Education 2.0 & 3.0

Leadership development is a journey that takes time and requires work. We don’t “get there” – we don’t arrive at a place when we are “finished” developing as a leader.

Leading is a battle when you build walls around your heart. But a leader with an open heart builds supportive relationships. People in relationship work hard for each other. A team of average players that pulls together will outperform a team of superstars that pulls for themselves. Lead with an open heart so you can…

Drowning in paperwork and medial tasks can drown any administrator or leader if they are not careful. It is crucial, that through our hectic and important days, that we build ourselves for efficiency. Within this post, you will see ways to get the biggest bang for your buck, while gaining more of your sanity and…

Behind every great athlete there is an even greater coach. There isn't a top athlete--from Muhammad Ali to Tiger Woods to Serena Williams--who did not need a mentor to help them reach the top of their profession.  

If you think about it, your business is similar to that of an elite athlete. You may have the drive, the skills, and the vision, but there are times when you need professional guidance to ensure you stay on the right path, and how to best utilize your talents and work on your shortcomings in order to reach your goals. An executive coach can be that person.

No matter where you are on your career path--from eager up-and-coming manager to a seasoned senior executive to an entrepreneur--there will be times when you can benefit from some professional coaching.

Successful entrepreneurs have a lot of things in common; one is knowing how to make the best use of their time. When the clock is ticking and they are under pressure to deliver, many have a favourite productivity hack to ensure things get done on time. Here, seven entrepreneurs share their tried and tested ways of being more productive.

Create artificial deadlines

Business expert and author of The Startup Coach Carl Reader uses a clever technique of creating artificial deadlines to guarantee a productive finish.

“One of my favourite tricks is the ‘train journey to nowhere,” he said. “I book a return train ticket, don't take my mobile phone, and set a completion target for the journey. With a clear deadline and no distractions, I find that I often produce more than I would in the office in a whole day. It's great if you can tie this around meetings that you need to travel to, but if not, the productivity boost is well worth the cost of a train ticket.”

Effectively managing others is both a science and an art, just like programming or playing an instrument. Based on personality and past experiences, some people tend to naturally be stronger at leading and inspiring others. That being said, anybody can learn how to be an effective manager if given the right training.

What's nice about the world we live in today is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to be a great leader. Countless studies have been poured into determining what makes for a good manager.

Whether you've always seen yourself as a natural leader or are scared in front of others, here are six science-backed tactics that are universally effective.

Want to know one habit ultra-successful people have in common?

They read. A lot.

In fact, when Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

Buffett takes this habit to the extreme — he read between 600 and 1000 pages per day when he was beginning his investing career, and still devotes about 80% of each day to reading.

And he’s not alone. Here are just a few top business leaders and entrepreneurs who make reading a major part of their daily lifestyle

One of the most difficult transitions for leaders to make is the shift from doing to leading. As a new manager you can get away with holding on to work. Peers and bosses may even admire your willingness to keep “rolling up your sleeves” to execute tactical assignments. But as your responsibilities become more complex, the difference between an effective leader and a super-sized individual contributor with a leader’s title is painfully evident.

In the short term you may have the stamina to get up earlier, stay later, and out-work the demands you face. But the inverse equation of shrinking resources and increasing demands will eventually catch up to you, and at that point how you involve others sets the ceiling of your leadership impact. The upper limit of what’s possible will increase only with each collaborator you empower to contribute their best work to your shared priorities. Likewise, your power decreases with every initiative you unnecessarily hold on to.

How inclusive or exclusive should organizations be when developing their employees’ talents? In a world of unlimited resources, organizations would surely invest in everyone. After all, as Henry Ford is credited as saying, “the only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” In the real world, however, limited budgets force organizations to be much more selective, which explains the growing interest in high potential (HiPo) identification. An employee’s potential sets the upper limits of his or her development range — the more potential they have, the quicker and cheaper it is to develop them.

Scientific studies have long suggested that investing in the right people will maximize organizations’ returns. In line with Pareto’s principle, these studies show that across a wide range of tasks, industries, and organizations, a small proportion of the workforce tends to drive a large proportion of organizational results, such that:

Monique Maley

Advice on how to improve one’s self is everywhere.  It accounts for about 2.5% of all book sales in the United States. Add in speeches, training programs, TV programs, online-products, coaches, yoga, and the like, self-help is a $10 billion industry per year, and that’s just in the U.S.

However, research shows that much of the advice extolled may be misleading or even wrong. Several myths about performance persist, despite research and practices that show they are half-truths at best. That might explain why the most likely purchasers of self-improvement books have bought another within the previous 18 months.  The first myth-riddled book didn’t work, so they bought another, and maybe another soon after.

A recent report in the Journal of Management noted that of nearly 25,000 academic articles on performance, only a fraction include what psychologists call within person variance, which describes ranges, such as that between individuals’ top, average and worst performances. Advice too often mistakenly assumes performance can be compared across people, using the same gauge. That’s absurd.

