The Sixth Sense

Human Potential - a new small business

For years now I have been fascinated by human potential. I love watching people making the most of their talents. I love seeing organisations be the best they can possibly be. Ultimately, I love seeing both people and organisations move from good to great.

It is because of this that I’m so excited about starting my own small business that will focus on human potential and helping both individuals and organisations unleash that potential.

The next six months are going to be geared to getting everything setup, incorporating the company, building the brand, and developing courses, training, and coaching material. From January 1st 2009 I will be looking for the new business to sustain me for one and a half days. And we’ll see how it goes from there.

It feels like a fresh challenge and one that I’m so looking forward to embarking on.

To the future!

All change

I mentioned in a previous post at the start of June that there were some changes on the horizon. Well I thought I’d go public with what’s going on!

For those of you who don’t know, since December 1999 I have worked full time as an IT administrator with a firm of accountants here in Sheffield. My work with Mosaic has always been something in addition to this. It keeps me busy!

From next week though my number of days with my employer is going to be reduced to 4 days per week. And then I am going to be doing 1 day a week with Mosaic. I’m excited about the change and opportunity.

Not only this, from next January I am going to be dropping to 2.5 days with my current employer and am looking to set up my own business focussed primarily on human potential consultancy.

I’ll share more about the specifics of both my work with Mosaic and the new business in later posts, but I thought I’d get the basics out on the table. I know some of you have been waiting with baited breath since that last post!

Implementing change

The world we live in is constantly changing. As a result, the businesses, organisations, churches, etc, we are part of also need to be constantly changing. This is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue as the speed of change continues to increase.

This begs the question of how do we go about building flexible and adaptable organisations that are able to change in order to stay relevant to the changing world outside.

I was reading a great article in the Harvard Business Review entitled: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (subscription required for full article). The article by John Kotter lists eight reasons for failing to implement change. I’ll mention just the first one today: Transformation efforts fail because of a failure to establish a great enough sense of urgency.

The article then quotes someone who said the purpose of establishing a sense of urgency is “to make the status quo seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown.”

This really makes sense. If people don’t sense how important it is for the change to occur, why would anyone be motivated to get onboard?

Have you had experiences of trying to implement change in a team you lead or an organisation you’re part of? How was it? What did you learn?

Bringing out the best in people

Whether we are a leader, a manager, a parent, or any other role where we are responsible for influencing others, we all have the challenge of trying to bring out the best in people. How do we do this though?

Clearly everyone is going to have their own unique approach but, at the same time, there must be some good practices that run true for everyone.

And clearly the person we are trying to bring the best out of is going to affect our approach too. How we handle the passionate but clueless person is going to be very different from how we handle the knowledgeable but apathetic person.

So, linked with this, I wanted to try and start a conversation today and invite as many of us as possible to share our stories of both success and failure in our efforts to bring out the best in people.

Feel free to use this as an opportunity to raise questions and struggles too. I certainly have a ton of questions and I have lots to learn. Hopefully this can be a mutually beneficial process for us all!

What do you think?

Progress

I realised today how much I thrive on progress. I need to feel like things are happening, that there is forward momentum. And, if there’s not, I can quite quickly start to feel drained.

Tonight three of us from Mosaic met to have a ’strategic planning session’ for something called VOX Sheffield. The vision with this is to try and create a movement that will give voice to both artists and causes. Essentially we want to showcase creativity in Sheffield and work together to create a better world.

We have made a few tentative steps in this direction in the past, but we really want to get this going. Ryan is going to be the catalyst and team leader. The meet up tonight was about setting some specific goals and identifying some tangible objectives.

I’m really excited and buzzed by the meeting. It really felt like a momentum creating meeting. Seems like we made some real progress and took some tangible steps forward. Watch this space for the details in the coming months!

What project are you passionate about right now?

Euro 2008 and teams

For some bizarre reason, I have been really enjoying the European Championship despite England having failed to qualify for it. In fact, it may be because we’re not in it that I’m enjoying it so much. There’s none of the tension, fretting, worrying, frustration, etc, etc, that typically coincides with following England in a major football championship. 

Having said that, I have been disappointed with the more recent quarter-final games. As the tension increases with the move to knock-out stages, it seems that the players shift into a far more defensive mindset. After all the adventure of the group stages, there just hasn’t been as much entertaining football. Let’s hope that things improve with the semi-finals later in the week.

