performance

I've been thinking about this whole concept of sacrificing the self for the team for a couple of days, and then the article below landed in my inbox this morning.

For years team building practitioners and leaders have been proclaiming that there should be no "I" in TEAM. I think it's a concept that's fundamentally flawed and the breeding place for conflict and discontent.

Basic psychology is clear on this... people will do things for their own reasons and primarily for themselves before thinking of others. That's what Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is all about. It's also the foundation for Self-Actualization.

Leaving the "I" out of results, implies socialism - and that's why this article is so relevant...

So the whole of Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia have come to a virtual standstill while BlackBerry has a problem with their BIS servers. Let’s get real though – it’s not that major a problem.

It wasn’t long ago that all of our businesses survived without instantaneous global communication. Remember fax machines? Snail Mail? Pigeons? Messenger? New York still uses the largest “fleet” of messengers in the world.

On Twitter, my friend and attorney Paul Jacobson puts it in perspective, “I'm a little concerned about the anxiety level with the #BIS crash. It’s ok, really, the service will (probably) be restored. Go do some work.”

Realistically, if you’re a salesperson, consultant, trainer or speaker, there are only 8 weeks left of 2011 to make your target. That’s right! 8 weeks.

It’s also around this time of the year that companies start with countless excuses why they can’t sign off on the proposal, the deal, the training programme – and one of the popular ones when it comes to training is that employees are about to go on leave in December and therefore won’t remember the training lessons and content when they return in 2012.

That’s rubbish.

Despite the increase in availability and ease of electronic communication, more and more business leaders and managers are travelling to events around the globe.

I've been an international speaker for over 15 years, and I've discovered that there are some things that business people and sports people - even tourists - can do to avoid Jet lag and poor performance caused by extensive air travel.

Here are a couple of ideas....

A company’s culture is the environment created by the priorities it sets.

Sometimes those priorities are made explicit: in a company’s formal mission statement, for example, or in the structure of the organisation and the power given to different departments and functions. Sometimes they are implicit: what the Financial Times once called “the large number of unspoken assumptions and beliefs which managers in the organisation share about ‘the way we do things around here’”.

Surprisingly, managers do not coach their charges - well, not effectively anyway. In Part 2 of this series on Coaching as a function of Management we looked at the excuses managers use for not coaching. Even those managers who do coach, often do not have the skills. At least willingness is good start.

In this, the 3rd part of my coaching series, I'll share with you the skills managers need in order to be effective coaches.

It is undeniable that first major management trend of the 21st Century is Coaching. Coaches are cropping up all over the place, often making outlandish claims of what they can achieve with your people – if you’re prepared to pay them vast sums of money.

Change is a constant in the business world. In fact the business world has never changed faster and faced more challenges than it does today. In the 3rd installment of this series on change and creativity, Erik Vermeulen looks at the 4 Secrets Creative Experts employ to deal with change and generate answers.

I'm currently wrapping up a 7 week contract with a client in Kenya. Yes, I've lived here for almost 7 weeks on a Culture Development "roll-out". Obviously CHANGE has been front of mind - not only because of the nature of the project, but because I've had to immerse myself in the Kenyan Way. So, if it is relatively easy to adapt to new surroundings, why do companies struggle so much with change? In the next few posts I'll have a look at change and how we can creatively deal with it.

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears
With their tedious diatribes about how hard things were
When they were growing up; what with walking
Twenty-five miles to school every morning ... Uphill BOTH ways

Yadda, yadda, yadda....