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How effective is your collaboration at work?

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Our `Future of Work´ report found that the evolution of communication tools in the last decade is having a major impact on organizations.  One area where this is really being felt is how we collaborate in the workplace.

The main trends here include: the virtualization of work, the increased adoption of flexwork policies, and the generation shift.  However, 90% of professionals agree that the way we collaborate today needs to improve and evolve to adjust to the changed environment.

What do you think?


Leading into the future: control less, trust more!

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As we outlined in our previous posts on the future of work, the world of work is evolving rapidly. Leaders are facing a wide range of complex new challenges, and to respond to these effectively, they need to grow their existing skill set.

Senior leaders need to be more aware of the challenges their people are facing in this new dynamic world of work. This requires them to engage more in regular dialogue with colleagues at all levels.

To be successful today and going forward, those in positions of authority need to refine their ability to lead change, leverage diversity, connect with multiple generations, and support the ongoing growth and development of their employees. They also need to be talented communicators who can empathize with diverse stakeholders, unite them towards a compelling vision and motivate them to excel. Above all, they need to learn to control less and trust more.

Why to improve performance?

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Why not? would be one way to answer this question. Here are 3 more good reasons:

1. On a personal level, most people want to be able to do things well and feel good about themselves afterwards. When you feel good about yourself and what you do somehow you tend to perform even better thus reinforcing the cycle. So, it’s good for your health!

2. You get more done. When you focus on things that are important to you, your motivation grows and your energy increases. High levels of motivation and increased energy lead to even better performances and better results.

3. On an organisational level, high performing individuals and teams are the lifeblood of innovation, growth and success.

What other reasons can you think of?

Pre-requisites to better performance

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As a leader you are normally responsible for both your own and your people’s performance. Here are 3 things to consider when setting performance targets and key performance indicators (KPIs):

To be successful at anything:

1. The person must want to do it

2. They must have the skills to do it

3. They must be given the chance to do it

If performance in your organisation varies a lot, then you may want to assess it against these 3 criteria. If one of them is currently missing then it’s likely that performance will not be as good as it could be. Now, you know where to start…

Do you really need coaching?

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The answer to this is probably, NO!

But do you want to solve a problem, achieve better results or learn something new? Do you want your teams to have less conflict, to perform better or to deliver projects on time and on budget?

Of course you do!

Coaching is a process and an incredibly effective way to support people getting from A to B. You only have to look at top sportspeople to see how it can do this. But, and I use “but” selectively, it may not be the only tool you need to improve performance. As Maslow famously pointed out: If you only have a hammer you tend to treat each problem as though it’s a nail… Coaching has become one of the most overused terms in business in recent years and it is frequently misunderstood.

Focus on results

So, my advice is to stop looking for coaching and start thinking in terms of results and outcomes. What is the problem you want to solve and what do you want instead?

Then, work with professionals who can give you an in-depth and highly accurate diagnosis of where you are so you can formulate where you want to be in a meaningful way. Ensure that those professionals have a complete tool box to support you in getting there. Coaching should probably be in there but not always on its own… It’s rarely that simple!

There’s an old Irish story about the tourist who got lost in the Irish countryside and stopped to ask a local farmer the way to Dublin airport. After scratching his head for a few moments the farmer replied: “If I were you I wouldn’t start from here!”

Get meaningful insights

Find out more about how to ensure that you’re starting in the right place. Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions (HATS) provides insights that other tools can only dream of. It’s like having a compass so you always know where you are relative to where you want to be.

Test out Harrison Assessments Talent Diagnostics for FREE today and you’ll find that you can make better people investment decisions in the future.

We’re currently recruiting Harrison consultants. Learn more…

Are your labels working?

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“Labels are for filing, labels are for clothing, labels are not for people” ~ Martina Navratilova

In our quest to understand ourselves we are often drawn to all sorts of frivolous games, quizzes and questionnaires to explain who we are. These approaches attempt to reduce the complexity of human behaviour to a label. In many cases the label acts like a metaphor comparing us to an animal, a car, a book, etc…

What if there were a better way to gain this understanding?

The labelling problem

When we label people we often label them as their behaviour. But a working premise is that people are not their behaviour, they are infinitely more than that! Behaviour takes place in a context and the meaning of all behaviour is dependent on that context. Some people love their labels because it gives them an excuse for inexcusable behaviour. Others hate labels. They feel disappointed in themselves and, if they accept the label, limited for life.

If you’ve ever been given a derogatory label you’ll know the feeling!

Confusing labels

We often confuse our labels with our behaviour when we describe what we do as who we are. When we say “I’m an engineer” what we really want to do is describe what we do. However, a label by its nature freezes what we do in time and space and this can be extremely limiting. Many engineers are also fathers, mothers, musicians, teachers, sports coaches. They are infinitely more than one label.

Are you a warrior lover?

So too with psychometric tests and assessments that label people with things such as combinations of letters or colours or terms such as “warrior”, “lover”, “jester”, etc… Most of these labelling approaches are derived from Carl Jung’s work on Archetypes, which in turn were derived from his interest in the Tarot cards.

There’s a better way…

A more useful way is to describe behavioural tendencies in terms of intrinsic motivators and preferences such as: tasks, working environment, interests, interpersonal relationships. This way you get a more meaningful insight into an individual without limiting their potential to develop and grow.

Since I started working with Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions (HATS) I have witnessed people gain a greater understanding of themselves and make significant strides in their own growth and development. Test HATS for yourself for FREE today.

We’re recruiting Harrison consultants. Learn more

Discover your Sales Performance Gaps

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Your sales force is the lifeblood of your organisation. They generate the sales that keep everyone else employed and hopefully enough profits to reinvest in new products and services.

