Self Leadership Coaching Blog

With the current economic downturn it is easy to be sad and serious and much harder to be lighthearted and fun – or is it?

Humor is a great stress reliever with  many positive health benefits and importantly in this current climate it causes us to step back and get a new perspective.

Allow me to share with you what a fun week I have had with the intention of inspiring you to have a little laugh…

On Tuesday night I performed 8 minutes of stand-up comedy; this had been on my bucket list for years as  I  had heard that stand-up is a real test of  skill. The aim of stand-up is to get six laughs a minute which is a hell of an achievement with a group of strangers. I didn’t get 6 laughs a minute but I did get the crowd to laugh as you can see and hear on this YouTube Video. Continue Reading »

I believe that to survive and prosper we need to learn faster and to teach better.

Did you know that your learning follows a path? Firstly you don’t know what your don’t know, which is a state I like to call “blissful ignorance.” On the learning path this is known as unconscious incompetence. Continue Reading »

Do you spend your week in countless and some pointless meetings?
Would you like your organisation to adopt some guiding principles for meetings?

As I was conducting a leadership retreat last week, one of the participants complained of “meeting madness” and requested that the team adopt a code of conduct for meetings. I think this is a great idea and so I have jotted down some principles that you might adopt for your team or company.

1. Define the ‘type’ of meeting – is it to brainstorm ideas, evaluate options, make a decision or plan execution?
2. Specify a start and end time – meetings do not have to go for an hour, you can start a trend by having 15,20 or 30 minute meetings.
3. Invite only the people who need to be there – nothing is more of a time waster than sitting in a meeting that doesn’t concern you.
4. Send pre-reading by email – make sure people come prepared and on time and that way meetings are more efficient.
5. Start all meeting on time - if you wait, you send the message that it’s not important to be on time.
6. No using phones or laptops – the exception is the laptop for a presentation which should be limited to 10 slides max.
7. Identify a Chairperson – if the team doesn’t play nice or keep to time it is important that one person has the authority to call the meeting to order.
8. Send action points by e-mail after the meeting – to make sure what is agreed to gets done.
9. Avoid Friday – consider making Friday a no meeting day and see if people have time to finish off the weeks work and get some work-life balance.

Do you have any more to add?

In my leadership development programs I usually share lots of real life stories but this  story came to me via Alysson at Yahoo! who got the story from her CFO, Tim.  And what a great story it is, maybe it will inspire your creativity, innovation and customer focus.

The Square Watermelon

Japanese grocery stores had a problem. They are much smaller than in other countries and therefore don’t have room to waste. Watermelons, big and round, wasted a lot of space. Most people would simply tell the grocery stores that watermelons grow round and there is nothing that can be done about it. That is how I would assume the vast majority of people would respond. But some Japanese farmers took a different approach. If the supermarkets wanted a square watermelon, they asked themselves, “How can we provide one?” It wasn’t long before they invented the square watermelon. Continue Reading »