Warning:  I’m going to have a bit of a rant…

Now that most business have returned to a ‘normal’ level of work, albeit partly from home now, the number of meetings going on seems to have risen alarmingly.

In recent weeks I’ve had several clients and contacts confide in me their stress at having days of back-to-back meetings, sometimes starting very early in the morning and going on well into the evening.

To make it worse, for some of these people all the meetings are ‘on screen’.

Electronic meetings scheduled in electronic calendars. We love our technology, don’t we? Well, we think we do, until we’re staring, gritty-eyed at the seventh on-screen meeting of the day, dying for a cup of tea or a ‘comfort break’ and wondering whether those emails that keep popping in are going to extend the day past all reasonable hours.

Sound familiar?

[Here comes the rant…]

All these problems could be avoided if everyone (that includes you) broke a few bad habits:

Bad habit #1 – assuming that a meeting must be 60 minutes or 30 minutes

This is the root cause of the ‘back-to-back meetings’ headache.  You agree to a meeting at 9am and it goes into your calendar from 9am to 10am. The tech obligingly does that for you – so you don’t need to think about how long the meeting actually needs. The next meeting goes in from 10am to 11am. Then there’s one from 11am to 11.30am. Back in the days when people went to the office for their meetings there would at least be an opportunity to walk from one meeting room to another – if you were lucky.

Now that a lot of meetings are on-screen, it’s possible to stay planted at your desk for hours on end, flicking from one meeting to the next until you can’t remember who you’ve talked to, what you’ve said or what you agreed to do and your blood sugar is dangerously low because you forgot to eat or spiking because you’ve been eating sugary snacks all day.

Enough!

The simplest way to break this habit is to make your meetings less than an hour. Experiment with different options – start at five or ten minutes past the hour so that everyone has the opportunity to take a break before they come to your meeting.

Alternatively, you could make your meetings 20 minutes or 40 minutes, creating a breathing space between meetings and – one hopes – making the meetings more efficient.

Bad habit #2 – not planning your workload

If you plan the work you’re going to do in advance and block out time in your calendar, it becomes blindingly obvious that you can’t spend all day in meetings. You’ll never get anything done! Even if you are a brilliant delegator (an endangered species, I believe) you still need time to delegate properly. Forwarding an email and adding ‘please take care of this’ does not, in my book, constitute proper delegation.

Ok, if you’ve got a very experienced team that might be fine. If not, then the best guarantee of getting the work done the way you want it done is to take some time with your team member to explain the outcome required.

If you have a lot of work that you intend to do yourself, rather than delegate, it also makes sense to block out time in your calendar to do it. I can see everyone nodding sagely. I know the majority of people don’t do this.

One simple way to break this bad habit is to protect a part of your day and keep it free of all meetings. Think about when you’re at your best and just block it out. For example, you might institute a rule of no meetings before 10am to give you time to work on the really important stuff while you’re fresh in the morning. Or you might take two afternoons per week and block them out for project work. You could have a whole meeting-free day every week.

The important thing is to protect some time so you can do the tasks you collect in the meetings you attend. (No, that’s not what your evenings and weekend are for!)

Bad habit #3 – saying ‘yes’ to everything

You can’t do everything. Shall I repeat that? You can’t do everything.

If you’re a senior leader and/or you have a lot of technical expertise the chances are that people from all over the organisation will want your input to something. At first, it’s gratifying to be consulted. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to influence decisions and steer a course. It’s flattering to think that they can’t do it without you.

Recognise that?

Perhaps you also recognise what comes next…

Your diary is full of meetings. You block out time to work on a project or strategy and someone invites you to a meeting in that window. ‘Please’, they say, ‘it’s urgent and we really need your input’. ‘Alright’ you say, resigning yourself to an evening at your desk to compensate.

Yes, we all want to be good colleagues and support the team. We want to do what’s right for the business. The sad truth is that if you keep dropping everything and jumping to the needs of anyone who asks, you are teaching them that it’s ok to inflict their crises on you. You are teaching them that you will drop everything and help them out when they have a problem.

Wouldn’t you rather teach them the value of planning and of dealing with problems before they become urgent?

The antidote to this bad habit is to say ‘no’. Or some polite version thereof. You might say, ‘I’m in back-to-back meetings today [!!]. I can fit you in tomorrow morning.’

Or how about, ‘My time is completely committed today. Why don’t you send me a summary of the situation and your questions about it and I’ll get back to you tomorrow (or later in the week)’.

