Meeting Essentials - good practice

PLAN
Make sure your meeting has
- a purpose and is necessary
- the right people - who need to be there
- an agenda in advance - with clear timings including the start and end times++
- people with clear roles for chairing, note taking and time keeping

DO
Meetings must
- start on time
- have action points recorded and distributed promptly
- stop when the purpose is achieved
- lead to positive, timely action and outcomes

CHECK and ACT
Individually we can all help :
- Arrive 5 mins early
- Be committed and involved – use our values
- Keep the meeting on topic – all other things are offline
- Leave the room as you would expect to find it

Memory tips - DOMINIC O'BRIEN'S

The three pillars to learning are

1. good memory techniques, one memory technique for languages is "gender zones". Visualise feminine nouns such as "la cantina" (cellar) in your home or home town; masculine nouns such as "il campo" (field) elsewhere
2. speed reading and to improve speed reading, use a pointer such as a pen to trace along the lines as you read
3. note-taking take effective notes, make mind maps from key words and crystallise original notes down to helpful reminders

If you learn something new, review it within 24 hours to help lodge it in your memory

Managing directors & others - time allocation

Rules of thumb
80% time dealing with customers and people
20% on other issues

All managers should spend circa 30%+ time on people engagement; e.g. 1 to 1s, team talks, etc activities

Schein's Career Anchors

Understanding what inspires you in your career

It used to be that once you decided on a career, you stayed in that career until you retired.

Not so anymore: The notion of lifetime employment has been replaced with lifetime employability. This means that you can’t rely on your employers to maintain your employment: You alone are responsible for your career progression and development.

Career management and planning in this environment is a challenge. So that you remain satisfied and fulfilled by the work you are doing, you need to adjust your career development activities accordingly.

Career development is no longer only about gaining the skills and knowledge you need to move up within one company. Career development today is about achieving flexibility and continuously evaluating and developing your skills in order to remain employable and fulfilled over the long term, regardless of who you are working for, and what industry you are working in.

To achieve this level of flexibility, you need to have a very strong sense of who you are and what you want from your work. Not everyone is motivated by the same thing, and our ambitions vary greatly. Some people thrive on being creative and innovative whereas others prefer stability and continuity. Challenge and constant simulation may be important to one person, while creating a work/life balance is paramount to another.

So, to effectively manage your career, you need to know more than what you enjoy doing: You need to understand WHY you like to do it. You need to figure out what the underlying characteristics of the work are that make the task enjoyable, interesting and stimulating to you.

To help people answer this question, Edgar Schein, a specialist in organisational psychology and career dynamics, identified eight "career anchors.”

Performance - The GROW Coaching Model

There are wide variety of coaching models around. One of the most successful, and popular, is the GROW model.

Background
Good coaching lets a coachee become more aware of what they can do with their life and prepares them to take more responsibility for it. This is achieved through sessions structured around questioning.
What GROW does is sequence or order those question sessions, as in:
     Goal
     Reality
     Options
     Will.

Goal
In the goal stage, the coach enables the coachee to establish where they want to be, or what they want to achieve. Questions of value here include:
what do you want to achieve?
how would you like things to be?
what does success look like to you?
Once the coachee has created some goals for themselves, the coach and coachee need to work together in partnership to define the goals as clearly as possible.

Reality
In the reality stage, the coachee's goals are checked against the way things are now.
For example, this could be a check of the skills or knowledge the coachee currently has against those needed to reach their goals. Questions of value here include:
so, what happens at the moment?
what have you tried so far?
what do you think are the big roadblocks here?
how do you rate your current skill level?

Options
In the options stage, the coachee develops different potential routes between the current reality and the goal they want to achieve. The key here is not to find the 'right' answer but to maximise the choices on the table. Questions of value here include:
how would you get there...?
can you think of any other...?
how would you feel about...?
what would be the costs and benefits of that?

Will
In the will stage, the coachee needs to commit to, and take responsibility for, carrying out the agreed actions.
The discussions on the coaching session are turned into decisions, with action points attached. Questions of value here include:
what are you going to do?
what date will that be done by?
can you think of any obstacles?
what support will you need?

Amplifying Effectiveness - models to consider

Congruence Model
The intent of the Congruence Model (Figure 1) is to remind the user that in dealing with different situations, the person should consider oneself, others involved in the situation, and the context of the situation. The inclusion or exclusion of any of these elements results in a stance that that may be blaming, placating, overly reasonable, or congruent.

Figure 1: Congruence Model
NB In Psychology, the Congruence Principle is a corollary of the principle of cognitive dissonance, the notion that it is impossible for a person (or organisation) to live too long where there is incongruence between a belief and a behaviour.

Assertive-Cooperative Model (based on Thomas Kilmann)
A similar model is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), this model describes possible reactions to conflict based on consideration of self vs. consideration of others. It is possible to think of this model not in terms of a negative conflict but in the positive achievement of goals (expressed or suppressed) and whether you have consideration of your own goals (assertiveness) and consideration for other people’s goals (cooperativeness). A resultant situation that ends in both parties achieving their goals is an ideal situation and one of collaboration. In contrast a situation arising from compromise could be considered to be a very poor outcome where dissatisfaction is prevalent with all parties; the middle ground may be quite unsatisfactory and lead to conflict at a later stage.

Figure 2: Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
The TKI reactions are as follows:

• Avoiding. The goal is to delay or avoid.
• Accommodating. The goal is to yield.
• Compromising. The goal is to find a middle ground.
• Competing. The goal is to win.
• Collaborating. The goal is to find a win-win situation.

To use the models when in an uncomfortable confrontation, the user should take a moment to consider where he or she is, in relation to the model, and where he or she would like to be. Then, modify behaviour appropriately. 
As a general rule many of us end up unsatisfactorily compromising on our goals due to a failure to engage adequately in understanding the needs and concerns of others or through not being assertive enough, in a constructive way, with our own needs. I expect that at its heart the centrist political third way aims to achieve new common goals and principles through an acknowledgement, understanding and reconciliation of historically polarised positions. 

Optimising time

Remember to take breaks.

• RAF trainers work on 50 min hours
• Even 1 min off looking at bright light is beneficial
• Chilled water helps the brain to work more effectively

3 minute talk (...only three minutes for your speech - then use this aide memoire)

Using the following check-list you can do a three minute talk or speech on a any topic 

without any real preparation or notes

• Go back in time 
• History of
• Types, uses
• Cycles, Seasons & Patterns
• Visual Picture

People often recommend only having three topics or themes as that is what most people can typically remember and

- past, present and future are therefore the usual stalwart to frame a talk around - taking the above as a guide this can be far more imaginative. 

• Past /go back in time, for example in the case of an apple, could be anything from Adam and Eve to your childhood or just last summer

Try it out with

• apple
• moon

• potato

• your best friend
• you
• your best-man or bridesmaid's speech

It is fascinating what you'll have to cut out of only three minutes