Conversations about leadership, learning, coaching and change.
When I ask groups how feedback should be given, there’s always someone who mentions the Hamburger Approach.
This is the theory that you should start by saying something positive (the white bread), move on to what you really want to say – apparently often negative – and then close with something a bit more positive (more refined carbs?).
When I ask groups how feedback should be given, there’s always someone who mentions the Hamburger Approach.
This is the theory that you should start by saying something positive (the white bread), move on to what you really want to say – apparently often negative – and then close with something a bit more positive (more refined carbs?).
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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I always worry when HR departments seize on a fashionable idea as the panacea that may not cure all ills but will certainly tick this year’s boxes.
Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder of a terrific mindfulness app called Headspace, wrote a great article on LinkedIn criticising the vogue for “Mindfulness at Work,” given that this slightly misses the point of mindfulness. As Andy says:
“Mindfulness simply means to be present, undistracted, no matter where we are or what we are doing at the time.”
Going barefoot – especially outside – brings instant awareness of our relationship to our surroundings. It uses more muscles and strengthens our ankles but it also makes us think just a little bit more about where we are treading.
There are many ways to become more mindful; more focused, attentive and present. One of the best ways to build this ability in an increasingly distracting world is through meditation. There is a ton of evidence emerging to show the wide-range of physical and emotional benefits of regular mindfulness-meditation.
Indeed it’s not a fix at all, because we can never say we’ve mastered mindfulness.
If you want to know how to get started with mindfulness-meditation, this is a great little video. Instead of repeating those tips, I’d like to focus on eight simple things that I think really help to introduce more mindful moments into our everyday lives.
Although there is science to back many of them up, I’ve chosen them because they work for me.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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Most have us have known that feeling when we’ve got a lot on our plates; challenging targets, multiple demands (often a combination of work and home) and tight deadlines.
Yet sometimes this just helps us focus; makes us resourceful, creative, efficient. We’re resilient in the face of pressure.
Sometimes it does the opposite. We feel stuck; as if we’re going to fail at something (possibly lots of things). The pressure overwhelms us.
I held an interactive webinar for the Time to Think group on Facebook to find out what caused them stress and how they dealt with it. Reflecting on the experiences and wisdom, I asked myself what they all had in common.
This is when those three Cs seemed significant. Pressure is a form of stimulation, which we can use to help us, just as long as we think we have at least one (preferably two) of those elements.
I think that unconsciously we ask ourselves:
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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Do you know someone at work who isn’t performing as well as they could?
With nearly three quarters of people reporting that they are not engaged at work, I have many clients asking what they can do to change this.
“How can I get rid of low performers or poorly engaged staff?”, is a refrain I hear a lot.
Then it’s time for a bit of tough love. So I say, there are two reasons for that:
Gardeners don’t blame the plant when it fails to thrive. True leaders, like effective gardeners, look at themselves first and then the environment.
As a keen gardener, I’m struck by the thought that if you are a leader, you can do a lot to help those around you withstand the cold winds of shrinking budgets and increasing targets by thinking about it from a gardener’s perspective.
Gardening is about both leading and managing change. Here are three leadership lessons from successful gardeners.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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From the outside it looks as if the majority of organisations are in a mess.
Surveys tell us that only a third of workers bring their A-game to the office. More and more time is spent at work, or working via the umbilical cord of our smartphones, yet productivity is stuck in the pre-digital era.
To make things worse, more people at all levels in organisations are reporting excessive levels of stress. Both employee and company suffers; when we are under stress our brain prioritises survival, and reduces our capacity to think clearly or creatively and to make rational decisions.
Everyone seems aware of the problem and a whole industry has sprung up, with million dollar consultancies and business schools clamouring to fix the problem.
However it isn’t working. Three quarters of those expensive change initiatives fail and it doesn’t seem managers with MBAs can transform the way their teams feel about work either.
When we at Mackie Consulting listen to people in organisations through our Clarity Survey, and through our coaching work with teams and individuals, people tell us that they are not having the conversations they should be having. What we hear supports the Ken Blanchard Leadership company’s research that shows the extent to which conversations are avoided:
In all too many organisations, meetings are long and formulaic. People come to meetings either to transmit information or receive it. Dialogue seems to have been substituted by the “let-s-read-this-presentation-together” practice.
