Self Leadership Coaching Blog

I have just returned from a client meeting, where the client needed to train its sales people to effectively increase sales.

Increasing sales is one of the key actions that is going to help this client weather the recession and profit afterward. After identifying the urgent need to train trainers to equip the sales team with product knowledge and values based selling skills across 14 countries, the business development manager told me, “Yes, we need this but I was told yesterday that there is a freeze on discretionary spending.”

I wanted to yell, “Since when is learning discretionary?” Continue Reading »

Are you Gen Y or do you manage Gen Y?

These are two important questions that you can help me answer.

1. Do we need to manage Gen Y any differently than previous generations (Gen X, Baby Boomers, Traditionals)?

2. Does Gen Y need to learn to manage upwards to update their bosses? Continue Reading »

Do you ever wonder why people behave the way they do? Are you curious about whether someone is a right fit for a job or a team?

All will become clear when you understand the psychological background of personality.

The word personality comes from the Latin persona, which refers to the masks once worn by actors to give clues as to the emotions driving their behaviour. Today the term personality refers to the sets of predictable behaviours by which we profile a person. These sets of behaviours are known as types or traits and profiling tools are known as psychometric tests. Continue Reading »

Interruptions are one of the most powerful time wasters.

The simple reason is because for each activity that we engage our brain in, we need a period of warm-up (just like in any sport), and then only can we start performing at the peak of our potential.

The problem is that if we get interrupted in the process, we need to go back to the warm-up phase again. And the more we get interrupted, the less chance there is that we ever reach the peak of our brain potential. Therefore we end up wasting precious time. Continue Reading »

A lack of effective presentation skills (public speaking) will seriously harm your career prospects. Whether you are starting out in a company or are the CEO, you will be judged on your ability to present ideas in way that engage the audience.

But fear not! The ability to present or speak well is within everyone’s grasp. I have coached the most boring of CEO’s and the most timid of junior staff to speak and present with impact. Continue Reading »

Businesses today face change all the time. If you’re not changing that means you’re standing still, and that just does not make good business sense. Change can take many different forms. An organisation can be bought, sold or taken over. Mergers happen all the time. Economic conditions, exchange rates, and government regulations all create ongoing challenges not only for business leaders but for employees as well.

Continue Reading »

Many training and change initiatives including coaching are a waste of time and money because they don’t deliver results. Organisations tend to measure people in terms of performance and potential and so any investment in people should show results in either or both of these.

In Singapore,  Self Leadership International transforms people’s performance and potential by impacting how they think and how they feel about what they do and by assisting the organisation to create a culture that will support the behaviours required for success.

There are many approaches to  ‘leadership development.’ but what makes the difference is the methodology. Continue Reading »

The Singapore Ministry of Manpower states (Sept 2008) that whilst most CEO’s in Singapore expressed a willingness to develop the next generation of leaders, very few of them are proactive and strategic in doing so.

This NATO (no action talk only) will result in Singaporean managers being unable to cope with the dynamic state of today’s marketplace and workforce.

For Leadership development in Singapore, what is sadly lacking are the culture and skills of mentoring and coaching. Senior leaders in Singapore are, by upbringing,either traditionalists or baby boomers and their values differ markedly from the Gen X and Gen Y managers who need developing. The former usually value ‘a job well done’ and the the ‘trappings of success’, whereas the latter are hungry for meaningful work and are very open to coaching and mentoring as they value personal development.

A Gallup study showed that whilst most CEO’s ‘mentored’ by taking employees to lunch, very few had any formal mentoring programs in place. It is my experience, having worked with many Singapore companies, that most current leaders, whilst tactically very proficient, have received little or no coaching or mentoring training.

Leaders are ‘made not born‘ and most develop their leadership during adverse work situations – just like what is happening now! Unfortunately a number of organisations are currently cutting their leadership development budgets rather than focusing on what will make the difference in the long-term.

What do you think? Please comment.

BTW: I shall be speaking on this very issue at the Global HR Leadership Congress 2009

(Copyright Andrew Bryant – No reproduction without permission, thank you )

As we start our new year fresh from the festive season, I am smiling
with curiosity, excitement, and eager anticipation of what 2009 will
look, sound and feel like.

Being a trainer focusing on communication and leadership, I travel to
different countries to run training programs. Continue Reading »

Realising that in today’s world email has become an indispensible way of communication, here are 4 suggestions to make sure we use it most effectively:

• Use the Golden Rule!

“If the email message that you are reading is going to take you longer than five minutes to read and reply to, it needs to be a phone call.”
Did you know that more information can be exchanged in a two-minute phone call than in any email that takes us ten minutes to write and the other person ten minutes to read? (The door swings both ways, too). Continue Reading »