The Hill Learning Centre

How often do you retreat?

How often do you retreat? We all need to recharge our personal batteries, but do we do it enough?

Retreating in its spiritual or religious sense is about taking time away from everyday life and reflecting and seeking to find answers to the issues or problems that we face. Retreat, or quiet reflection, as a thought process helps us with our personal lives, but can also help us in business. How noisy is your office space, are you constantly being interrupted when you are trying to think through ideas? Are you encouraged to leave enough time for quiet reflection in your working day? Meetings can be very good to air views and opinions and reach a consensus, but a trap that many organisations fall into is to end up having a meeting to discuss what you they are going to discuss at the next meeting and so on and so on and never making any decisions. 

Peter Drucker said that we should, “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”  Is everyone expected to think on their feet in your organisation or is there space in the day for people to undertake quiet reflection? When project timetables are developed is the need for reflection incorporated into the design process i.e. having time to “sleep on it”? Have colleagues been trained in the art of quiet reflection and is this valued as a management process?  How many times has your organisation decided in haste and repented at leisure? If the answer is “Too many times!” then maybe you need to consider incorporating this management process more effectively into your corporate style!

First posted in The Human Imprint July 2007

Negotiation skills

One of the key life skills to acquire is the art of negotiation. I am much better at interacting with people on all levels of my life since I learnt the basic art of negotiation. I am not saying that I am a fully fledged negotiator but I am getting there slowly, and who taught me this life skill? My children!! It is a steep learning curve when faced with an individual with limited vocal communication skills, due to their own degree of personal development, who can only identify their needs through body language and either how the volume or the pitch of their shouting. Actually that sounds quite familiar in some business situations I have been in!

When individuals lack the life skill of being able to calmly vocalise their feelings, or point of view they will quickly switch to secondary means of communication. Some individuals miss out the first step altogether and go straight to expressing themselves emotionally. These issues impact on management’s effectiveness, and we must consider them when having to facilitate or negotiate with, or within, operational teams. When negotiating with(in) teams and with individuals we have to understand the visual signs that tell us how people feel towards either each other or the information that is being presented, including changes in the:

Pitch, speed or volume of their voice,

Eye contact - who are people looking at, who looks down when certain people speak, this will help you to identify the level of agreement and disagreement within the meeting/team

Nodding and smiling – who smiles and nods in compliance with some views and sits stony faced when others are talking.

Hand gestures – banging a fist on the table is an obvious sign but are all the people expressing open hand gestures or is there the overall impression that everyone in the meeting either has their fists clenched or their arms firmly folded. Do hand gestures change when different people speak?

If you are the manager, team leader, or facilitator it is important to constantly consider these cues during a meeting. An effective manager will identify where they are in terms of the five point plan, see below. Effective negotiation management is about continually rating where you are on the scale – if the meeting starts to go to a 3 rating you need to take action to reduce down to a 2 or below. If the meeting gets to a 4 you need to take immediate action before the meeting gets out of control, even if it is to announce a five minute coffee break to reduce the tension. Do you have this life skill, if not what steps are you going to take to acquire it?

Five point plan

The five point plan is basically how would you rate the meeting at this moment in time (1 = In control meeting, going totally as planned, 2 = in control, some side debate, but on track, 3 = in control, but increased side debate and some individuals starting to exhibit emotional behaviour, 4 = starting to lose control, people starting to talk over each other and meetings objectives are in danger of not being achieved. 5 = everyone’s lost the plot and the meeting objectives are effectively abandoned.

First posted on The Human Imprint June 2007

One of the key life skills to acquire is the art of negotiation. I am much better at interacting with people on all levels of my life since I learnt the basic art of negotiation. I am not saying that I am a fully fledged negotiator but I am getting there slowly, and who taught me this life skill? My children!! It is a steep learning curve when faced with an individual with limited vocal communication skills, due to their own degree of personal development, who can only identify their needs through body language and either how the volume or the pitch of their shouting. Actually that sounds quite familiar in some business situations I have been in!

When individuals lack the life skill of being able to calmly vocalise their feelings, or point of view they will quickly switch to secondary means of communication. Some individuals miss out the first step altogether and go straight to expressing themselves emotionally. These issues impact on management’s effectiveness, and we must consider them when having to facilitate or negotiate with, or within, operational teams. When negotiating with(in) teams and with individuals we have to understand the visual signs that tell us how people feel towards either each other or the information that is being presented, including changes in the:

Pitch, speed or volume of their voice,

Eye contact - who are people looking at, who looks down when certain people speak, this will help you to identify the level of agreement and disagreement within the meeting/team

Nodding and smiling – who smiles and nods in compliance with some views and sits stony faced when others are talking.

Hand gestures – banging a fist on the table is an obvious sign but are all the people expressing open hand gestures or is there the overall impression that everyone in the meeting either has their fists clenched or their arms firmly folded. Do hand gestures change when different people speak?

If you are the manager, team leader, or facilitator it is important to constantly consider these cues during a meeting. An effective manager will identify where they are in terms of the five point plan, see below. Effective negotiation management is about continually rating where you are on the scale – if the meeting starts to go to a 3 rating you need to take action to reduce down to a 2 or below. If the meeting gets to a 4 you need to take immediate action before the meeting gets out of control, even if it is to announce a five minute coffee break to reduce the tension. Do you have this life skill, if not what steps are you going to take to acquire it?

