Another Interesting Book by Philips Delves Broughton

One of my colleagues just finished reading "Life's A Pitch - And then you Buy - What the World's Best Sales People Can Teach Us all" by Philips Delves Broughton and have taken the following key learning points :

* Success, according to Nightingale's definition is "really nothing more than the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. The successful person is the one who wakes up in the morning and knows what they are doing, why and where their actions are leading. It could be anything for an exam, teaching, to running a small business or a very large one. The idea itself does not matter". Nightingale claimed that only one in twenty of us achieves this broad definition of success."Most of us are just drifting, composites of others we don't particularly admire but by whom we would rather be liked than not. He argues liked Gitomer, that convention is an ass. "Whatever the great majority is doing in any circumstance, if you do exactly the opposite, you'll probably never make a mistake as long as you live. The tragedy, Nightingale said, is that people die without ever making full use of their abilities and lie on their death beds consumed by regret. 
* Nightingale argues there are seven items necessary for living a full life:

1. Goals - without them a man is no better than a "starfish or amoeba" living hour to hour day to day always reacting, never setting his own course
2. Attitude - because it determines others' attitude towards us
3. Thinking deliberately and with a purpose - not being buffeted by circumstance and biddable by others, but thinking for oneself.
4.  Truth - for it will be reciprocated.  
5. The Law of Laws - the notion that we get what we give 
6. Invest in one's own development - just as a company would invest in its own training then so should we
7. The importance of thoughts - Our thoughts determine our fate. Whether we become dictators or gas station attendants, it is what we think of most of the time that leads to these outcomes. It is why, Nightingale says, that thinking and have a goal are so important. Without them we are nothing. 

At the moment, we are currently busy marketing our new upcoming event. It is the 

Annual Review of Employment Law 2012 (Ramada)

Leadership Event

Recently, one of my colleagues attended a leadership experience event in Belfast and picked up the following points relating to leadership:  

1. Ask yourself, "Have you delivered what your followers want?". Followers want community, recognition, excitement, authenticity.

2. Work out what is it about you that excites others.

3. Display significant, real and perceived differences. Know yourself and show yourself.

4.  Effective leaders use their emotions to liberate the energy of others.  

5. When you reveal weaknesses you reveal yourself. 

6. You need to communicate by telling stories. Great leaders are very good story tellers.

7. Great leaders choose their channels well.

8. To be effective as a leader, be yourself more and with more skill.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the 

Equality Law Update 2012

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: 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 #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:  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 #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.

We're currently busy marketing our seminar rooms for Northern Ireland

Common Purpose - Passion and Resonance

Passion and Resonance was the second topic discussion in the course, "Common Purpose" which one of my colleagues attended to last week. She got some helpful learning points from the discussion:

• "Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about" ~ Steve Pavlina 

• "Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~ Donald Trump
•          Communicating a business’ passion:
  -          Be strong, honest, true and accurate
  -          Think about the content, be creative.
  -          Engage in conversation with our customers through our website/ Twitter/ Facebook
  -          How is it we want staff to communicate?

• "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

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.       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.

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.       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)

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

As always we're busy devising more Irish employment law seminars

Common Purpose - Broadening your vision

One of my colleagues 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.       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?

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.       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.

5.       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.

We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland

David Meade's Insight

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

1.       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.
2.       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). 
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.


We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland

Employee Management

Our CEO has been researching staff engagement recently and has come up with the following conclusions:

1. One of the most effective strategy to impact engagement across an organization: Start at the top

• It will be an uphill battle for everyone if your most senior teams are not true believers of the power engagement.

2. Spot an Engaged Employee, engaged employees are:Authentic

• Employees who are themselves are more effective in the workplace.

3. Define and refine your culture to engage: Keep your “culture to engage” in the front of employees’ and managers’ minds.

•  Make “culture,” “engagement,” and similar subjects frequent items for discussion.

4. One of the most important rules of Employee Engagement: Rules are meant to be broken.

•  Sometimes, you may find that it is necessary to break a rule to easily proved extraordinary service or just to make things work as they should.

5. Engage remote teams: Use web cams

•  An inexpensive web cam can be tied to your Instant Messenger. It is a great way to humanize people who are just names on a "cc" list.

