More and more organisations are taking initiative to upskill their senior teams. Down-sizing is mostly complete and there has been a year or two of minimal ‘training for performance’ in many parts of the economy. Now is the right time to get more performance from top layers of management.

Typical errors include upskilling to target new behaviours and performance and members of the Board rejecting these new behaviours and performance. Find out more about best-practice in setting out leadership development journeys.

Part of our ‘Human at Work’ (©AngusMcLeod2011) series, the full slide-show has memorable and striking images by Daniel LeClair for Reuters. You can see the slide-show below. There are many lessons for coaches and coaching-executives but the concept of giving and taking is one I explore here.

A number of self-help and charitable groups work in Honduras and elsewhere to try and eleviate the enormous problems of poverty and child deprivation. In Honduras, the President’s wife puts on old jeans and joins helpers to help in the middle of the night. In every walk of life we have givers and takers. In Honduras the povety-stricken may have good excuses for receiving, when they do. But in our lives, what has made our culture so self-centred and selfish to the extent that ‘me first’ darkens almost all human behaviour from the super-market to the street. The coaching mindset is a force for change.

Professional coaches are net-givers not net-takers. If you see a greedy coach, you are unlucky. The Performance Coaching mindset is one of service, and many of us think of Greenleaf’s idea of the ‘Servant Leader’ on which to found our working practices. So, what if many more of us took these mindsets into more areas of our life-experience? What do you think you will see happening around you?

Let’s help make that cultural shift. Against all odds I still believe that you cannot shine darkness into the world, but you can shine light and make a difference that matters. Be a net-giver.

Angus

See the whole slideshow

As part of our ‘Human at Work’ (©AngusMcLeod2011) series you may want to see a slide-show from after the Japanese Tsunami. With lessons to coaches and coaching-executives, the spirit of Japanese people in adversary is hard to match. See the slide-show below. With continuous fire-fighting all of us are susceptible to getting small stuff out of proportion. Reminding ourselves that our glass needs to be half-full and not half-empty is a healthy perspective to hold on to and we can thank Kahlil Gibran for that. “How bad is bad?” & “Calibrate ‘bad for me’?” are good responses to negative thinking about our working predicaments. From calibration comes fresh perspective. From that fresh perspective, the coach in us will look to the first achievable target towards the desired outcome or goal. Things are rarely as bad as we make them.

Angus

see the slideshow

This Blog is part of our ‘Human at Work’ (©AngusMcLeod2011) series.

A slide-show of striking native pictures has lessons for coaches and executives alike. You can see the slide-show below. When Richard Moraes first tried to go in with Brazilian Health Expeditions to bring medical help to the tribes, they often stayed away as the people were frightened. Stories abounded about the white people taking your eyes and replacing them with horse eyes. Fear was rife.The slide-show has stunning pictures showing the results of their breakthrough. For coaches and coaching executives, the story is a metaphor for some of the people who more-or-less trust us, who are more-or-less anxious when with us. What mindset and behaviours should we bring to our work to put others in a good mental and emotional state to perform and have wellbeing at work? For performance coaches the answer is in personal growth. Often, as we know, therapists and pschologists are attracted to their professions as part of their own need to fix themselves. No doubt some coaches are the same.

Our clients and colleagues at work deserve better than that. We need people, coaches and executives who are grown up and do not feel a need to be ‘one-up’ or who feel threatened by others. The people around us grow faster when we have already gone some way along our own development journey.

Angus

see the slide-show yourself

A free new article on the trainingzone website ‘Online-learning-journeys’ has been viewed 488 times in under 7 hours! Now you can view it for free too. Learn this and more:

• The process, language and the interpretive demands on the learner must be appropriate to them.
• Remaining committed to web-based learning is more of a challenge to those who like to work near others.
• Make sure there are milestones and to congratulate learners when they move to a new module/unit after successfully completing their previous one

Learn more about established e-learning journeys for skills and knowldege development at the AMACS website.

One hour of your time – have you been inspired by someone?

Inspiration is a small and uneccessary aspect of leadership. If you have it, you are probably lucky or just highly developed as a human. But do our coachees develop inspiration in others? A key to this which I borrow from coaching senior executives for over a decade is the observation that inspiration, like charisma or ‘a brand’, mainly works easily in a new environment. This blog is part of our ongoing ‘Human at Work’ (©AngusMcLeod2011) series. If you do grow and develop inspirational charcteristics then these will invariably have more impact if you take them into another arena of work – by moving job into a wholly new environment. In other words, people often put us in boxes and once in, it is darned hard to get out! Yes, there are exceptions and these exceptions are themselves typically ‘exceptional’ e.g. where an individual comes to sudden prominence by doing something truly remarkable.