Five point plan

The five point plan is basically how would you rate the meeting at this moment in time (1 = In control meeting, going totally as planned, 2 = in control, some side debate, but on track, 3 = in control, but increased side debate and some individuals starting to exhibit emotional behaviour, 4 = starting to lose control, people starting to talk over each other and meetings objectives are in danger of not being achieved. 5 = everyone’s lost the plot and the meeting objectives are effectively abandoned.

First posted on The Human Imprint June 2007

Communication - what is it?

Communication is about the passing of messages from one person to others. In a previous post I thought about how I could improve my communication, but I wanted to take this thought a little further. Communication involves people, passing information between themselves and feeding back on the information and hopefully at the end of the communication taking a resultant mututally agreed action. 

In order to communicate effectively we need to consider the language we use and our language can be both verbal, and non-verbal. Often the non-verbal communication has the strongest influence on our ability to communicate with others. This was brought home to me very firmly by my own children. I have always had a home office, but on the days when I was dressed up in a suit about to go off to work - often wearing my coat over the top from 7 a.m. onwards so I would keep clean, my children would get very frustrated, they sensed I was unavailable to them. It was only when they could talk that they began to say to me the minute I came into the house "Put your cuddly clothes on!" i.e. become available to us. When I worked at home, I obviously wore my home clothes - well I didn't have a web-cam! - and they associated the different types of clothes I wore with different activities, although I was essentially the same person.

This taught me a huge lesson, we all take comfort from what is familiar and that includes our appearance, what we wear, our mannerisms and the often deep-rooted opinions that we have, but does this interfere with how others perceive us and also the message that we are trying to convey?

First posted at The Human Imprint - June 2007

Communication is about the passing of messages from one person to others. In a previous post I thought about how I could improve my communication, but I wanted to take this thought a little further. Communication involves people, passing information between themselves and feeding back on the information and hopefully at the end of the communication taking a resultant mututally agreed action. 

In order to communicate effectively we need to consider the language we use and our language can be both verbal, and non-verbal. Often the non-verbal communication has the strongest influence on our ability to communicate with others. This was brought home to me very firmly by my own children. I have always had a home office, but on the days when I was dressed up in a suit about to go off to work - often wearing my coat over the top from 7 a.m. onwards so I would keep clean, my children would get very frustrated, they sensed I was unavailable to them. It was only when they could talk that they began to say to me the minute I came into the house "Put your cuddly clothes on!" i.e. become available to us. When I worked at home, I obviously wore my home clothes - well I didn't have a web-cam! - and they associated the different types of clothes I wore with different activities, although I was essentially the same person.

This taught me a huge lesson, we all take comfort from what is familiar and that includes our appearance, what we wear, our mannerisms and the often deep-rooted opinions that we have, but does this interfere with how others perceive us and also the message that we are trying to convey?

First posted at The Human Imprint - June 2007

Communication

Sometimes when we are so concerned about the message we want to communicate we express ourselves in a way that merely turns the audience off. It is very hard when you feel passionate about a subject not to become intense, or appear angry, and then use strong emotive language. It is also often a human reaction by the listener, or group of listeners, as part of the flight and fight mechanism to "shoot the messenger". So I have worked out five tips for myself:

1) Know where your audience are. Do your research and find out what they think and how receptive they are to what you are going to say;

2) Know where you want to take your audience. Can you only take the audience on part of the journey in the time you have? if so don't try and give the whole message in one go.

3) Be prepared and plan how you intend to facilitate their journey. What are you going to say, what props are you going to use, how are you going to use your time effectively?

4) Think about what questions you could be asked and plan the answers that you might give. Think of the most technical questions and make sure you can access the data either at the presentation or be able to respond quickly afterwards.

5) Don't take things personally, its the ideas that you are talking about that people may not like, not you.

I'll let you know if they work!

First posted at The Human Imprint - June 2007

Sometimes when we are so concerned about the message we want to communicate we express ourselves in a way that merely turns the audience off. It is very hard when you feel passionate about a subject not to become intense, or appear angry, and then use strong emotive language. It is also often a human reaction by the listener, or group of listeners, as part of the flight and fight mechanism to "shoot the messenger". So I have worked out five tips for myself:

1) Know where your audience are. Do your research and find out what they think and how receptive they are to what you are going to say;

2) Know where you want to take your audience. Can you only take the audience on part of the journey in the time you have? if so don't try and give the whole message in one go.

3) Be prepared and plan how you intend to facilitate their journey. What are you going to say, what props are you going to use, how are you going to use your time effectively?

4) Think about what questions you could be asked and plan the answers that you might give. Think of the most technical questions and make sure you can access the data either at the presentation or be able to respond quickly afterwards.

5) Don't take things personally, its the ideas that you are talking about that people may not like, not you.

I'll let you know if they work!

First posted at The Human Imprint - June 2007

Blog is launched

The site for The Hill Learning Centre is launched today. The Centre provides for a range of activities and learning opportunities. More details will be added as the site develops so watch this space.