Our observation of hundreds of performance seekers largely confirms the report and has led to delineating a series of myths that hold people back when trying to improve. These assertions are based on a diverse set of fields, including psychology, sports, arts, and leadership. We hope that by dispelling these myths, explaining the reality and offering some sound advice instead, we can help move people toward more effective personal development.

What are the defining attributes of great leaders? That's the age-old question thought leaders and scholars galore have been attempting to answer in mountains of books and literature. 

While great leadership, to an extent, can be personal and subjective to the follower, there are universal principles you can't argue with (but you can try). Speaking of those thought leaders and scholars, here are six traits that keep surfacing over and over again in the leadership literature and best-sellers.

Great leaders may be smart and know a lot, but they are humble enough to recognize there are smarter people in the room that they can learn from. They don't restrict themselves from opinions and input outside of their own. They surround themselves with diverse perspectives to help them answer questions like, "How do I know my decision is the right one?" or "Is there a better course of action here?"

According to an Oxford University analysis, close to half of all jobs will be taken over by robots in the next 25 years. No wonder the press is full of handwringing about how workers will adjust and the best way to prepare the next generation for this A.I.-filled future.

But not everyone is alarmed about the prospect of radical change in the labor market. After all, this has happened before (for instance, when mechanization replaced the vast majority of farmers) and it turned out OK. Plus, a lot of today's jobs are soul-crushingly boring and repetitive. Losing them just might be a blessing. 

Among these optimists are IT service company Cognizant. In a recent report (hat tip to Business Insider for the pointer), the consultancy notes that while creative destruction has always been with us, so has reinvention. Sure, robots will take jobs away, but they'll also create new ones.

What will these new gigs look like exactly? The report imagines detailed job ads for 21 future careers that Cognizant thinks may emerge in the next 10 years.

What do people want out of work? More than money, more than benefits, much more than job security, a recent survey says, they want to be treated with respect.

If that sounds like you, how can you increase the respect you get each day at work? It turns out that there are specific habits you can cultivate that allow you to train the people you work with to treat you respectfully each day.

Here are 33 of these proven habits that can help, if you're willing to stick with them. Implement a few, take inspiration from the others, and you'll likely see dividends quickly.

More and more organisations are choosing to complement their face-to-face inductions online or move to an entirely online induction model.  Here are 3 reasons why…

“The Day 1” experience

Sometimes it’s the time it takes to set new starters up on your systems or finalise the paperwork, sometimes it’s not having enough people start around the same time to justify the cost and resource of running a face to face induction session.  Whatever the reason, it’s rare that new starters experience a consistent, formal induction on their first day.

Sure, there’s the office tour, the meet and greets, but how do they understand where your organisation is headed, the values that drive you, and what’s expected of them… from day one?  Or even before their start date?

An online induction means these all-important messages that set the scene and communicate who you are and what you do are delivered from the get-go. This can include video of your CEO or MD talking conversationally about what your organisation’s vision and values mean to them. From Day 1, your new starters can have the impression that senior leaders are approachable and accessible.

Streamlined content

Often the content that new starters need to be aware of is housed in multiple locations: your web page, your intranet, your shared drive, in old emails, in people’s heads.  A new starter needs a map.

An online induction corrals all that must-know, or must-know-where-to-find information in a cohesive way.  It signposts people to the places they can access the information now, and return to later as needed. And if they need to find it later… it’s the most up to date version, not a new starter manual that is out of date as it’s too hard to maintain.

Getting connected

There is so much opportunity to connect new starters to each other and encourage that sense of belonging to a ‘cohort’.  Consider allocating someone the responsibility of being your “Induction community manager” and taking advantage of the discussion groups on your LMS, or standalone social networks. 

This means you can dish out work-integrated challenges or activities for them to complete, and come back to post and share their insights amongst the group.  Moving your induction online means new starters can form connections with colleagues across geographical and departmental boundaries – at a fraction of the cost and potential time lags involved in achieving this face to face.

To read more about moving your induction process online click here. And see a vignette of one of our Inductions.

Learn more about how to move your induction online

Sarah Davie is the Global Design Lead for The Learning Factor. Sarah has a passion for Onboarding and Induction solutions. She is an experienced learning consultant with a demonstrated history of delivering for clients from large Corporate organisations, Government sectors, global Consulting Firms and boutique Learning Agencies. 

No commute. No drive-by meetings. No dress code. Remote working can seem like a dream — until personal obligations get in the way. These distractions are easy to ignore in an office, but at home it can be difficult to draw the line between personal and professional time.

Consider when you’re working on a project and get a call from a friend. You know you need to finish your work, but you feel rude for not talking when you technically could. Or think about when you’re planning your daily to-do list, but also need to decide when you’ll squeeze in your personal commitments. Taking the time to put a few loads of laundry in the washer midday can seem like a quick task — until you find yourself making up that work time late at night. In the end, it’s never entirely clear when you’re really “on” or “off.”