruiter, or an entire conference audience, effective storytelling is key...
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November 06, 2020
What is it about virtual presenting that can feel so unnerving? The lack of audience response, the inability to “read the room,” and the lack of direct eye contact all increase our anxiety. Recreating the back and forth of a ...
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October 30, 2020
With the Covid-19 pandemic ongoing, the move to an online workplace has become widespread and may well endure. But, as many organisations are learning, managing the flow of communication among remote teams is tricky.
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October 23, 2020
Chances are you’ve attended a meeting today. Was it time well spent or a soul-draining exercise in futility? Although no two meetings are the same, their collective impact on the culture of a company is significant. Meetings matter. They are the forum where people come together to discuss ideas, make decisions, and be heard. Meetings are where culture forms, grows, and takes hold.
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October 16, 2020
Team collaboration done right is a powerful force to align a group of individuals to accomplish a common goal in the most effective way possible. But even the best collaborations, filled with smart, capable, and experienced team members, can be a struggle.
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October 09, 2020
If you’re working to improve your leadership capability, what exactly should you be trying to develop? The experience of the 2020 pandemic offers a powerful lesson: A critical skill a leader must bring to the table is the ability to figure out what kind of thinking is required to address a given challenge.
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October 02, 2020
At home and at work, “busy” culture worsens the problems it promises to solve. It’s natural to assume that the busier we are, the bigger the impact we’ll be able to make — but in reality, studies have shown that busy culture destroys productivity and pulls us away from both our families and deeper relationships with our coworkers.
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September 25, 2020
Most companies recognise that aggressive adoption of digital technologies is increasingly critical to being competitive. Our research shows that the top 10% of early adopters of digital technologies have grown at twice the rate of the bottom 25%, and that they are using cloud systems — not legacy systems — to enable adoption, a trend we expect to accelerate among industry leaders over the coming five years.
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September 18, 2020
Some companies are struggling to keep up with our new normal. Research from Asana reveals nearly half of employees surveyed globally said company-wide goals had been deprioritised since remote working began, with 47 per cent saying those goals have changed at least once during that time – and 60 per cent haven’t increased communication on such issues.
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September 11, 2020
The global pandemic has left newly remote workers swimming in confusion and struggling to keep up. To shift from today’s state of surviving to a future where teams are thriving, we need tools that make coordinating and collaborating on work effortless.
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September 09, 2020
Everyone from the CEO to the newest hire wants to be part of an effective team. But in unprecedented times, with an accelerated shift into the future of work, how can organizations achieve clarity on day-to-day tasks and achieve the company mission?
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September 04, 2020
The term “gig economy” was coined by the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown in 2009. It described how workers in the knowledge economy increasingly were pursuing “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces while they transacted in a digital marketplace.
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August 28, 2020
The California bullet train between San Diego and San Francisco. Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter program. Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport. Apple’s AirPower wireless charging pad. These are just a few examples of projects that suffered severe schedule delays and cost overruns, or that were unable to deliver on their promised scope.
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August 21, 2020
The call for individuals and organizations alike to invest in learning and development has never been more insistent. The World Economic Forum recently declared a reskilling emergency as the world faces more than one billion jobs transformed by technology.
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August 14, 2020
The productivity problem is especially challenging these days, when many of us are working from home, with less structure than usual. It’s easier than ever to be busy all day and still not make progress on critical work (where did that day go?).
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August 07, 2020
It was one of those kinds of relationships. I had the recurring event on my calendar to attend this group’s meetings. For my first year or two of involvement, I was passionate about it. Then my interest waned, and I was showing up because I felt like I should. Then...
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July 31, 2020
Covid-19 has thrust many leaders into remote management which requires a different skill set than face-to-face management. They have been forced to make this transition quickly, and for the most part, without training. While some jobs have proven adaptable, many sectors are not well-suited for the remote environment and many workers have home lives that present overwhelming challenges.