As always we're busy devising more employment law seminars

Social Media Marketing

Legal-Island has been studying social media marketing closely this week and have gleaned 5 important key points to remember:

1. Declining Effectiveness - the traditional approaches to sales and marketing are not as effective as before
2. It's Social - Marketing as a conversation is a two-way dialogue. New 'mindsets' are required to be successful in social media
3. Power Shift - Social media empowers the customers and the network
4. It's a Revolution - A fundamental and revolutionary change in online behaviour, expectations and in the online customer experience
5. The End of Business as Usual -  We need new 'mindsets', new business approaches and new performance measures. It's not all about being a broadcast medium. It's about listening to and engaging with customers, partners and community.


As always we're busy devising more Irish employment law seminars

Active Listening

A colleague of mine listened to an audio cd this morning by Peter Thompson called ‘The best kept secrets of the world’s great communicators’ – the following is a summary of one chapter on ‘Active Listening.’ These are the points that he noted from the session:

Listen actively when there is high emotion or the possibility of misunderstanding, when the person is important to you, or when you need the information they have. The better you listen and respond to others, the better they will listen and respond to you. The more attention you pay when someone else is talking, the more attention they will pay when you are talking. The following are ways to listen actively:

1.       Get all the information that is available within a conversation so you will not jump to any false conclusions. Wait for the end of the sentence or end of the conversation to be sure this conversation is unique from any other that may sound similar to you.

2.       Maintain eye contact. It shows others that you are paying attention.

3.       Make notes. This will reinforce your memory. It is advisable to ask permission first in some situations. That permission is seldom refused. If you wish to take a tape recording, it is vital to ask permission.

4.       Allow people to finish their own sentences no matter how enthusiastically you want to jump into the conversation. Doing so will indicate respect for what the person is saying.

5.      Think of listening based on the ratio of having two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. Listen twice as much as you speak.

6.       Respond so the other person knows you are listening. Your response may be “Yes” or “I see” or merely nodding your head. Any of these will do.

7.       Be accepting rather than judgmental so you can truly hear the message being given. Different accents, catch phrases, speeds of speech, and cultural generalizations can get in the way of hearing the actual message.

8.       Ask questions when you do not understand something that was said. This goes a long way to building strong communication.

9.       Ask core questions. That is typically a series of “why” questions that go deeper into a particular subject to gain the greatest understanding of a situation. Start with broad information and continue seeking more specific responses.

10.   Pause before replying. Pausing will add power to what you say. It indicates you are giving a considered response, that you thought about it, that it is not just some answer you offer every time this question comes up.

11.   Use the Rapid Repeat Method to improve your listening skills and concentration abilities. Do this by simply repeating, silently in your mind, what is being said a fraction of a second later. This holds your concentration and improves your recall of what was said.

We're busy at the moment marketing our new mediation services for Northern Ireland 

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.     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.

3.     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.

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.

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Diversity Management Workshop

One of my colleagues attended a Diversity Management workshop delivered by Tanya Kennedy today at Legal-Island's training centre and took from it the following five key learning points :

• Jane Elliot’s “A Class divided” is a superb video that shows just how easily people can fall into prejudice and the ugly consequences. See here
• Zappos has some great core values worth examining including :

1. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Deliver WOW Through Service
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

• Pret a Manager have simple core values  : passionate about food; passionate about people; passionate about success
• No-one is born prejudiced. It’s a learnt process. We can unlearn it.
• Are we all age obsessed? I think we are…

We're currently re-working how we marketing our employment law email service

Andy Bounds's Sales Seminar

6 key learning points from Andy Bounds's Sales Seminar in London, 26th of April:

1. People buy because they are interested in your value proposition not your unique proposition.

2. Money is never a money issue but a priority issue. We need to help customers give us priority.

3. Success, not perfection is what selling is all about.

4. You need an incentive on Facebook for customers to like you. For example, to receive 5 top tips a day, join us on Facebook.


5. The aim of the marketing brochure is to cause something to happen.

6. Facts tell, stories sell. A good selling technique is what is known as the "BO" technique. Where 'B' stands for Benefits and 'O' stands for Options. Give them a choice of 'Yeses' rather than a 'Yes-No' option.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the Absence From Work Conference.