The Sixth Sense

Photo’s from Lille

I’ve been really slow in getting this online, but you can see our pictures from our May bank holiday weekend in Lille if you follow this link.

Freedom Writers

After much persuasion from my friend Byrney who’s staying with us at the moment, I finally watched the movie Freedom Writers last night. I loved it! Really powerful and moving story. And made all the more so because it is based on actual events that happened.

To be honest, I love these sort of films. It reminded me of films like Coach Carter and Remember the Titans.

Anyone else seen this??

Staying people AND performance focussed

It doesn’t matter what type of organisation it is, finding the balance between being people focussed and performance focussed is a challenge. And obviously the two are completely linked. 

If people are not valued and engaged then the performance of the organisation is going to suffer. And yet, if we become so people focussed that we stop challenging, setting goals, and raising standards, then the performance will also drop.

Of course, if the entire focus is on endlessly improving the performance, then we are going to end up losing people and leaving them behind. Then we are left without the very people who are essential to the performance of the organisation.

So the question we need to grapple with is: how do we keep a healthy balance between focussing on people and focussing on performance?

To propose an answer, here is a paragraph from an article in the Harvard Business Review on this subject. After studying lots of different CEO’s handing the balance between people and performance, the ones who did it best did so my combining four strategies:

“First, they earned the trust of their organizations through their openness to the unvarnished truth. Second, they were deeply engaged with their people, and their exchanges were direct and personal; employees in the companies we studied had a particularly close connection with the CEO and were seldom surprised to meet him or her. Third, having earned legitimacy and trust, these CEOs were able to mobilize their people around a focused agenda. Finally, while they were all strong individuals, these senior leaders realized that they could succeed only as part of a committed leadership team, and they devoted considerable efforts to building their firm’s collective leadership capabilities.” (Emphasis mine)

What do you think?

Working for Mosaic

As of this month, I am now employed one day per week by Mosaic. This is another exciting step for me in the midst of a whole host of exciting changes.

Today I thought I’d share some of the things I’m going to be focussing on as I embark on this new phase. So, here pretty much is my job description:

• Identify and train team leaders for the various teams Mosaic is looking to establish.
• Create training resources to aid the development of team leaders and team members.
• Develop resources and materials for the Underground (the Christ-following community that is part of Mosaic).
• Identify and connect with other people and groups around the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world who are looking to move in a similar direction to Mosaic. Provide support, training, and leadership where appropriate.
• Establish more tangible goals and plans for supporting the work of other organisations (e.g. Oasis in South Africa, Open Kingdom in Cameroon, Help Unlimited in Uganda), and catalyse more people to serve with them and establish a fundraising base to support this work.
• Oversee the establishment of a registered charity and provide leadership and oversight to all itʼs functions.

I’m excited to have this dedicated time to serving within and through Mosaic. Looking forward to the progress that comes as a result too!

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?