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July 24, 2020
Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebook’s 50,000 employees would be working from home. “We are going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” he declared in a follow-up interview. A few days before...
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July 17, 2020
Has there ever been a time when customers were more demanding of the companies serving them? Industry 4.0 technologies—many barely imaginable only a decade ago—have already enabled genuine breakthroughs in cost, convenience, and customization, creating extraordinary value for buyers while raising the performance bar for producers ever higher.
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July 10, 2020
Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the importance of effective collaboration for long-term commercial success. Particularly in a crisis, organizations need to pull together experts with unique, cross-functional perspectives to solve rapidly changing, complex problems that have long-term implications.
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July 03, 2020
Interruptions have always been a reality of work, as meetings, text or chat messages, emails, and conversations with coworkers endlessly fragment our time and thus our attention. As the Covid-19 global pandemic forced many of us to work from home, the concurrent management of work/non-work responsibilities have added to this already fragmented time.
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June 26, 2020
In 1935, the life expectancy of an S&P 500 company was 90 years. By 2010, it was 14 years and studies show that it’s getting even shorter. No wonder more and more companies, who are tired of change fatigue and endless restructuring, are looking at how they can become a more agile organization and retain their competitive advantage.
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June 12, 2020
Imagine a crisis that forces your company’s employees to change the way they work almost overnight. Despite initial fears that the pressure would be too great, you discover that this new way of working could be a blueprint for the long term.
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June 05, 2020
With unemployment levels at the highest since the Great Depression, many individuals don’t have the privilege of working, and those who do feel nervous about how long they’ll have that opportunity.
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May 29, 2020
In an ongoing crisis, clear communication is more important and more difficult than when things seem normal. Employees and customers are hungry for information, so we’re tempted to pull together presentations and communicate with urgency instead of with careful planning. But ...
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May 22, 2020
We’ve been taught that if we want more — money, achievement, vitality, joy, peace of mind — we need to do more, to add more to our ever-growing to-do list. But what if we’ve been taught wrong? What if the answer to getting more of what we want isn’t addition at all, but subtraction?
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May 15, 2020
Remote work, especially in a world affected by Covid-19, naturally leads to “flex time.” Employees with small children might be getting the majority of their work done at night after the kids are in bed. Others are working early and hoping to quit early. Still, others are starting late and working late.
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May 08, 2020
Imagine a crisis that forces your company’s employees to change the way they work almost overnight. Despite initial fears that the pressure would be too great, you discover that this new way of working could be a blueprint for the long term.
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May 01, 2020
If you’re finding that you’re more exhausted at the end of your workday than you used to be, you’re not alone. Over the past few weeks, mentions of “Zoom fatigue” have popped up more and more on social media, and Google searches for the same phrase have steadily increased since early March.
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April 24, 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic escalates and disruptions to business-as-usual continue, managers are grappling with the unknown. You don’t know when your employees will be able to return to the office or how different things will be when they do. Regardless...
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April 17, 2020
We’re all busy — so busy. We have bills to pay, a mortgage to service, kids to take care of, and of course, work deadlines to meet. All of these commitments leave us with little meaningful time for ourselves, and for cultivating meaningful relationships with others. But the good news is...
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April 10, 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic forces many colleges, universities and businesses around the world to move their activity online, connecting online via video is now having its moment.
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April 04, 2020
“I’ll Slack you.” In workplaces around the world, the name of the popular online messaging system has become a verb, just like Google. Slack has been enthusiastically integrated into the day-to-day functions of legacy corporations and burgeoning startups: The company claims that, in 2019, it hosted 10+ million daily users.
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March 27, 2020
Those of us who present, facilitate, and teach for a living understand the importance of developing a personal connection with an audience. It’s critical to be and feel natural; to make people laugh, feel at ease, and fully engage — and perhaps even lose themselves — in the content you’re delivering.
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March 20, 2020
In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. While Millions of people report that they work remotely around the world, the new policies leave many employees — and their managers — working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time.
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