It can be done politely. The point is to do it.

Ok. Rant over. It frustrates me enormously to see talented people working ridiculous hours because so much of their days are taken up with meetings. I’m the first to extol the value of getting people together and – well – working together. I just hate to see meetings for the sake of meetings detracting from the opportunity to do great work.

It’s in your hands…

When we think about leadership, it’s often related to an individual. The word conjures up a person who provides direction, who inspires and encourages others and who gets results.

Many people in leadership roles find it a daunting prospect. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of famous and fabled leaders and to find oneself wanting in the comparison.

This is where the value of a leadership team comes in.

A leadership team is a group of peers who provide direction to a department or organisation. They inspire and encourage people – including each other – and they get results.

Sadly, a lot of executive teams never really achieve the distinction of being a Leadership Team. They may be good leaders individually, but collectively they fail to experience the sought-after ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ functioning of a team.

Part of the problem is often to do with different approaches to leadership and diverse ways of thinking. In an average team, the differences between people can be a source of frustration and irritation. A great leadership team will work on the basis that those differences are a strength and the diversity within the team enables it to be flexible and responsive.

The big question is always, how do you create that atmosphere in a team?

Here are some of my thoughts…

The first milestone in creating a leadership team is to arrive at a point where people are aware of and respect differences. Until that is achieved, people will annoy and frustrate each other – not intentionally but persistently nonetheless. Meetings of a team that hasn’t reached this point will echo with sighs of ‘Why do you have to be so negative?’ ‘Can’t we just do it the way we know will work?’ ‘Wouldn’t a period of stability be better than ploughing on through more major changes?’ and so on.

To get past this constant clash of styles takes conscious effort. It isn’t going to happen by accident.

People in the team will benefit from looking at each other through the lens of a model of personality or behaviour, that shows the value of each distinct approach and equips people to communicate across the divides of style and preference. Then each person’s unique contribution to the team is welcomed.

[My go-to tool for this is the LAB Profile because it provides useful insights without putting people in ‘boxes’ of rigid personality types]

 

The second milestone is when people in the team know and trust each other’s technical strengths as well as their personal style. This enables them to share work around the leadership team instead of sticking to individual ‘silos’ of responsibility.

A team that has passed this milestone will be flexible. When a major project comes up they will choose who to lead it on the basis, not just of technical responsibility but also of workload, style and fit with the intended results.

For example, one of the best leadership teams I have worked with was a team of six people. They were the Executive team of a small business that was considering growing by acquisition. When an opportunity came up to buy another company it was the IT Director who did most of the due diligence and the bulk of the ‘number-crunching’ so they could decide whether it was a good option. This is not because the Finance Director wasn’t capable. It was because the FD had several inexperienced team members and a year-end to deal with. The IT director had an experienced team and no major drains on his time so it made sense for him to take on the additional workload.

Would you trust a member of the team to take on a task that related to your technical expertise? If not, there’s work to do in this area. Usually it involves spending time getting to know each other’s skills and experience and perhaps collaborating on a project to establish the common ground.

In a team of people who have worked together for a long time, that is often taken for granted. In a new team, it takes effort and attention. Again, it isn’t going to happen by accident.

 

The third milestone is when this kind of sharing of responsibility extends to the leadership of people. A team at this stage can be confident that when a leader goes on holiday – or is tied up in a big event, or perhaps is not well – their people will not be left unsupported.

Any other member of the leadership team can step in and provide direction, inspiration and encouragement to ensure that the results are achieved.

This facet of a good leadership team comes from unity and clarity of purpose. Everyone is working towards the same goals and is bought into a common strategy. When that happens, functional teams within an organisation or department are not operating in isolation. They all contribute towards the same end result.

A leader with different technical skills, can still provide leadership to people who need direction, inspiration and encouragement. Yes, they might need a bit of technical know-how too, but more often than not they don’t.

Would you feel comfortable to go away on holiday and be completely out of contact with your people? Would you be confident that one of your colleagues could give them support in your absence? If not, there’s probably not the clarity you need about direction within the leadership team. Or is it a matter of trust?

 

I could go into a lot more detail about trust. Perhaps another time.

All I will say is that you always have a choice whether or not to trust someone. It’s your choice, not theirs. There is a myth about earning trust. The reality is that if you don’t trust someone you will never know whether it’s justified or not.

