Self Leadership Coaching Blog

I have posted previously about public and professional speaking and this week I was training a group of young professionals in the art of presentation skills.

During the 2-days training, using video feedback, the participants were transformed from nervous to confident and from unstructured to persuasive presenters. 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?

Andrew Bryant will be speaking at the Singapore HR Congress & Business-Connect Exposition 2009, 14 to 15 April 2009 at Raffles City Convention Centre.

The thought provoking title “You can’t teach leadership at a seminar” highlights the need for a strategic approach to leadership development. Andrew is guaranteed to give a highly engaging, interactive an memorable presentation – so don’t miss it.

Fear is a part of our every day lives and to achieve Self Leadership we must understand and work with our fears so that they do not prevent us achieving our objectives.

Or as the bard,  William Shakespeare, put it, “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt”. Continue Reading »