Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the tag “Leadership”

02 Aug 2008
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Balance between Focus and Multi-tasking II

Lens by Craig Jewell

Lens by Craig Jewell

I wrote a piece on the balance between Focus and Multi-tasking in which I was challenging my own views (and the views of a number of personal productivity systems) on the value of multi-tasking.

I also wrote a piece last week on leaders learning skills from their teams.

These two sets of thoughts were fused marvellously at the end of this week when I was holding one of my six-monthly catch ups with one of the Madgex team where they can get anything off their chest that they haven’t managed to do in any other way.

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Posted in Action Orientation, Conscious and Unconscious, Focus, Habits and Routines, Leadership, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , , ,
01 Jul 2008

Goal Setting makes things less Scary

I’ve just come back from our six-monthly strategy away days with the Madgex shareholders. Now these are always good events. We get through a lot of stuff very productively.

This session was particularly productive because since we have tightened the focus of our mission to be the global leaders in job board software and services, our ‘flamenco dancing’ of innovation and creativity has significantly step-changed for the better.

Over the last two days we agreed a set of targets for the five years from 1.2.9. We’re into our fourth year of targets set four years ago which we’ve achieved in each of the years. Now this next set of targets should have ‘filled us with the fear’. We’re talking triple-digit millions. Yet it didn’t.

The reason why I think that it didn’t is that we’ve taken the time to plan the scenarios and imagine what it would be like. We’ve done the sales capacity modelling. We’ve got a big A3 map full of our ideas. We’ve allocated responsibilities and modelled in our heads what it will feel like when we’ve got there.

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Posted in Business, Focus, Leadership, Management, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
27 Jun 2008
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Improving Capacity to see New Possibilities

I delivered the first part of the Madgex ideas and learnings session on the Behaviours of Leaders and Managers today.

I think it went well. I’d concentrated on researching and distilling down from a top down view the ‘best’ behaviours of managers and leaders. The bit that really ended up interesting me as I researched in more depth was quite a lot of the writing within the topic of ‘insight’ as a key leadership trait.

The obvious elements of insight obviously weren’t surprising: self awareness and an understanding of others are hugely important.

However, Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard’s thinking and observations around ‘seeing or perceptions of situations’ in particular really struck a cord.

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Posted in Business, Leadership, Management, NLP and tagged , ,

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