Meaningful conversations are frequently avoided, and the more challenging conversations are saved up for those zinging e-mails or vented to the wrong person at the coffee shop or water cooler.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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How many times in a week do you get asked for advice?
If you’re half-way good at your job, I’m going to guess that the answer is “frequently”. If you’re quick to offer your advice I’m going to be blunt: you’re not helping.
And by clarity, I don’t mean clarity about knowing what you think or what you think should happen. I mean clarity in the asker’s own mind.
These things are not in our power to bestow on others – they come from within. Clarity and confidence come when new insights emerge, motivating the asker to act from their own conviction.
read more…
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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Stupefyingly difficult people cross and re-cross our path – the ridiculous boss, the toxic colleague, the impossible line report…
We also work with a much larger group of talented people who simply think, communicate and behave in a way that is very different to our own.
Workplace conflict and related tension are inevitable given the potent mix of our different personality types, backgrounds and strengths. Many of us suppress and so magnify a lot of our feelings because we:
More than 3? Less than 10? How many conversations did you have with these people about the issues, the resulting personal and commercial impact, your differences, new insights and possible solutions?
However, if we don’t tackle this important issue what is the impact on us as individuals, leaders and team members?
Are we also missing out on the competitive advantage and cultural benefits of encouraging differences, a more questioning approach and more constructive, if sometimes difficult, conversations? How many valuable new ideas and insights go un-shared in favour of mid-ground/status-quo thinking to avoid “rocking the boat”?
read more…
Abigail Hunt helps leaders to have courageous conversations. An Innovation Consultant and Executive Coach, she is an associate at Mackie Consulting and a member of Bridge Collaboration and Møller PSF Group.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude this week.
Firstly Jane, a friend of mine from school, nominated me on Facebook to declare three positive things each day for five days and to pass this nomination on to three of my friends.
Now ordinarily I am not a huge fan of the “get me a million likes because I’m seriously ill” or “share this picture of a mis-treated animal to show you care” type of post that Facebook is awash with.
I believe we need to give real time and real money to the causes we care about and spend time with people we know who are suffering, rather than soothe ourselves with an instant LIKE or SHARE.
So that’s the grouchiness out of the way, let’s get back to the gratitude.
I’ve been buried in books about emotions over the last couple of weeks as the subject of my Masters dissertation is about working with emotions in coaching.
All roads to happiness and leadership start with positive emotions
In the Emotional Life of your Brain, the neuroscientist, Richard Davidson, says:
“Emotion works with cognition in an integrated and seamless way to enable us to navigate the world of relationships, work and spiritual growth. When positive emotion energizes us, we are better able to concentrate, to figure out the social networks at a new job or new school, to broaden our thinking so we can creatively integrate diverse information, and to sustain our interest in a task so we can persevere.”
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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Recently a coaching client told me:
“I’m really trying to be more collaborative but I can see it in their eyes; they don’t trust me. They remember the old me – how can things get better if we can’t get beyond this?”
This is not the first client who has found it hard to change because others still remember the past
Which brings to mind my favourite Tony Robbins quote:
“Everybody’s got a past. The past does not equal the future unless you live there.”
It strikes me that any kind of change – whether inside you, within teams or even between whole nations – involves the ability to let go of the past. I think change requires forgiveness.
It was April 1989 and I had been looking out of the airplane window, ever since we crossed the Zambezi River from Zambia into Zimbabwe. It was autumn and the bush below was losing its summer green, revealing small settlements, the occasional herd of elephant and long, straight gunmetal grey roads breaking up the red earth stretching all the way to the horizon.
As the plane bounced down onto the runway, I realised that I had been away for half my life.
Walking across the tarmac I wondered what lay ahead. I was a white woman with a British passport – I potentially represented colonial white privilege.
Moyra Mackie helps leaders and teams to work with courage, compassion and creativity. She is an executive coach and consultant and the founder of Mackie Consulting.
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