Earning The Right To Lead Others

I’m sorry to say your team today won’t follow you just because you are their boss; authority alone won’t earn you any long term right for others to follow you. Today, we are in a world where the team can sack the coach (leader). They can subtly withdraw, “go on strike” and fail to fire…

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The Truth About Incentives

Imagine the scene - you’re in a meeting discussing how to get better performance from your workgroup, sports team or employees…. AGAIN. You’ve tried recruiting over priced ‘talent’ and you’ve invested in training interventions but both are expensive and neither lives up to the promise. What about incentives? Some funky innovation fund or new structured...
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Why Measuring Engagement is Too Late

Every major organisation today in some way measures employee engagement. We know that engagement is important, it leads to greater satisfaction for the individual, a better experience for customers and greater productivity for the business. I don’t think that anyone would debate that engagement is not critical to success. The 2013 Gallup Engagement Survey collected…

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Judging Others, How You Lose

For hundreds of years we’ve been told that we shouldn’t judge others. From sage philosophers, religious manuscripts, through to business leaders have been advising us that we should reconsider when the opportunity to judge arises. We have been offered wide and varied reasons from; we’re not perfect ourselves, it’s dis-respectful, do unto others, we may…

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Are You Ignoring Your Best Performers?

It’s too easy to get caught in solving immediate problems and providing oil to the squeaky wheel with the fast pace of business today. I understand as a manager you need to watch the numbers, manage relationships, deal with the problem children, plus keep peers, customers and the bottom line happy. Probably the last thing…

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The 3 Greatest Myths About Teams

Over the past few years, teams have become critically important to the success of business and sport. With that importance we’re seeing an increased focus on the understanding and development of teams and the individuals within them. In some ways, sport is way ahead in understanding the practices of high performance but their approach can…

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The Dark Side of Optimism

For many years we have been hearing how optimistic people are more successful than pessimists. Research has shown that they live longer, are more content and are better employees. This has borne a wave of Happiness Indexes, Strengths Based Approaches and Positive Psychology, all of which are incredibly valuable approaches to assessing and developing people….

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Sacked Doorman – UPDATE

Last week I wrote a post on what we could learn from being too nice and how it could impact our relationships and performance. The story was focused around Ralph Body who was a doorman at an exclusive New York apartment block. He was sacked for being too nice to the tenants in his block….

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Why Are Our Elite Athletes Derailing?

Why is it that we see so many of our sporting heroes leaving stellar careers only to derail their post sport life for seemingly obscure reasons? Research shows us that between 60%-80% of NBA and NFL players go broke within 5 years of their retirement, despite earning between 1.9 to 5.15 million per playing year….

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Is This The Secret to High Performing Teams?

Relying on functional matches in high performing teams doesn’t ensure success. New research from Hogan Assessment Systems (specialists in personality profiling) suggest that psychological roles and the matching of those roles are critical to success. Within the variety of functional and psychological roles there is “space” for individuals to contribute and play their natural role….

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Saying Sorry – Could It Be Just That Easy?

Recently a major Australian telco, Telstra, came under hacker attack which caused them to shut down their website and email service to thousands of customers. In addition to this customers had been forced to wait in long phone queues to have their passwords reset and have their services reactivated. The problem arose at a poor…

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Personal Motivation – Don’t Fail This Test

In recent Harvard research it has been found that paying someone based on results may not be enough. There are other factors at play which impact performance, engagement and tenure. Assistant Professor in Negotiations, Markets and Organizations, Ian Larkin has found that a final hurdle to motivation is that rewards offered are considered “fair” when…

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