Advice, tips and inspiration to help you perform at your best
My favourite bit of the Brit Awards is where artists collaborate. Ed Sheeran (love him or hate him) does this a lot, most recently with Bring Me the Horizon to kick off this year’s awards show. It always adds a frisson of excitement.
I love interesting collaborations. When researching content for an upcoming communication training programme, some of the most engaging examples I came across featured two brands coming together to form something new and exciting. Here are two that caught my eye.
Last week I wrote about how to uncover your authentic identity at work. The real, honest and truthful version of yourself. This week I want to provide a few more tips on how you and your team can bring this to the workplace more effectively.
Happiness and success at work starts with being confident in expressing your ‘authentic identity’. The real you. The unfiltered, open and genuine version of yourself. It means feeling relaxed and comfortable in the way you show up in the workplace. It means using this to shape your decisions and your ideas.
Following on from my previous post about building trust in a team, I wanted to talk about team conflict. I’m someone who naturally shies away from conflict and doesn’t enjoy getting involved in arguments. I’ve also felt that the best teams are harmonious. Where everyone agrees with each other.
So, it’s the 1st of September and the Summer has officially ended. The sun is getting weaker, there’s a chill in the air and the days are shortening. To me, it feels like a new beginning. Much more so than the 1st of January. It feels like the start of a new school year. So, my suggestion is to take the time to start afresh as if you’re heading back to school. Here’s what works for me.
I had always believed in following your passion at work. Doing what you love and getting paid for it. This for me was the ideal scenario. Occasionally I’d fantasise about my dream job. This usually involved food or sport.
It was a seductive vision. Make a career out of your passion. It’s the passport to true happiness.
One of the biggest challenges we face in facilitating online workshops is to make sure people stay engaged throughout. It’s so easy for people to switch off, given the amount of time we spend staring at screens nowadays.
So, as a facilitator, how do you make your online workshops more enjoyable and more productive? These are my suggestions.
Creative workshops are not like normal business meetings. Where you sit, listen, nod your head and leave. Attendees have to work hard. They’ve got to join in. They’ve got to come up with ideas.
As a facilitator, your challenge is to extract the maximum creativity from the people who attend. It’s important to get people in the right zone, right from the beginning.
Here are some suggestions:
In the past, I’ve shared three essential creative exercises for innovation workshops. In case you’re looking for more exercises that will help you generate new ideas, here are three more. They’re just as useful.
I’m in the middle of running an online training programme with facilitators looking to sharpen their approaches to facilitating innovation workshops. Whilst there are common skills we can all learn, it’s important to facilitate your way. To create a style you feel comfortable with. Where you also get the best out of the workshop participants.
There are many different brand positioning models in the world of marketing. In the early days of my old agency Added Value, we created a tool called the ‘Bullseye’. I also remember developing a tool with Unilever which became the famous ‘Brand Key’.
Every brand owner and agency has their own version, which they claim to be unique or proprietary. Of course, it isn’t. In marketing, nothing is. The shape of the boxes might change as do the names, but essentially, it’s the same kind of thing. A positioning model.
One of the podcasts I enjoy is ‘The Pitch’. It’s a bit like ‘The Dragon’s Den’, but with an American twist. Where budding entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to potential investors. The episodes are short and entertaining. And you hear lots of interesting new ideas.
Getting clarity on your ‘elevator pitch’ is essential for all of us.
