There are parallels in our working lives too.

How often do we take time to review what we are doing and challenging ourselves to find a more efficient or smoother way of doing stuff? Perhaps if we did we would be pleasantly surprised that we could get more out of our tanks with less effort!

Action – take 15 minutes and one learning activity you deliver routinely.

Evaluate how you can do this in shorter time and provide greater impact through your debriefing strategies and action planning.

Momentum enables progress. It provides the driving force to success so how do we harness it, right now, to help our organisation succeed?

This time of year people  start to get distracted and preoccupied with Christmas (unless you work in retail of course!) but in today’s troubled times, it is the very time where you can make a discernible difference and offer your customers greater value than your competitors. This short article and our support activities are designed to help you build commitment and take action towards this progress by building momentum.

What is momentum?

It is the power to develop at an every growing rate.

Momentum is about the small steps of many people building to steer significant change. Momentum builds confidence and becomes an ever increasing energy as people build motivation and pleasure in success.

Why is momentum important?

Today’s crazy world demands progress. If you remain still you fall behind… rapidly. But experimentation in business needs to be measured. Building momentum allows new ideas to be tested and risks taken by making progress in stages. Experimentation is the life blood of progress and momentum builds energy and commitment towards these plans.

“All progress is experimental.” -John Jay Chapman

What gets in the way of momentum?

It is easy for experimentation to be criticised or ridiculed by those less confident. Organisations often find responding to change tough going because we are all more confident with certainty. But those organisations who fail to change will die in today’s fast moving economy.

Momentum can come from anyone at anytime and the more people who participate, the more momentum grows. This article is sent to you, as a single individual to either start the process or link with others who have already started to help you and your organisation flourish.

Tips for building momentum

We have developed the 3 m’s for building momentum.

1. Create a movement - by being clear about your purpose, what drives you and your team, your goals and how you will know when you get there. This keenness of focus will provide a clear direction for all in your team and help you create a movement.

Try our short activity to help you with this

2.  Model – be the best role model you can be for progress in the organisation. Role models are looked up to, your team will be proud that they work for you (and not someone else!) and you are more likely to extend your own sphere of influence as people want to hear what you are doing and what you have to say.

Have a go at our short exercise to challenge whether you are the best you can be and if you need to improve it will help you make the necessary changes swiftly

3. Modernise

As you progress, the uncertainty can lead to challenge and confusion. Be aware of this and use every opportunity to help your team refocus on what is important. Keep momentum, it will be self propelling.

I have provided a short activity to complete with your team to help you do just that, right here.

Like these activities?

If you like these activities we have a toolkit for managers to develop themselves and a toolkit for managers to use with their teams - click here for more. You can buy on line or email me for more details  including volume discounts caroline@leaps-bounds.co.uk

Go… build momentum… now!

As organisations grow, they seem to fall in love with order and consistency. Management practices are developed to minimise risk  and prevent someone messing up. Organisational values externally shout about innovation and passion but internal every day practices demonstrate the pre-requisite for strucutre and order. This conflict goes some way to explain the frustrations that many workers feel today and the limited application of disretionary effort.

However, the pace of change in business today demands that we rapidly enhance the personal skills of all staff so that they can respond, analyse, challenge and improve.

We don’t need to rupture all the rules and order but we do need to rethink the way we encourage people to make a contribution.

It can often feel that advoates from each camp are in conflict. But this isn’t the choice leaders of today are facing. It’s not a choice between order and irrationality. The more important choice is between an approach of domination and control and one of participation and interaction. The question is whether the goal is an order that is subtle and dynamic, based on interactive engagement with others, or an order that is based on sterile following of the rules and on traditional command and control.

20th Century thinking focused organisations to consider these options as either/or. In the 21st Century, we need “both-and” thinking. We need both order and innovation.

What can you do today to challenge thinking and encourage a greater participation by members of staff at all levels?

This is the third blog in which we have chatted about creating a following. In this short blog we share our thoughts about getting going to attract your customers to you.

You can no longer push your products out there with the promise of free gifts, clever ads or the more romantic/ aspirational gestures. Customers are too savvy now. Just as the premise of the  marketplace for great employees has been blown away by new entrants with a promise of ownership, excitement and responsibility, so has your customer marketplace. You once spoke to your customer one customer at a time, in one home at a time, now you speak to millions all over the world at the press of a button. No longer are people happy with you controlling the agenda, they want to discuss the things that are important to them, with people who they respect, at a time and pace that is right for them. So pushing your products and services to the many waiting hoards is no longer an option but how do you pull them towards you? How do you start a meaningful dialogue with the people you need to buy from you?

They need to be courted, just like you before you started dating! You don’t just pitch up at a random house and knock on someone’s door asking for a date, do you? You go to the places that people who you think you’d like hang out. You start chatting to people, asking questions, showing you’re interested. You want to be guaranteed of a yes before you pop the question!

So as an organisation who is courting customers and great staff ask yourself:

1. Where should you hang out to start building that relationship?

2. What things do you need to be interested in to help galvanise their interest in you?

3. What questions can you ask to start the dialogue?

4. What do you need to offer your ‘following’ to keep them interested?

Love to know what you think.

Caroline

I’d decided that making cookies would be a great way to pass the time on an afternoon off school and only 5 minutes into the process I was having second thoughts. With a whole bag of sugar on the floor and butter stuck to the window their level of shrieking seemed to be rising in exact proportions to my frustration. I was just about to utter the words ‘If you can’t do this sensibly then we won’t do it at all!’  but I stopped myself just in time. All that would have meant was that the mayhem would transfer to another room.

