Common Purpose - Broadening Your Vision

One colleague of mine underwent a lot of courses last week and one of them was entitled "Common Purpose – Broadening Your Vision". She learned 5 important points from this course:

1.       Paul Rooney from PWC gave an interested session on Leadership and who he looked to for leadership and vision both in his career and personal life.

2.       Baroness May Blood also demonstrated how humour and humility can take you far in life.

3.       Heard from Peter Dixon from Phoenix Gas, provided a very interesting insight into how a business needs a vision in order to achieve results. Results cannot be expected without the vision behind them.

4.       The day itself raised questions on our own visions – do we have a personal vision? and do we know what the true vision of the organisation we work for is?

5.       Heard from Baroness May Blood, truly inspirational woman who clearly had a vision for what she wanted to achieve and showed the energy and determination to match it.

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Social Effectiveness Training

 I went to a really interesting seminar on Wednesday evening of this week organised by the Association of Coaching in Belfast. It was delivered by Michael Mallow, a very entertaining speaker. I learnt the ten following things:



1.   We can only control our own behaviour.
2.   All we can give another person is information.
3.   All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
4.   The problem relationship is part of our present life.
5.   What happened to the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.
6.   We satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.
7.   All we can do is behave.
8.   All behaviour is Total Behaviour and is made up of four components: acting, thinking, emotions and physiology.
9.   All Total Behaviour is chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components. We can only control our emotions and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think.
10.  All Total Behaviour is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognisable.


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Mediation Seminar

I attended a mediation seminar on Saturday last in Letterkenny Donegal and came away with the following learning points :  

* A good mediator should hold onto a closed mediation file indefinitely afterwards

* It's advisable to ask all parties for any notes they have taken for you to destroy after a mediation has finished.

* In most employment cases a mediator should eschrow an agreement giving parties time to seek professional advice before signing an agreement.

* "Professional advice" is a better term than "legal advice" for it wider and encompasses medical and business advice where necessary as well as legal

* Any person shadowing a mediator should be referred to as an assistant rather than an observer. Co-mediators are just that and share responsibility and liability equally.

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Young Leaders Conference

The Young Leaders Conference was also one of the coursed I attended to two weeks ago. It was all worth it and I learned the following important points:

1.       Power of psychology/ persuasion. Think about how you put a suggestion forward. Say for example you have 5 ideas and there is one in particular you would like the person to choose. Place it at number 3 in the list. Research shows that the choice at number 3 is most likely to be chosen as by then the person feels they know what you are talking about and are drawn to number 3. If you have 4 ideas, still put it at number 3 and if you have 3 ideas, make up a first or fourth and place it again at number 3. (David Meade)

2.       Taking risks – a good leader should not be afraid to take risks – whether they be good or bad.

3.       Make a decision and stick to it – even if you know it will mean people may dislike you for it. If it needs to be done, stick to the decision and carry it through.

4.       Vision was again reiterated at this course, the importance of sharing the vision.

5.       Don’t hide away from the bad stuff – don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away when there are problems, deal with them head on even if you know the outcome could mean change.

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Change Management Issues

At the moment the company is researching change management issues and have discovered a lot of mistakes that caused failure. We noted five common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Lack of communication - change management communications need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce. It should be delivered in a two-way fashion that allows people to make sense of the change subjectively.


Mistake #2: Not enough leadership - several leaders focus too much on management and too little on leadership.


Mistake #3: Ignoring current corporate culture - when people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization’s success and progress, Mistake 3change can occur.


Mistake #4: Not envolving the employees - leaders must actively involve the people most affected by the change in its implementation. This will help ensure employees at all levels of the organization embrace the proposed changes.


Mistake #5: Lack of skills and resources - change does not happen through goals and exhortation alone. Like any business operation, It also calls for the right skills and resources, Organizations often simply fail to commit the necessary time, people, and resources to making change work. Paradoxically, successful behavior change often demands the very skills the change Is trying to create.


As always we're busy devising more employment law seminars

David Meade's Insights

A colleague of mine attended a course two weeks ago hosted by David Meade. She got 5 helpful important points from the conference:



1.       Power of positive thinking – being told you are terrible at something will make you worse at the task, being told you are good (even when you are not) will make you perform better as you believe you are good at the task (research carried out by team of ballet dancers who were asked to play basketball. They were then randomly selected and told some were good and some were terrible at playing – even if they were really good. The ones who were told they were great outperformed the ones who had been told they were terrible).
2.       Know when to take a risk – David Meade relayed the story of how he took the chance and left his University job to start a career doing Mentalist TV work. On his first appearance on the Stephen Nolan radio show, he was expected to be “car crash radio”. His determination and desire to succeed proved otherwise.
3.       Awareness – when given a task be aware of the other things going on around you. It is amazing how you can miss the most obvious thing because you are so busy focussing on the task in hand.


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Good to Great

One of my colleagues told me about a great book he read, it's called, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. He took five key learning points from it:

1.     Pursue the big 3 traits. Good-to-great companies move ahead of their competitors by pursuing only those projects that have three traits;

        a.     What they can be ‘best in the world’ at

        b.    What drives profitability for their     business model

        c.     What their people are deeply passionate about

2.     Good is the enemy of great. This is one of the reasons why so little becomes great, but ultimately good companies can become great companies if they push themselves and don’t settle for great.

3.     Stick to what you’re good at – The Hedgehog Concept. Good-to-great companies are those that consistently stick to doing what they do best and avoid getting distracted into new fields of business that are away from their core competencies.

4.     Do not get side-tracked on non-core ideas. Instead, good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding what lies within their Hedgehog Concept and ignoring everything that does not.

5.     Creating a good-to-great company takes time and is an iterative process rather than a blinding flash of inspiration. To guide this process, many use a ‘Business Council’ approach to gain the depth of understanding required to come up with a unique differentiating Hedgehog Concept.

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