Now we have a chance to learn more about inspiration and the character of it in a more structured way by participating in the research work of Laura Murphy. If you have felt inspired by someone at work and both you and your ‘inspirer’ are potential interviewees (about an hour each) then do please contact Laura as below.

Laura Murphy is undertaking research on inspirational leadership with a view to publication and is focusing on the values aspect of leadership instead of looking at the usual leadership traits and styles.  She wishes to identify people who have been inspired by someone they have worked with and to interview both the inspired and “inspirer”, separately. In some instances the two would have been in the same company at the time and for others the “inspirer” was someone external to the company. If you are willing to be interviewed or just want to find out a bit more before you commit yourself, then Laura can be contacted on info@mtc2.co.uk.  She’s already interviewed a number of people but the more she can speak to the more robust the research.

Here’s a link so you can find out more about her:  http://www.mtc2.co.uk/about-us/associates/profiles/Laura-Murphy.xalter

I would encourage you to help Laura in expanding the research in this new and exciting area of work.

Angus

Visiting Professor of Coaching and,

External Supervisor of Research at Birmingham City University

Using the McLeod, ‘Human at Work’ (©AngusMcLeod2011) philosophy, I give you a ca. 7 minute video demonstrating how getting to the basics of human development (using ‘Human at Work’) can underpin executive training for stress and numerous performance issues. Free access with a simple sign-up.
My first video based on ‘Human at Work’ technology was a video on mindfulness. Here is the second in the series, called ‘Pain to Gain’. Just sign up and this video will be on your new dashboard. Existing ‘Human at Work ©’ members will find the video on their dashboard.Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ © technology updates here!

But why ‘Human at Work’ and what does that do for organizations that L&D does not? Although good work is done within L&D we often see too many initiatives without adequate resources to accomplish the job. Naturally, what slips through are programmes that are not themed for corporate key learnings and we also then see an element of ‘tick box’ programmes where whole groups are put in training when in reality, some people should not be in the training room at all. They will get little or nothing from it – they are simply not ready, and their view of HR will be compromised.
Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ technology updates here!

A COLLABORATIVE OFFER

I intend to add other inputs based upon my ‘Human at Work’ technology including short videos for L&D and HR staff, so if you want some challenges from this ‘Human at Work’ perspective to help you develop ideas and innovation in any given area of executive and leader development, then do please contact me – I shall be happy to engage and move things on with you. Angus.

Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ technology updates here!

I have produced my first video based on ‘Human at Work’ © technology. This video is on mindfulness. But why ‘Human at Work’ and what does that do for organizations that L&D does not? Although good work is done within L&D we often see too many initiatives without adequate resources to accomplish the job. Naturally, what slips through are programmes that are not themed for corporate key learnings and we also then see an element of ‘tick box’ programmes where whole groups are put in training when in reality, some of them should not be in the training room at all. They will get little or nothing from it and their view of HR will be compromised.Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ © technology updates here!

If we have the luxury of going back to basics, then we can think acutely about the ‘Human at Work’ © – specifically, how different executives need different learning opportunities at different times. When we do this, we find (as in the case of mindfulness) that many executives are NOT ready for the programme – instead, we place those on an 18-24 month period of L&D interventions to bring these executives to the point where the mindfulness (thinking and behavioural changes) can take place. Structured learning journeys, over time, allow personal development processes to take place at the pace of the human; anything faster is a waste of time and effort. It’s akin to telling a teenager to ‘grow up’ – we all know that growing up is life-journey and the real impact of personal development invariably takes at least 18 months to integrate and be observable in behaviours/performance. Of course, the structured learning-journey needs to address the key elements of personal development that will challenge and create the will to learn. This then is the heart of my ‘Human at Work’ technology and it is these considerations that then advise what we need to do and what we need to measure.
Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ © technology updates here!

A COLLABORATIVE OFFER

I intend to add other inputs based upon my ‘Human at Work’ technology including short videos for L&D and HR staff, so if you want some challenges from this ‘Human at Work’ perspective to help you develop ideas and innovation in any given area of executive and leader development, then do please contact me – I shall be happy to engage and move things on with you.   Angus.

Sign up for your FREE access to all ‘Human at Work’ technology updates here!