If you see all grey, move the elephant (Indian proverb)
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Coaching is very close to leadership principles. Coaches are leaders who devote their life not simply to the victory at a championship. They help individuals grow and improve.
Thsi is why many companies ask famous coaches to talk to their employees about teamworking, goal-setting, identifying strenghts and weaknesses, learning form experience, fostering humilty and trust.
In this article, Robert Prior identifies 5 NFL coaches who have much to teach to every leader.
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The contemplative life requires discipline and hard work, for sure. But it also seems to require some time indulging pleasures.
There is much fascinating variety in the daily habits of celebrity and creative humanists to be discovered browsing their biographies.
Monkish and lonely Nietsche used to eat incredible amounts of fruits at lunch, and a much loved beefsteak, before setting himself for long mountain walks in the Swiss Alps.
Prodigious Karl Marx was accustomed to working long hours at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking.
Rather predictable and orderly Immanuel Kant tried to stick to the rule that he would smoke only one pipe, but the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on…
Remember Gustave Flaubert’s maxim?
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Maybe, the addition of a little “bad habit” or two might help too!
Discover more here…
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Yesterday is dust, tomorrow a dream, our gift is now. Gabriel Byrne
Image source: Pixabay (CCO Public Domain)
The way how you give an information is as important as the information you are giving. This is why improving your presentation skills is crucial in order to capture your audience and pass your message.
In this article, Sarah Kessler provides a guide to teach us how to preprare and deliver a good presentation and to answer questions on it.
The first step is to prepare your presentation. While preparing you must:
- Research your audience (Who is it?)
- Structure the presentation (opening, body, closing)
- Practice, practice and practice but not memoryse (videotape yourself!)
The second step is to deliver your presentation. The delivery of your presentation depends on:
- Verbal delivery: be brief, ask questions to keep the audience engaged, work on your tone, avoid fill words, avoid speaking softly
- Body delivery: stand at comfortable distance, eye contact
- Power point
The last step are the questions that could arise after the end of your presentation. You must be prepared to them and anticipate them while preparing your presentation. It is a good idea to take questions before the end of your presentation. Anyway, remeber that you don’t have to answer to all the questions you receive from the audience.
Read here the full article
Image source: Flickr – Lorenzo Gaudenzi (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The same things can be seen in a different way from people belonging to different countries. This fact could treathen your work team and impair business relationships with your partners.
In an article by Paul Sanders and Donnie MacNicol, you can find ten steps for dealing with different culture:
- Learn about how your values, attitudes, behaviors and communication style may be perceived by someone from another culture
- Relate to each person as an individual and not as a stereotype
- Understand who can make what decisions as it may be at a different level than in your own organization
- Identify if their management style is more typically masculine or feminine―assertive and competitive or modest and caring respectively
- Understand if they have a short-term or long-term view as this will affect the way and the speed at which projects are assessed, justified and decisions made
- Identify their need for structure and certainty as this may vary and affect the level of control, definition, risk taking and governance
- Develop your empathy skills and show people you are making every effort to see and feel things as they do
- If you are unsure what is appropriate, be more structured and have more explicit communication rather than less
- Ask each person how they would like to be addressed and treated
- Assume nothing―a smile and handshake are not necessarily an agreement, “yes” can mean “no”, unsmiling may not mean unfriendly, silence may not mean disagreement
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All things are difficult before they are easy. Thomas Fuller
Image source: Flickr – 190.arck (aka bymamma190) (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The word diplomacy often invokes power and intrigues. Nonetheless, diplomats deal with the world’s biggest problems. Although people have often the impression that diplomacy does little for the wealth of the world, the world would be worse without it.
In this article Anna Mar, underlining the role of diplomacy in the relations among countries, suggests to use diplomatic techniques and strategies in everyday business negotiations.
She points out 15 diplomatic strategies that can be used:
- Use an advocate (Shutter diplomacy)
- Superrationality
- Use of objective criteria
- Tit for tat
- Buy time
- Ignore imposed constraints
- Name the trick
- Call bluffs
- Build golden bridges
- Avoid escalation
- Anchoring
- Make your ideas seem their ideas
- Never allow your opponent to lose face
- Code words and politeness
- Set uo your opponent’s victory speech
To read more about these strategies, click here
Image source: Flickr – Immaginario diplomatico (CC – BY – NC – ND 2.0)
Nowadays, we do everything fast. “We used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date and now we speed date.And even things that are by their very nature slow — we try and speed them up too”.
In this TED talk the journalist Carl Honoré, recalling his book “In praise of slowness”, underlines how the Western world erroneously believes that to do things better you should speed them up. Instead, doing fast impairs our productivity and, above all, the quality of our life. Fortunately, according to Carl Honoré the trend is…slowly changing!
Courage is Grace Under Pressure – Ernest Hemingway
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