On Monday evening I found myself rushing up to Manchester for a networking dinner, prior to attending a Benchmark for Business event.
The conference, hosted at the Hilton, featured Daniel Pink and Marcus Buckingham, and so thanks go to Colin Ross of Benchmark for Business for pulling together such a great event.
If you’re dying to find out more about the conference, hold onto your hats.
All will be revealed later in the week.
In the meantime, I wanted to talk about something the chairman said in his opening remarks.
Richard Wellins of DDI, a authority on leadership development and employee engagement (with lots of books and articles to his name) talked about a survey he conducted on the plane over from the US.
He asked 15 fellow travellers if they thought the workplace was a crueller place than two years ago.
13 said yes.
Looking at Richard, I guess he wasn’t crammed into steerage eating a half-frozen sandwich off his own knees.
That means his fellow travellers were probably pretty senior people.
All of which makes his survey results a little shocking.
Because if the guys in the comfortable seats are feeling it, how must everyone else be feeling?
Recession. Cost-cutting. Redundancies.
Doesn’t exactly make you want to dance in the street, does it?
The world’s a serious place right now, and maybe that’s as it should be.
But surely all that negativity starts to eat into productivity.
It impacts our effectiveness.
So we can’t fiddle while Rome burns.
But we can remember the string quartet who continued to play on as the Titanic filled with icy water.
Try to find ways to release the pressure.
Recognise little wins.
Complement a job well done.
Praise outstanding effort.
Talk up examples of the behaviours you want to see more of.
And what the hell – tell a few jokes as you go.
Here’s one to get you started.
A terrorist targeted a supermarket chain, placing a bomb next to the alphabetti spaghetti.
A police spokesman said it was lucky their expert defused it.
If the device had gone off, it could have spelled disaster.
Thank you
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About Me
- Kevin Jackson
- The glasses are important, since I’m almost totally blind in one eye. This means I have zero depth perception. Instead of making snap judgements, I have to think around a subject and look again to try and gain a sense of perspective. And that’s what I’m doing here - taking a different view of the trends and patterns around us to see if they’re as close as they seem, or further away than we thought. There’s not a discipline within the communications mix that I haven’t spent time in – what connects them though, is my passion for igniting advocacy and word-of-mouth. I’ve also worked on multi-platform campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands, we are all on first-name terms. Ultimately, whether it’s a consumer, business or internal audience, no one is exempt from my belief in engaging experiential communications. Over the last four years ago, I’ve been busy developing relationships across the telecoms, technology, FMCG, retail and energy sectors, to name a few.
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