Someone I used to know was proud that he had ‘learned not to trust anyone’. I think it’s better to trust everyone. Yes, you might occasionally be let down, but overall it’s a nicer way to live.

To conclude…

A leadership team can be a lot more effective than a group of individual leaders. The question is, are they willing to learn about each other and about how to operate as a team? If they are, then the possibilities of what they might achieve open up considerably. It takes commitment and effort, energy and time but the rewards can be spectacular.

I never met the Queen and it wasn’t something I felt a great desire to do. Nonetheless, I found much to admire in her and in certain other members of our Royal family. While the lives of royalty may be far removed from the lives of we ‘ordinary’ folk, there are still ways in which we can learn from their successes.

Taking the late Queen as a role model for grace and dignity, for service and duty and for commitment and dedication, here are a few thoughts on how we might adopt some of her skills and behaviours. What better way to perpetuate her legacy?

1. When you take on a job, commit to it 100%
2. Always make an effort to look your best, regardless of anything else
3. Show up because of what you can do for others, not for your personal gain
4. Smile
5. Listen well and remember what you hear
6. Never talk about your own problems when you’re at work, just do the job
7. Surround yourself with people you like and trust
8. Never let someone know that you don’t like them
9. Smile – again
10. Accept gifts with grace and gratitude

What would you add to the list?

 

Well-being is a term that is familiar to most people. That hasn’t always been the case, though. There was a time when, especially in the workplace, nobody talked about how anyone felt. The focus was on what we did, how efficient and effective we were and whether we were capable of performing at a higher level.

Yes, the idea of engagement between the company and its employees was considered desirable, but the notion that companies would make themselves even partly responsible for employee wellbeing is a relatively new concept.

It can take a while for a new idea to be fully embraced and as people engage with a new concept and discuss it, they find different possible meanings and interpretations. When they find one they like, they tend to stick with it. Others may continue exploring and hence the labels come to have different meanings to different people or carry different connotations.

In the case of Wellbeing as a concept, I suspect it means a very wide range of things to people. Everything from ergonomic desks and chairs to mental health interventions and many varied points in between.

I also suspect that it’s defined more by its absence that its presence.

What do I mean by that? I mean we notice when people are not taking care of their wellbeing rather than when they are taking care of it.

If someone is working excessively long hours and is becoming irritable and jumpy, you notice. If someone is working at home, alone, for long periods and is becoming withdrawn and uncommunicative, you notice.  If someone is suffering from a heavy cold and is still attempting to do their job, you notice. If someone always seems to be eating, you notice.

The question is, do you notice when someone is making sure their schedule includes regular exercise? Or when they are eating a healthy diet? Do you notice when someone is getting home in time to have dinner with their family? When they get enough sleep? Probably not.

Wellbeing only becomes a talking point when it’s obviously absent.

There are lots of great things that companies do to support and encourage the wellbeing of their people. But fundamentally, each person is responsible for their own wellbeing. Only you can make sure you get enough sleep or exercise. It’s your choice what you eat and drink. You decide when to stop work for the day (within reason) and you decide how much time you spend chatting with colleagues. Companies can provide opportunities for you to make good choices, but they can’t do it for you.

And if all those things are you choice and under your control, how do you decide?

A lot of people only really get an understanding of an aspect of their physical or mental health when it starts to be a problem. A person with an injured knee will become very aware of how they move or sit and the consequences for their injured knee. They may also gain an understanding of how they can prevent similar injuries occurring in the future.

A person with a stomach condition will become aware of the effect of different foods, the quantity and timing of eating and so on.

Very few people are aware of the effect of their behaviour on all aspects of their health. And I’m not really suggesting you should be. What I am suggesting is this:

Work out your own indicators of wellbeing. How do you know that all is well with you?

Is it about your energy, your motivation or how well you sleep? Is there a clue in your appetite or how far you can run? Do you laugh or sing more when you feel good?

In other words, what are the things you do when all is well, that you do less of (or not at all) when your wellbeing has taken a hit?

Once you know your own indicators of wellbeing, monitor them. Check in at the end of the day, or the beginning. Ask yourself, how am I doing?

Notice what you do when things are not well with you. Do you put off going to bed by watching trash TV or scrolling through your social media for hours? Do you eat or drink too much? Do you play computer games or withdraw from social activities?

Track the effect of pressure – do you respond to a tight deadline by drinking too much coffee, eating doughnuts or snapping at colleagues? How can you choose something else?