However, it’s quite likely that your star performers carry the rest of the team.

What would happen if you could scientifically and accurately identify the difference that makes the difference between your highest and lowest performers? What would you do?

Learn more by downloading our short publication…

How can you close your Sales Performance Gap?

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Your sales force is the lifeblood of your organisation. They generate the sales that keep everyone else employed and hopefully enough profits to reinvest in new products and services.

However, it’s quite likely that your star performers carry the rest of the team.

What would happen if you could scientifically and accurately identify the difference that makes the difference between your highest and lowest performers? What would you do?

Learn more by downloading our short publication…


How do you deal with conflict in teams?

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If you’ve ever played on a winning team you’ll know the feeling you get when everything just runs smoothly. There’s an energy and elegance that comes to the fore and very little can go wrong. Psychologists refer to this as a state of flow. To get into a state of flow a person’s intrinsic motivators are all operating on full cylinder and the perceived difficulty of a task and the available resources are in balance. When a person or a group of people are in a state of flow engagement levels are very high!

“Dream on”, you may be saying to yourself at this point! You can’t even begin to imagine being on a team like this.

How do team dynamics actually work?

Getting back to our winning team. Let’s take the example of a football team that starts conceding more goals than it scores and losing matches. Is it really the fault of the goalkeeper? Or is it the defenders? Perhaps, the midfielders keep giving the ball away in the middle of the field. Or, is it that the forwards are not scoring enough goals?

As a team is fundamentally a system, it’s probably a combination of all these factors because systems depend on the relationships between the parts to function properly. They also depend on having appropriate feedback loops in place. If, however, the only form of feedback is criticism and pointing the finger this becomes a recipe for disaster and teams quickly degenerate into bickering and the blame game.

The net effect is that it costs organisations millions!

How do you identify your blindspots?

You may be surprised to learn that there is an easy and highly effective way to discover your team’s blind spots or potential de-railers. Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions (HATS) provides a full range of team diagnostics so you can easily spot your blindspots as a team. What’s more HATS provides a range of team development solutions, all at the click of a mouse!

How do you achieve better balance?

HATS also gives you valuable insights into how you have balance in your teams. Not everyone has the same strengths and a high performing team is made up of a range of complementary skill sets. Not everyone needs to be a goal keeper! For example, there may be someone who is very good at assessing risks at the beginning of a project and others who are good at dealing with and adapting to change during the project.

Wouldn’t it be good to know who these people are rather than guessing?

Before you invest in team building

The common approach to dysfunctional teams is to go offsite for a team building day or weekend. However, in my experience, a lot of this is hit and miss and a wasted opportunity. Yes, people usually have a good time but rarely do they address the root causes of their problems or name the elephants in the room. The result: within one week it’s back to the usual bickering and in-fighting… Deadlines slip by and costs escalate!

A better way forward…

A better way is to run the HATS diagnostic beforehand and build your team day around how to get better balance and performance as a team. The whole team building experience will be a more meaningful one and you’ll notice generative results in the weeks to follow.

You can test HATS for FREE by clicking on this link.

We’re currently recruiting Harrison Consultants. More information here.

Is HR about to become the next casualty of Disruptive Innovation?

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When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007 people were stunned. Three mobile devices in one. Nobody had done that before. The mobile phone makers were caught out big time. Many people thought it was too good to be true. Others were impressed. Finally, someone had produced just what they’d been waiting for! Then it wasn’t long before everyone wanted a touch-screen smart phone. Today, smart phones are a part of daily life and it looks strange to see someone using a traditional mobile device.

The iPhone is just one of a plethora of ways in which traditional industries and practices have been disrupted and overturned in the past 10 years. And, it’s set to continue affecting how many of us live and work on a frequently occurring basis.

Disruptive Talent 
Fast forward to today and to the world of Talent Management. Organisations continue to rely on outdated practices in how they hire, retain and develop their people. Surely not, you might be saying to yourself!?

Worse still, in an attempt to “modernise” HR practices they’ve invested in sexy looking software that promises to do everything. As thought leader on Talent Josh Bersin remarked in one of his recent reports, in some cases users are still trying to figure out what to do with the software. That strikes me as a bit like putting the cart before the horse!

LinkedIn’s 2015 Global Recruiting Trends report found that improving candidate and job matching was the top trend that will affect how recruiting is done over the next five years.

So, how do you do that?

Be The Employer of Choice
There is however an Apple-like 3-in-1 type solution available. One that can make you THE Employer of Choice in Your Sector. One that is user and needs driven. One that requires minimal investment and produces outstanding results. One that is customisable to your needsOne that matches candidates very precisely to specific jobs.

Enter Harrison Assessments Talent Solutions (HATS) an online solution that provides in-depth talent analytics that match people to jobs and explain what precisely engages your people and why they are performing or not performing well in their current jobs. HATS supports you in attracting, recruiting and on boarding new recruits, employee engagement, retention & development, employee rotation, succession planning and leadership development.

All this and more! You get up to an 80% improvement in your hiring processes. You save money on training and development and you significantly reduce your employee turnover. You get happier people at work and become the Employer of Choice in your sector. Studies have shown that people who are happy in their jobs and enjoy at least 75% of their work perform better than those who don’t.

Now, you can accurately measure it. What could be better than that?!

So, what are you waiting for? Test out HATS for FREE today and become the Employer of Choice in Your Sectorhttp://widecircle.harrisonassessments.eu/free-report.html

We’re currently recruiting Harrison consultants & coaches. More information here.





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