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This year’s CIPD Ireland conference is being offered as a free event to CIPD members.

CIPD Ireland says that the conference “is designed around interlinking themes that reflect the current key issues of concern across all sectors of the economy”. Speakers will address topics including leadership, labour market trends, stress management, coaching and performance optimisation.

Unfortunately I will be out of the country so can’t make it, but it looks like a good line-up for an event that last year cost €975!

You’ll find more information here.

If you do attend, please come back and post here to tell us how it went.

Anyway, back to teambuilding Sir-Alan-style. This week he decided to nominate the team leaders himself, putting Noorul and Paula in charge for no other reason than to get a chance to have a look at them in action.

Although his team ‘won’ in the end, Noorul’s team-leading skills were non-existent. He didn’t set any direction, his decision-making was poor and his team didn’t seem to know what he wanted or what he was thinking most of the time.

Paula, on the other hand, was pretty good, I thought. She got her whole team involved but made decisions when she needed to. She seemed to have everyone on board and working well with her.
Unfortunately her lack of attention when calculating the soap recipe meant that she costed it at ‘naff all’, rather than the £700 it should have been – a mistake that ultimately led to her demise…

Obviously it is a competition with an individual winner so the teamwork element is always going to be a bit contrived, but surely part of the aim is that candidates demonstrate their ability to work well with others and to support them, rather than shoot them down and deny all accountability, à la Ben. So far I haven’t seen much teamwork or team leadership, though maybe that’s still to come…

Complete our Stress at Work survey

I was recently discussing the results of some work I did with a client and he told me that, although they have not conducted any formal work to measure engagement since we worked together, they had over 95% attendance at their Christmas party last year, versus a usual attendance of around 80%. Attendance at all-staff meetings is on the increase month on month and the response rate to the annual employee survey is up 8% this year. Measures such as these, although informal, will give you an indication of employee engagement in your organisation without carrying out much work at all. Look for the subtle signs as well as the obvious metrics such as sickness absence and staff turnover, and you’ll get a good feel for what you need to do next.

Conflict can be very obvious, manifesting in arguments or open antagonism, but it can also simply be about differences of opinion or personality. So how can you recognise the more subtle symptoms of conflict? They might include:

Not completing work on-time or to quality goals
Gossip
Not returning phone calls or e-mails
Passive/aggressive behaviour
Not responding to requests for information
Hoarding information that should be shared
Finger pointing
Not attending required meetings
Absenteeism

If you spot any of these behaviours it may be worth asking yourself whether there is more to them than meets the eye, and whether there is something you may need to investigate with your team. Just because it’s not obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t there!

A recent experience where one individual in a newly-formed team was able to articulate his discomfort with a particular situation and discuss his opinions with the rest of the team meant that the situation could be resolved there and then. Had that not been the case the likelihood is that the individual would have left the event with a sour taste in his mouth and certainly not feeling part of a close, supportive team.

Sometimes it requires some coaxing to get someone to open up about what is wrong, and team members might be loathe to voice a different opinion than that of the rest of the team. Force it and work through the differences, it’s worth it.

One of the characteristics of high performing teams is that they have great relationships and they recognise and reward one another, so what better day to remind your team how much you appreciate them and the effort they put in? You don’t have to go the whole hog with cards and flowers, but maybe a chocolate on their desks? You might be surprised how far it would go to building morale and cementing their commitment to you – go on, give it a try!

Me: Why not?

Them: Because I have given up making them

Me: Why?

Them: Because I never stick to them

Me: Why? (my vocabulary is limited)

Them: Because I always make them too difficult; Because I make too many; Because I’m not motivated to carry them out; Because I forget; Because I get distracted and focus on other things; Because there’s nobody pushing me to do them; Because I lost sight of the point; Because I chose them at random and they don’t actually fit in my life;…and so on – you get the picture.

New Year’s resolutions and goals and objectives at work are exactly the same thing applied to different parts of our lives, and they succeed or fail for exactly the same reasons.

To make sure we achieve our objectives – at home or at work – we need to follow some simple rules:

1. Find one or two things that will make a major difference, and focus on those
• We all have lots of things in our lives that we would like to change, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. You are far more likely to succeed by changing one thing at a time than you are if you try to change everything at once.
2. Write them down
• Studies have shown that writing down your goals increases your chances of achieving them, and of course if you have them written where you can see them all the time you are more likely to remain committed to them and keep striving to achieve them.
3. Break them into bite-sized pieces
• In corporate language today we often hear the phrase ‘let’s not try to eat the elephant’. Ignoring the disturbing question of why we would consider trying to eat an elephant, we understand the point. If you are aiming to run a marathon you will probably aim for a 10km run and then a half-marathon before you go for the full monty.
4. Track your progress
• Measure your progress at regular intervals, and keep a record somewhere – make a chart, keep a personal log, draw up a scoreboard or mark it in your diary – whatever works for you, but make sure you know how you’re doing. We often avoid tracking because we don’t want to see that we haven’t made progress, but it is often this that will motivate us to work harder!
5. Reward yourself
• Identify some rewards that you will give yourself to celebrate achieving certain milestones. This will motivate you to keep going and allow you some guilt-free treats along the way!
6. If at first you don’t succeed…
• …try, try again. Examine where you’re going wrong, make sure it’s still something worth doing and get help if you need it, but don’t give up. Stay focused and believe that you can do it and you are certain to achieve.