What happens when you travel? Do you abandon your exercise regime or your healthy eating plans? Or does the thrill of visiting somewhere different give you a lift in spirits every time?

When you know the signs to look out for, you can begin to notice the elements of your work and routine that disrupt your wellbeing and those that support it. You can plan ways to mitigate the effects of the disruptive elements.

For example, as someone with an introverted personality type, I love running workshops and training programmes but it tends to be tiring. While I’m in the thick of a programme I don’t focus on myself much, but I know that once I’ve waved everyone off and packed up my kit, I’m going to need some ‘down time’. Because of that I’m unlikely to accept a social invitation for the evening after a training event. Unless I know I can take time the next day to recharge the mental batteries.

And over the years, I’ve learned that I can maintain my energy for longer if I take ‘mini-breaks’ during the day. For example, at lunch, I listen rather than talk, unless someone asks me a direct question.

I have a client who used to travel a lot as part of her job and she took her running kit everywhere – and used it! She worked out that exercise was a great way for her to rebalance and she found it stressful when she didn’t have access to a gym, so she picked a form of exercise that she could do anywhere. As an added bonus, she would see some of her surroundings when in a foreign city.

Wellbeing is personal. It’s highly individual and it’s mostly a matter of choice. Of course, there are times when your boss might be putting you under pressure to deliver and you’re a bit stressed. That’s life, isn’t it?

The real value of taking your wellbeing seriously is that it enables you to ‘pull out all the stops’ occasionally without any ill-effects. And that can be a significantly rewarding experience, which adds to your overall wellbeing instead of it being a nightmarish period of your life that is best forgotten.

Your wellbeing is up to you. At least, that’s what I think.  How about you?

 

You and I know how important it is to have goals. Without goals, there is a real risk of getting distracted, of spending time in activities that have little or no value and of never experiencing a proper feeling of achievement.

You probably know as well as I do, that writing down your goals is more powerful than simply thinking about them. There is a commitment that arises from writing down your goals. Unwritten goals are just ideas, dreams, wishes.

And that’s all fine, as long as you know what you want. Have you ever found yourself wondering what your goals are? Not because you haven’t thought about them, but because you haven’t got anything in mind that you want to commit to, that you’re excited about doing, or that looks like a meaningful challenge.

It happens to most people at some point. There are lots of reason why you might not know what you want:

Maybe, deep down, you DO know – but it’s big and scary and so you’re just avoiding it rather than take on something so big you’re not sure you can handle it.

Maybe you have recently achieved something significant. It’s part of our natural anti-stress systems to take some time out when we complete something important – especially if it’s been very demanding to get there. That also applies if you’ve been busy ‘fire-fighting’ as a lot of businesses have been during the COVID pandemic. Keeping the business going and looking after your team might not have felt much like pursuing a goal, but I imagine that it was the sole purpose for many people during 2020 and 2021.

Under pressure, most people find that their ability to think long term all but disappears. When the pressure lifts, the future comes into focus again and it’s a good time to set goals.

If that seems like a challenging task, it could be that you’re just not in the habit of thinking about goals. Lots of people who grew up in the UK when I did were brought up with the mantra ‘I want never gets’ and mistakenly avoided wanting anything because they thought they’d never get it.

Or maybe you’re experiencing a shift in your values. This is an evolutionary process. Each person’s values change throughout life, moving through distinct phases where the importance of self vs group, achievement vs process, acquiring vs sharing changes and challenges.

This is why fantastically successful entrepreneurs suddenly stop focusing on making money and become philanthropists.

So if you don’t know what your goals are at present, maybe you’re looking in the wrong place for them.

Ask yourself this question: if NOTHING AT ALL changed in my life in the next 5 years, would that be okay with me?

(If the answer is ‘yes’ then your goals are about maintaining the status quo, aren’t they?)

If you answer ‘no’ to that question, then your real goals will quickly reveal themselves if you start considering what you want to be different. As the Summer holidays approach in UK, this can be an excellent time for a bit of reflection and consideration of the future.

In a recent email I referred to the NLP Practitioner training as ‘life-changing’. Some of the responses I received gave me the impression that the writers were taking this description with a very large pinch of salt and I thought it might be useful to elaborate.

To say that something is life changing is indeed a bold claim and one that is worth qualifying. I have two ways of qualifying my statement – one is dramatic, the other much more pragmatic. Take your pick, read one, read the other, read both or neither. Please, don’t write off this description of NLP being ‘life-changing’ as marketing hype. It’s not.

