Category: Management

6 ideas about setting goals in your organisation | Paul

11/9/2017

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Here are 6 thoughts about goals:

It’s unethical to hold people to goals that they have set, because much of what happens after you set a goal is unpredictable.
Watch out for when goals turn counter-productive. Like prescription drugs, they can have unwanted side-effects.
It’s important to give yourself permission not to stick to goals when circumstances change and you need your wits about you to deal with uncertainty.
Perhaps if goals are modest and short-term, they will not be so delusional.
A deadline by which you have to produce a piece of work can be very productive. I write here as a trained journalist.
If you work with others, instead of setting goals ask them what they would like to achieve. Then when you meet again, ask them what progress they have made.

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I’d love to take a solutions focus, but I can’t let go of the problem

12/6/2017

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Many clients have difficulty in letting go of their problem. It’s not surprising. They have lived with the problem for a while; the problem is giving them trouble and it’s worthy of respect. Yet the solution-focused practitioner pops up to say the problem may have nothing to do with the solution – and remind them that it’s the solution that the client wants. That may make sense logically, but from the client’s perspective that can be tough to accept emotionally.

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The logical thread of better conversations

5/6/2017

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We are all familiar with tricky conversations in our organisations - the ones you put off for as long as possible or perhaps never have at all. But suppose you could handle these conversations in the best way imaginable, what difference would that make?

What difference would it make it to you, to your team and to your organisation? Each conversation has an impact on your ultimate results, as there is an inevitable logical thread between you, your team and your organisation’s performance.

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Great talent, poor attitude | Janine

5/9/2016

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What do you do as a coach or a manager when there’s a mismatch between talent and attitude? An HR director called me in to coach Lucy, an experienced senior manager in a city IT and software company. He said she was excellent at her job, but her attitude was terrible. While she was good at what she did, the pressing problem was that she was rude to people. She had a poor attitude towards company initiatives and so she was continually overlooked for promotion. If it didn’t improve, regardless of how much they valued her skills, it would be time for her to move on.

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What can we learn from a crisis?

8/2/2016

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There is a common misconception that in Chinese, the sign for crisis is the same as for opportunity.

If not through these symbols, how can we create opportunities from our crises?

Well, we can learn more about our resources and resilience. And we can learn more from those than we can learn from our mistakes and failures.

Mistakes are events you would rather have not happened (at least at the time), because the intention was to do something different, and the immediate consequence is most often unfavourable.

I like this story of a crisis handled by Hans Zeinhofer, who I met at a conference where delegates were discussing the application of solutions-focused ideas in organisations.

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Intervision - a neat variation on supervision for managers and coaches

16/8/2011

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I learned a new word today - ‘intervision’. Any ideas what it means? Well, according to my friend and colleague Dominic Godat, it’s a form of supervision in a group setting.

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6 ideas about setting goals in your organisation | Paul

I’d love to take a solutions focus, but I can’t let go of the problem

The logical thread of better conversations

Great talent, poor attitude | Janine

What can we learn from a crisis?

Intervision - a neat variation on supervision for managers and coaches

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