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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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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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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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 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 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 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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March 06, 2020
At the end of February, early March 2020, the coronavirus (or Covid-19) took a more serious turn in Korea, Italy, Spain, UK and the U.S. with warnings that it could very well impact how, when, and where we work.
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February 28, 2020
As automation and artificial intelligence dramatically change the nature of work, employees must fine-tune the social and emotional abilities machines cannot master. To encourage this behaviour, employers must adjust the ways they assess, educate, train and reward their workforce on soft skills such as collaboration, communication and critical thinking.
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February 14, 2020
“We need to hold people more accountable.” How many times have you said this in the past year? When things aren’t going well — maybe your numbers are down, you haven’t met your goals, or your pipeline is dry — it’s easy to turn to this familiar mantra. But when you say it...
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December 27, 2019
We often hear tips and tricks for helping us to “control” our emotions, but that’s the wrong idea: strong emotions aren’t bad, and they don’t need to be pushed down or controlled; they are, in fact, data.
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December 13, 2019
Once upon a time, saying “the soft stuff is the hard stuff” was a snappy challenge to business convention. Now, it’s a cliché. Everyone knows that it’s not easy to suddenly make your colleagues more creative, adaptable, or collaborative, however well-intentioned you may be.
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December 06, 2019
Why are so many meetings so unproductive?
Many professionals, fed up with calendars chock-full of long, disorganised, soul-bruising sessions, resort to uncharitable, even cynical explanations
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November 22, 2019
As a leader, you’re going to face conflict. It comes with the territory. But before you try to deal with a conflict, you first need to stop and ask yourself the following question:
Is it hot or cold?
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November 08, 2019
Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business processes, most companies are still in the dark about how to manage it. Linear, process-based tools such as activity-based costing, business process reengineering, and total quality management have long been effective at measuring and improving the efficiency of people and organisations in accomplishing individual tasks. But ...
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November 01, 2019
Over the past decade, “purpose” has become a management watchword. Since 2010 it has appeared in the titles of more than 400 new business and leadership books and thousands of articles. And no wonder: Many people—not just Millennials—want to work for organisations whose missions and business philosophies resonate with them intellectually and emotionally.
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October 25, 2019
Good listeners tend to make better decisions, based on better-informed judgments, than ordinary or poor listeners do—and hence tend to be better leaders. By showing respect to our conversation partners, remaining quiet so they can speak, and actively opening ourselves up to facts that undermine our beliefs, we can all better cultivate this valuable skill.
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September 27, 2019
In today's dynamic markets, leaders need very different mindsets from those used to manage traditional organisations in less-demanding times. We find that three primary mindset shifts are required to lead agile organisations designed for innovation, collaboration and value creation.
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September 20, 2019
One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that’s packed with meaning: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
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September 06, 2019
As business landscapes become increasingly networked and distributed, more companies are ditching hierarchical leadership models in favour of collaborative leadership approaches. In fact, 51% of respondents in a 2018 Deloitte survey rated “C-suite collaboration” as very important.
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August 30, 2019
A study out of Virginia Tech University confirms something that just about every knowledge worker already knows: Dealing with after-hours emails produces anxiety which is damaging not only to the worker but to their family, too.
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August 02, 2019
To learn about teamwork, management gurus tend to study collaboration in companies. Most don’t consider rock ‘n’ roll groups as an appropriate venue for studying teams. After all, what is a life in rock ‘n’ roll, if not a quest to escape the 9-to-5?
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July 19, 2019
Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. The ability to persuade, to change hearts and minds, is perhaps the single greatest skill that will give you a competitive edge in the knowledge economy — an age where ideas matter more than ever.
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