The dramatic…

As a teenager and well into adult life I suffered badly with asthma. I was allergic to cats, dogs, horses and house-dust and I felt I was in a constant battle to breathe. Cold, damp weather could provoke an attack and so could exercise – school hockey lessons in Winter were my pet hate!

It’s well-known that there can be a powerful psychosomatic element to asthma. In my case, when I look back, I can see that I’d forgotten what it was like to be able to breathe freely and had ceased to expect it – even when I wasn’t around any of my allergic triggers.

Three months into NLP Practitioner training I’d travelled to London for the start of the next module and, because I was early, I decided to get off the Tube at an earlier station and walk for a while. I found myself strolling down King Street in Hammersmith on a cold, damp, misty morning in November with a huge smile on my face…

It took me a while to notice. It took some thought to figure out what was going on. I was walking down the street in the cold and damp and enjoying it. Why? Because I could breathe.

That was the moment when I realised that the work I’d done, with an NLP technique called the Six-Step Reframe, to break the pattern of constant asthma, had made a difference.

That was truly life-changing!

(It’s also probably one of the reasons why I continued to study NLP and eventually qualified as a Trainer of NLP so I could bring it to other people.)

I’m still allergic to cats, dogs, horses and house dust. I still carry an inhaler – but the last one went out of date before it was empty. I breathe normally most of the time but that’s not the only life-changing bit. The bit that is truly life-changing is the discovery that things can change. That I’m not stuck with my current reality. That not everything I think is true is, in fact, permanently true.

The pragmatic…

Most people don’t feel the need to change their lives. When I say ‘life-changing’ you might think I mean leaving your job, living ‘off the grid’ or dumping your partner in search of new adventure. That’s extreme life change and only appeals to small number of people – usually because they are massively dissatisfied with their life.

What NLP offers us is something more measured and practical.

I remember reading about the success of the GB Cycling team at the 2012 Olympic Games being the culmination of an improvement campaign, the focus of which was to ‘get 1% better in 100 things’. Rather than striving for big improvements in the obvious areas, they decided to give attention to everything and look for small improvements. The results speak for themselves: seven of the ten gold medals for cycling were won by Team GB.

Imagine this principle applied to your life…

If you were 1% better at:

• Customer engagement
• Presentations
• Staying focused on your goals
• Managing your stress
• Dealing with disappointment
• Defusing arguments
• Persuading people to take action
• And all the myriad things that make up your working week

Imagine if you were 1% better at all these things and more besides, how big an impact that would have on your life.

These are the kind of things that most people address in the course of an NLP Practitioner training: getting clearer about goals; figuring out what’s holding you back and how to overcome it; building better working relationships; solving long-standing problems in the workplace; using words that make a difference in getting your message across; creating new habits that get things done; ditching your doubts; facing your fears and creating more choice and control.

In reality, I expect a practical application of an NLP technique to an everyday situation to create an improvement of more than 1%. Using NLP means paying attention to habits and adjusting them to get better results, using simple processes that get results straight away and don’t need painful repetition to embed them. Keep doing this to create improvements across all your areas of activity and you can see how this can be life-changing.

It’s not a big dramatic change when you reduce your stress, but it changes your life for the better.

It might seem like a small thing to stop fretting about your work, but it changes your life for the better.

It’s not a big, challenging goal to stop wasting energy on things you can’t control, but when you let it go, it changes your life for the better.

This is why I say that doing NLP Practitioner is often a life-changing experience. The little things add up. Life gets easier. And perhaps more importantly, you discover that things can change easily. That you do have choice, even in situations that might have been feeling stuck. You find out how your unique mind works and you’re able to use it more effectively.

You might not believe that’s possible. But imagine if it were…

You might think I’m lying or exaggerating. But imagine if I were telling the truth…

You might think it wouldn’t work for you. But imagine if it did…

I understand that it’s a leap of faith to enrol in a course to learn how to manage your thinking, your habits and your actions. I know that many people grow up with myths such as ‘it takes six weeks to make – or break – a habit. You may believe that if it were possible to do the things I say we can do with NLP you would somehow already know about it.

Remember, not everything you believe to be true is, in fact, permanently true. Our understanding of Psychology has advanced rapidly in recent decades, to the extent that a great deal of what I learned as part of my degree course is now out-of-date, inaccurate or obsolete. It’s good thing I’ve kept on learning!

If you’d like to find out more about how NLP could help you change your life for the better, click here…