Month: June 2014
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Tip Of The Week: Add Capability Without Hiring More People
In the 21st century, you can add capability to your team without having to create a permanent position. If you’d like to free yourself up or expand into a new area but don’t want to increase the size of your company, could you get that function handled on an as-needed basis?
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Quotable Coach: Decision Making Made Easy
Decisions are difficult when you have no context for making them. But with a purpose—a vision of the future you want to see—it’s suddenly much easier to evaluate and choose in a meaningful way. Dan and Babs created Strategic Coach with a set of “prime directives” to guide the company’s direction: Everything we do has…
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4 Questions To Improve Your Communication With Anyone
Communication can be a tricky thing. But there’s actually a way to feel much more confident in this minefield of possible misunderstanding and irritation. We’ve zeroed in on four aspects of the communication process that are totally idiosyncratic, yet—and here lies the rub—we tend to assume that the other person is exactly like us in this…
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Tip Of The Week: The Raw Material For Innovative Solutions
When things are going well, we resist change—“If it ain’t broke,” and all that—but a breakdown in the existing order is an opportunity to create something simpler, better, and more relevant to the new reality. As Dan says, “Other people’s bad news is your good news”: When someone’s overwhelmed, upset, or confused by change, you…
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Quotable Coach: How To Attract The Right Team Members
At Strategic Coach, we define leadership as “providing direction.” You do this every time you set out a vision of a desirable future for others. With your team members, you don’t even have to know how they’re going to work toward that goal—in fact, that “wiggle room” allows them to supply their own creativity and…
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Courage vs. Confidence
Every once in a while, you have an experience where the lesson learned leads to a huge jump in your capability. Who knew fear, uncertainty, and discomfort would be the secret sauce to increasing your confidence? For this confession, I’m taking to the “big screen.” Watch at your own risk! [embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN9u3I-bctQ[/embedyt] Your challenge, should…
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Tip Of The Week: The Trick To Getting Things Done
Waiting until you’re certain you can achieve a 100% result often leads to doing nothing at all. Plus, once you begin, you learn things that change your definition of 100%. Just aim for the first 80%, get started, and soon you’ll have something tangible to work with or hand off to someone whose abilities are…
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Quotable Coach: The Path To Greater Productivity And Profitability
Micromanagement confines a team’s output to the limits of one person’s imagination, but when you let people’s Unique Abilities® flourish, you move into the realm of unimaginable, unpredictable growth and breakthroughs. The path to exponentially greater productivity and profitability is not one of increasing control, but increasing freedom. [contentblock id=smc-ebook]
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We Never Say, “That’s Not My Job”: Backstage Pass With Tasha W. Thomas
At our Strategic Coach headquarters in Toronto, we have a café, and in that café is a big, fancy coffee machine. It’s a bit intimidating. Recently, an entrepreneur came into the café during a break in his Strategic Coach Program workshop and asked me to show him how to make a latte. “If you’re not…
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Tip Of The Week: A Company Full Of Leaders
Delegate an activity that you don’t like or don’t do particularly well, and you give someone else the chance to apply their talents and take ownership of some small piece of your overall process. This new responsibility draws out their devotion and genius. Meanwhile, you get to concentrate on providing the “big picture” and doing…