11 March 2010

Short and shocking, but possibly blunt. Or how to miss the .ppt completely …

Posted by don't compromise under communication, learning theory, learning transfer, relationships | Tags: , , , |
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We’re familiar with the idea that a picture paints a thousand words. We mostly know about presentations too – at least the kind where someone attempts to prove that ‘two legs + slides’ is superior to just the legs. The undisputed world leading tool for putting together presentations is Microsoft’s PowerPoint, but every tool has potential downsides. Looking at some of the commentary of the impact of PowerPoint on working and social life, many of these downsides might actually be attributes of the tool stood a couple of feet to the left of the projector screen.

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9 March 2010

Press the button on your keypad for a brighter future …

Posted by don't compromise under HR, behavioural change, coaching, leadership development, learning transfer, line managers, organisational development, relationships, reward and recognition, talent management | Tags: , , , , , , |
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In a world of choice, there’s a comfort in being offered options. Too much choice – like a badly designed software interface, or an enormous supermarket – can be stultifying as easily as it can be liberating. That’s one reason so many of us are drawn to numbered or bulleted lists: it shepherds life into manageable portions. It’s reductive of course – they don’t call it ‘whittling’ because anything gets bigger – but the scale of human activity long ago surpassed our ability to deal with all of it. So we narrow down the possible options to a shortlist. And, because we have a sense of humour, we call this ‘rationalisation’. Even when we apply to something as important as our futures.

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4 March 2010

A rose by any other name: An Assistant Control Projectionist Writes …

Posted by don't compromise under HR, communication, motivation, reward and recognition | Tags: |
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Shall I compare thee to the median daylight hours of an unseasonably warm and bright period of planetary rotation? Or would you just wonder what I was on about? Saying I thought you were as sunny and enjoyable as a summer’s day would have got the point across, and might have endeared you more, no? (Relax, readers, I’m spoken for: and that’s a lucky escape on your part.) We’re all agreed that communication is a vital thing in the workplace, I’m fairly confident, but – as the BBC pointed out recently on its website – we do have a spot of bother when it comes to job titles. Why, when we’re writing it on something as a small as a business card, do we suddenly feel the need to call a spade an earth-moving arboricultural and horticultural personal utensil. (Or presumably, if it has a black handle and a smart logo, an Executive earth-moving arboricultural …)

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4 March 2010

Make your legacy a tradition of change

Posted by don't compromise under HR, behavioural change, leadership development, learning transfer, life, organisational development, relationships, talent management | Tags: , , , , , |
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Many of us are concerned about our ‘legacy’ – what we will leave behind as a testimony to the labours of our three score and ten. It’s a human instinct, even if we don’t get as agitated on the topic as Tony Blair seemed to in his final months as PM (driven, no doubt, by fear of ‘leaving on a low note’). But as sustainability in every sense becomes a more widespread topic, perhaps a more vocal concern for our individual and collective legacy is an inevitable consequence. It struck me, however, that when asked – separately from each other – what they hoped their legacy would be, most of the ASK Team wrote about their children. I’m not a parent, but I suspect that focusing on those you will leave it to may substantially influence your thinking of your ‘legacy’.

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4 March 2010

Fresh Crackers (18)

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Two articles on very different aspects of change in today’s instalment of Crackers (click the link for the full list) – the role (and importance) of creativity, and the evolution of training in response to social and organisational change.

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2 March 2010

Ireland’s Education system struggles to make the grade

Posted by michael mckiernan under recruitment, talent management | Tags: , , , , |
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After the dramatic events of the last two to three years in Ireland’s ‘tiger economy’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that inflation was hardly their biggest worry. Indeed, Ireland currently had negative inflation at -2.9% for the year 2009 – the lowest figure in the EU. But a different kind of inflation – exam grade inflation – is currently front page news. Not just because the importance of a robust educational system is something the Irish value and are proud of, but because the credibility of exam grades – and the quality of the system’s graduates – is critical to future of a country where inward investment is critical for current recovery and future success “of a knowledge-based economy”.

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25 February 2010

Putting up walls: the problem with feedback

Posted by don't compromise under coaching, communication, leading performance, line managers, management, motivation, relationships, talent management | Tags: , |
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Last December, we started a post here about giving and receiving feedback with the words “I’m not a sociologist, nor even a psychologist, but I do sometimes wonder if human beings have an innate problem with two-way communication.”  I don’t know if Evan Davis was reading (ironically, he hosted a BBC programme we mentioned in the earlier post), but a BBC programme shown last night – The Day the Immigrants Left (available till 3 March on iPlayer, so click quickly) – made us wonder. Although it wasn’t the biggest thing that it made us wonder about. We had thought that giving feedback in a constructive, sensitive and timely fashion was an issue for line managers: we hadn’t realised that carpenters had a problem with it too.

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23 February 2010

Tortoise-brain vs hare-brain: creativity at work

Posted by don't compromise under HR, leading performance, line managers, management, motivation, relationships, reward and recognition, talent management, teamwork | Tags: , , , |
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You may employ someone – or a few people – who you might use some of the following phrases to describe to someone else:

  • Fond of asking dumb questions, despite their intelligence
  • Arrogant when they know they know something, humble when they know they don’t
  • Highly self-critical
  • Often markedly introverted, but sometimes quite the opposite
  • Very honest about their own shortcomings or knowledge/skills gaps
  • Tend to see situations and issues in more complex terms than their colleagues.

You might be blunter, and throw in some other phrases: “hard work”, “difficult to handle”, “no business sense”. Or just plain “trouble”. Yet these traits are some of the characteristics of the highly creative, as identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Davidson Professor of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, California.

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