Monkey Puzzle Blog

We often see the new year as an opportunity for a fresh start or to try something new. Our new year gift to you for 2020, is to consider how you use the word ‘busy’.

If you love what you do, do you even need to think about work life balance? It’s a question many CEOs, business owners, and entrepreneurs ask us. The short answer is yes - both you and the relationships that matter to you – need looking after, regardless of how well your work might be going.

Doing a group communication is one of the most agonised over events in organisational life. The number of meetings about meetings, reviews and circulations of scripts and announcements can be staggering and often result in something that’s so bland and watered down that the message is lost, confusing or ineffective.

Does this sound familiar? There’s a briefing going on, it’s an important project and you’d really like to ask a question. Except that you don’t. If only you had, a little clarity would have made your contribution so much more effective from the outset.

You’ve invested a huge amount of time and resources hiring the best people, you’ve got them in the right roles and are rewarding them well for their contribution - but you just don’t seem to be getting the success you’d anticipated. We hear this from CEOs a lot, especially in innovative and knowledge industries, often coupled with exasperation, frustrations and if they are self-aware enough, a smidgen of self-doubt.

Last month we looked at how to integrate your values into your organisation – and we emphasised the importance of getting your leaders on-board to ‘walk the talk’. But what happens when they don’t – or even do the very opposite – what can you do?

Anyone who’s worked on an organisational values exercise knows how painful the process can be. You start out wanting to build something inspirational that truly reflects all that is great about your organisation; instead, you end up in endless wrangles over the right kind of words and ‘what’s the point of this?’ discussions.

We’ve all seen emotions displayed at work. As humans, it’s almost impossible to hide our emotions and often they can be a good thing – showing positive emotions at work can be highly motivating and engaging.

People who are motivated to achieve are always looking to improve, drive quality and love getting stuck into complex problems.

Stressful life events don’t have to be work-related to impact on performance or the workplace. It’s human nature to be affected by the challenging events that life can bring our way. Unfortunately, taking them into work is often unavoidable.

The four stages of team development by Bruce Tuckman is a core management model most leaders are familiar with. Teams start by ‘Forming’ and then go through a series of stages that eventually see them arrive at ‘Performing’ – with the advantages of being self-motivated, autonomous and competent.

Leaders and managers often ask us to run training or coaching programmes to help them deal with difficult behaviour - it’s the most common request for training we get. It’s not surprising, difficult behaviour in the workplace is time consuming and frustrating. Even the most cohesive team may experience it.