Watching football - or any team sport really - always gets me thinking about, well, teams. Its fascinating seeing how some teams are crippled due to too much reliance on a ’star’ player whilst other ‘lesser’ teams really pull together and pull off outstanding results. Whilst I wanted Holland to win, I was very impressed with how the Russians played so well as a team and ended up totally dominating the match.

What lessons have you been learning from teams lately?

Far too many email accounts

Guess how many different email addresses I have?! Ok, I’ll just tell you. It’s ten. And I’m sure there might be one or two others lingering about that I’ve forgotten about.

Clearly that’s way too many and far too confusing for others. I’m getting increasing complaints from family members asking which address they should use to contact me.

To be fair, apart from my work email account, all the other email address automatically forward to one main account, but still, I think I’m in need of some consolidation.

At the moment, I’m looking to break down my emails into three accounts: Work, Personal, and Mosaic. Then I’ll have one dedicated email for each and encourage people to stop using any others. I will then look to keep my main Gmail account but simply as a backup where a copy of all emails sent to those three main account goes just in case.

Obviously my Work and Mosaic accounts are pretty set, but I am looking to use my .Mac (soon to be MobileMe) for personal emails. 

The only potential complication to all this is that I do want to make the most of the new MobileMe push services for email, calendar, and contact updates. I don’t know what the setup of MobileMe is going to look like, but I may decide to route everything though MobileMe if I can’t attach my Work and Mosaic accounts to it. We’ll see!

I guess ultimately I’m saying all this to say that I’m trying to make a concerted effort to get on top of my email addresses and do some consolidation. I’ll keep you posted with how it goes!

What about you? Have you got too many email addresses?

The best job in the world?

I was watching some of the clips from Coldplay’s concert at the BBC earlier. One thing that stood out right at the end was a comment by Chris Martin. He said thank you to the crowd for giving them the ‘best job in the world‘.

And that got me thinking. For who? Clearly it’s the best job in the world for them. But surely it’s not for everyone. Believe me, the world would not appreciate it if I had Chris Martin’s job. My singing and musical skills would not be pleasing to everybody’s ears.

This all leads to a more important question. What is mine or your best job in the world? What would that look like? Do we have it already? Or are we at least heading in the right direction?

It’s important too that we think about what our best job in the world would look like based on both passion and realism. It is undoubtedly the case that for us to ever remotely feel like we have the best job in the world, it would have to be something we are passionate about. At the same time, it would need to be something we are good at. And something that we have the right talent mix for.

So, today’s question: how close are you to having your ‘best job in the world’? And how could you move more towards turning a dream into a reality?

Italy: Good or Bad for football?

I watched the Italy vs. France game tonight. Potentially both teams could have gone out the tournament if Romania had beaten Holland. But, as it happens, Romania lost and Italy won. 

What is it with Italy? They’re always there or thereabouts when it comes to major football tournaments. They are, of course, the current world cup holders too.

I have a big problem with them though. And this may be my perception, but I can’t get away from these thoughts. They just strike me as really dull. They are uninspiring. They play very safe football. And they sneak wins.

Take tonight for example. They won 2:0 which sounds pretty convincing. But the truth is that one of those goals was a penalty and the other was a lucky deflection. Oh, and they were playing with an extra man for most of the game after France had a player sent off.

Even though they could have gone out tonight, they are through. And I wouldn’t bet against them winning the whole thing. After all, they won the World Cup play dull, unimaginative football.

I think its the way they play so safe which frustrates me. There’s something within me which reviles against that which is safe. When not attempt something more risky? Why not try to create something spectacular rather than sneaking a single goal and then hanging on for the win?

For me, Italy winning the World Cup was bad for football. Do we want the teams or try so little and sneak wins held up as the pinnacle of the sport? I don’t. I love to see adventure.

I think this is relevant for organisations too. Do we want to play it safe and keep things predictable? Or will we attempt something grandeur, even if we don’t ‘win’? I know for me, I’d choose risk over safety any day.

What about you?

Greatness

I have to say, Tiger Woods is simply amazing. This guy has barely hit a golf ball for several months after having a knee operation and he comes back, plays his first tournament, and is on the brink of winning it.

I love seeing greatness. People making the most of their talents. I watched Rafael Nadal win the Queens tennis tournament at the weekend as well. There too was greatness on display.

It is sometimes easier to look at sportsmen or women and tangibly seem them making the most of their talents. The challenge is to consider our own talents though and make sure we’re doing everything we can to make the most of them. 

In our own unique way, we all have the potential for greatness. It won’t look like it does for Tiger Woods or Rafael Nadal, but it is equally impressive. Do we want to be people to admire greatness from afar or pursue it for ourselves with every breath we have?