Instead, and I’m not quite sure where this came from, I took a deep breath and asked ‘Who’d like to chop up chocolate with really sharp knives?’  Three shouts of ‘Me, me, me!’ followed so I found three chopping boards, three knives and let them get on with it. Now I did still watch from a distance and gave very clear instructions about knives and fingers before they started, but the mood in the room changed instantly. High jinx was replaced with calm concentration which held up long enough to finish the cookies and put them in the very hot oven.

And the point about behaviour? If we want to influence others to behave how we would like them to then it’s own own actions we have to consider first. When we put our trust in others and give them meaningful and challenging work we may just get the performance we are after. So, whether at work or at home see what  relinquishing control and handing over the reins can do for the performance of your people.

Oh, and the cookies tasted pretty good too

Gill

We are still in the grips of an incredibly tough trading climate yet one of the positive things to come out of these times is our focus to challenge existing practices and explore better, more cost effective and simpler ways of working. Please share your stories with us and others so that we can all make the difference that will help us steer a stronger, more sustainable course in  the future.

This has been one of our most commented on threads and its been great to see the development of the topic.

I was then sent a link to a video of Dan Pink speaking about the Surprising Science of Motivation – by our ‘online guru’ Carl Jeffrey and it has inspired me this morning to STOP WHAT I’M DOING AND SPREAD THIS MESSAGE FURTHER!

Dan Pink now proves the conflict that there is a mismatch between what Sciences Knows and What Businesses Do when it comes to motivating staff.

No longer can we continue to use external motivators to boost our team members performance, we must develop the internal motivators so they want, need and boost their performance for themselves.

The new model talks about encouraging three things:

1. Autonomy

2. Mastery

3. Purpose

I encourage all of you to watch Dan Pinks very engaging talk about the scientific proof that building internal motivators is the best way forward for our businesses to increase and enhance productivity (it will take you about 20 minutes to watch and digest so get yourself a cuppa). Please pass this link on to anybody you feel would benefit!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y[/youtube]

I’m a customer who has experienced World Class Service from a call centre advisor who’s got the internal motivators to do the best they can and it makes a massive difference! So help me spread the word and encourage managers to use the new model!!

Enjoy!

p.s. Thanks to Carl for passing this on!

Carly

What a great day we had – the safari is something you should really experience if you’re in the area and want to see animals in as much of a natural environment as you can in the UK! My favourite was seeing the lions!

When we arrived back at our hotel there was a family of wild donkeys in the field opposite and again it was lovely to be around nature and see the way these animals lived & interacted with each other and us in their natural environment.

It reminded me how important it is to stop and watch!

Now you know how I love to learn from any situation, so straight away I’m thinking how does this relate to us in business (it’s ok, it was only day 2 of my hols – so fine for me not to have switched off from work yet!!!! J).

To me, just stopping and watching the animals in their natural environment reminded me how important it is for us to take time to stop and watch what’s going on around us – especially if we’re in management roles.

Sometimes we get so hooked into the day to day work life of being busy, busy, busy, that we don’t stop and notice what’s going on around us – for the business, our team and the individuals in our teams.

So my challenge for you all today is conduct a Business Safari!

What to do:

1. Take 15 minutes out today to STOP and watch your operation

2. NOTICE – what’s going on for the business, for your team and for the individuals in your team… notice the conversations and interactions people are having – what impact are they having on the experience your customers receive? (How can you enhance the positive impact?)

3. LOOK for strong/comfortable relationships – what’s making them strong? Are there any relationships that could do with strengthening – how can you help achieve this?

4. ANALYSE your team’s habitat and environment – how is it helping or hindering their ability to perform? What can be done to improve it?

5. ENJOY it! Safari’s are meant to be fun, interesting and enlightening… make sure your business safari is too!

Have fun observing your team’s natural environment – please let us know what interesting sights you see and insights you get!

Carly

With all this talk about the credit crunch, with some banks making money and some banks still losing money, house prices up, house prices down it got me thinking about the need to continuously plan, do and review.

Both at home and at work the need to keep doing this now more than ever, why? Well we live in an ever changing world, at work things change from moment to moment, at home it’s the same because we spend more time at work then we do at home it naturally feeds from one to the other.

I’ll give you an example both my wife and I are self employed and my wife’s contract comes to an end in 2 months time so last weekend we decided to do a review of our finances and applied a “just in case” scenario and this covered things like:

· contract does not get renewed

· unable to find another contract

· fall ill and unable to work for 6 months

Did we have enough to make sure we could get through and the answer was Not Enough!

Just to give you some background we are pretty good at planning our finances and the last time we reviewed them was back in March. The interesting thing was having reviewed it last week we were still able to slash 20% off our monthly budget to go towards our “just in case” fund. So for example we have declared the month of August as a “no spend” month apart from essentials, did we need to have a glass of wine every night with our meal-but we can have a glass with our meal at the weekend. Cook meals at the weekend that can act as leftovers during the week-a curry a few days later are soo much nicer – if you ask nicely I will email you the recipe. Now we are spending all of August at home we have made a list of the things we were going to sort out around the house that have been in storage in the attic and will put any good stuff on ebay or gumtree and sell them.

So how does this relate to business-well it’s a good opportunity to look at your plans more regularly rather than leaving them., have you thought about all the “just in case” scenarios so that you, your team, department or business are as prepared as possible.

Good luck with your planning, doing and reviewing and let us know how you are getting on.

Dilesh

Some useful websites:

www.moneysupermarket.com

www.comparethemarket.com

www.moneysavingexpert.com

www.businessballs.com

www.ebay.com

www.gumtree.com

Check out all the free stuff in our reports section on the website and subscribe to our ezine that contains many useful tips and articles for managers and trainers.

Keep in touch on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LeapsBounds

Have a great day.