Conference Facilitation & Team Building Blogs

Fearless Leadership – Storytelling

Storytelling is older than the written word. In that sense it is prehistoric. Ever since we noticed one another we have wanted to make contact. This is as true today as it has always been. Be that in the boardroom, the classroom or over the kitchen table.

So why is that ? What does storytelling do that makes it so different from other communication. Simply put, storytelling connects the heart to the head . It takes thinking into feeling and travels imagination into action like nothing else. It can make information engaging and inspiring and it is the seat of positive relationship.In spite of educational norms that extol a cognitive approach to learning, storytelling embraces a more holistic perspective by combining thinking, feeling and doing to inform, engage and inspire….

5 Steps Towards Better Meetings

Our forthcoming seminar on Improving Productivity on the 16th March will give you some tips on getting the most from meetings.

In the meantime, here are some quick pointers inspired by a Japanese car manufacturer that has meeting guidelines pinned to the wall of every conference room. Why not paste these meeting guidelines alongside agendas to keep your meetings on track:…

Olympic Tickets Available – at a price

I received an email recently inviting me to buy Prestige Olympic Tickets. It was from a LOCOG accredited source and the tickets were genuine and amongst the best available. But, they come at a price, £7500 for the Opening Ceremony!

It’s unlikely that many of us will be able to justify taking our teams to the games but we should certainly seize the opportunity to replicate the behaviours of world class sports teams in our own work groups….

Vodafone Fail to Make the Connection

If you’ve travelled on the London Underground recently you might have seen a series of posters featuring team building exercises.

Vodafone have launched an advertising campaign suggesting that with their service teams can connect without the need to spend time together.

We would challenge this assumption on the basis that whilst it is possible to convey information by phone it’s almost impossible to build trust.

Trust is the single greatest differential between good and bad teams and to build trust takes a combination of time, commitment, shared experience and common values.

Smart phones might be clever but even they have their limitations.

What are your thoughts?

The Language(s) of Love – for Teams

As we celebrate St Valentine’s Day it brings to mind Dr Gary Chapman’s theory that there are five Love Languages.

These are the different ways in which we show and receive appreciation, not just from our nearest and dearest but also from colleagues in our teams and our managers.  Dr Chapman suggests that each of us favours one particular Love Language over the other four and whilst his work is focussed towards married couples, his theory can be applied in part to those leading teams….

5 Tips for More Productive Sleep

Our level of productivity depends as much on our inactivity as our activity. Failing to get a good night’s sleep prevents our bodies and brains from fully recharging. Like a car battery, if we try to operate on less than a full charge both our short and long term performance will deteriorate.

Whether you are waking up tired or struggling to get to sleep, here are some tips that can help:…

Free Team Building Activity: Perfect Picture

This free team building activity is a light-hearted task which highlights the need to work as a team to succeed.

Overview

A creative and involving exercise that will highlight the need for communication, collaboration and organisation across the group. Suitable for many different groups and group sizes….

Can Losers be Part of Winning Teams?

In his superb book Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins states that a common factor in the highest performing businesses is the make up of their teams. He says the best leaders “get the right people on the bus, in the right seats and the wrong people off the bus.”

So, if some of your team have had a run of bad luck or even failed in the past can they succeed as a team in the future?…

Will the Olympics Spoil Conferences?

If your organisation holds a large annual conference, prepare yourself for a very different experience in 2012.

A combination of the Olympics, the Farnborough Air Show and other major events between June and September means that many of the larger hotels and conference centres already have bookings confirmed for this period and are unable to accept large bookings during the summer conference season of 2012.

Whilst this might send a shiver down your conference organiser’s spine, they needn’t panic….

The end of email? 5 tips for reducing email overload

James Murdoch must be wishing News International had stuck with printed memos as the Leveson enquiry threatens to pin the blame on him for the phone hacking scandal.

The rest of us face the daily battle to select the important from the apparently urgent, as we try to spend time on the priorities that will drive our organisations forward and not fall into the trap of our Inbox becoming our To Do List. Some solutions to this will be part of our next workshop “How to be more Productive with Less Stress” on Friday 16th March 2012.

The Financial Times recently reported that…