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Archive Monthly Archives: June 2020

Four Steps to Make Your Meetings More Engaging and Enjoyable

The email comes in, meeting next Tuesday, 2 pm, Agenda attached. What happens for you?

A, your heart lift with joy and excitement at the magic that you are going to create in that meeting?

B, does it plummet with the thought of sitting through yet another painful meeting where you don’t feel like you have a say and nothing ever seems to come of the hours you spend in never-ending discussion.

I would love to think that it was option A, your heart soaring at the idea of what you can create, but I know that unfortunately, the option B is a lot more common. Today I would like to share with you four steps to get more heart soaring and less heart plummeting.

Catching the plummet

So why do you go to the meetings in the first place? Maybe you have to for your job; maybe you have to to get something to happen, perhaps you have to because ‘stupidly’ you signed up to do it.

First thing I will ask you to do is to go on a mind hunt for all the ‘have to’s that you are thinking. Notice when you say ‘have to’ regarding the meeting when you think have to. Whenever it has that energy, you are going to walk into it feeling like you have to drag yourself. Let’s catch those moments of ‘have to’.

Find the why

Next, I want you to zoom out to the bigger why. What excites you about the potential of the committee/team? What are you collectively trying to get done? What have you got to offer the group? And, what has the group got to provide you with? Now the trickiest part of this is to stay in the positive and the possibility with this. If you feel yourself heading off into the negative/problem, side of things, stop, breathe and got back to the bigger why, bigger possibilities. If you can, come up with a little statement about your why for these meetings like “I really want to see the local business community thrive.”

What excites you about the potential of the committee/team?

Switch the vibe

Now here comes the on-going part, and the part that makes a huge difference. Each time that you have a case of the ‘have to’s, the ‘what is the point’s or the heart plummets, when it comes to thinking about the meeting, switch it with your why statement. It would go something like this. “oh no I have to go to another meeting… YES AND I want to see the local business community thrive” and see how that changes your outlook for the meeting.

Share the vision

This one will supercharge the vibe of your meeting. Set an agenda item that explores ‘the why’ of your whole group. Why is each person in the room part of it? Here are the questions to look at again as a group

What excites you about the potential of this committee/team?
What are you collectively trying to get done?
What have you got to offer the group?
And, what has the group got to offer you?

In a group, you can have a ‘downer police’. Have a couple of people who call it out when the vision starts to be dragged down by all the things that aren’t working. You can always look at these later. However, we all do love to talk about problems and your why session will quickly regress into a ‘why not’ meeting if you don’t take extra care.

At the end of the session, summaries everyone’s whys into what will become a vision statement. This summary can be a powerful way to start each meeting and keep you working towards where you want to go.

Next steps

There is a lot more that you can do to improve the effectiveness of your meetings. If you would like to talk to me about what is happening in your meetings specifically, book in for a free 30-minute chat and we can see what is happening and what else you can do to have the hearts of your team or committee’s heart soar. Book a time here to find a time to talk about your meetings.

Trish Everett is a mindset coach and communication geek with a passion for creating workplaces that people love to work at. She is also a lecturer of Wellness Coaching at RMIT uni and is passionate about conversations that bring positive change.

The Behind-The-Scene Secret To Customer Experience

I like to think of my life as a series of experiences, some that I relish in, savor every moment of, and others that, well, they are downright bothersome, painful and the kind of experiences that I generally do my best to avoid.

Photo by Elena Koycheva

This behind-the-scene secret to customer experience will help you create a superior and lasting impression with every interaction.

Each of these experience has the power to either lift me up or drag me down. And what happens in one experience with usually color the next one. Do you see this in your life too?

Now go with me on this train on thought for a moment.

Think of your life, a large number of your weekly experiences are in the pursuit of earning money, and there are also quite a lot of experiences in the area spending that money.

How are these experiences coloring your life? Are they lifting you up or dragging you down?

And taking that thought train to one more stop:

How are your interactions coloring the life of the people who work for you and who buy from you?

Are you providing opportunities for a great experience?

Let's first dive deeper into customer experience.

When someone comes to buy from you, what kind of experience do they have? And before you shrug off this question with a ‘yeah it is a great experience’, I want to share a statistic with you that, when Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtics, shared this at the Qualtics 4X Event, almost had me falling off my chair.

80% of CEO’s believe they are providing a superior experience. That could translate to say 4 out of 5 of each person who is reading this. The crazy bit is that only 8% of customers agree.

That blows me away how significant the experience gap is in this area. And when we all think we are providing a superior experience, we aren’t looking for how we can make it better. It is time to step it up.

So what do we do?

First, meet the behind the scene secret to customer experience.

Behind the scene of customer experience we see that people buy from people. Your team, whether this is just you, or you have team upon team, your customers are buying from them. And I don’t just mean your sales and customer service people. They buy from the whole team.

From your CEO to your trainees, whether your customers talk to them or not, they all contribute to the customer’s experience. It is kind of huge to think of it. That everyone’s actions have an impact on customer experience.

It's time to talk about the employee experience.

Now let’s think about your team. I am going to start with a scary stat. According to research by Gallop, two-thirds of the global workforce is disengaged.

So if you are out there, wanting to create amazing experiences for your customers, think about what the experience is like for each member of your team, even if that is only you.

If your employees aren’t enjoying the experience of working for you, if they are disengaged, then it is that much harder for them to create an excellent experience for your customers. Put your oxygen mask on first. Make great experiences for your team.

Don't forget the flow on.

Each experience has the power to disrupt the next one. This happens to each of us moment by moment. If I lose my keys and rush about looking for them, I might get frustrated and then when I get in my car, and I might then cut someone off in my rush, and be out of sorts when I arrive at my destination.

Photo by Chandler Chen on Unsplash

If I am not careful, I can carry the downer of losing my keys for the whole day, mucking up each experience as I go. But that is just my side of it. The thing is, we don’t just keep this to ourselves. Our negative experiences can lead us to give others unpleasing experiences, like the car I cut off after losing my keys.

When you think of this on the level of your team and of your customers, you can see that without awareness and management, everyone’s experience can be tainted. But do not despair. The powerful thing is we can do the same thing with positive experiences. Let’s think about that for a moment.

What if every person, employee, customer and beyond, that came in contact with your business walked away feeling better than they did when they arrived?

Think of the difference that could make — the difference not only to your organisation’s success but to all those lives.

Five things that you can do today to give both customer experience and employee experience a lift:

Get curious – find out what it is like to be a customer to you as well as an employee. Start asking questions and don’t stop.
Get emphatic – be on a mission to see what it is like to walk in their shoes. How does it feel for them? What lifts them up? What knocks them down?
Commit to change – genuinely commit to creating experiences that will lift everyone up. Find ways to make it happen
Co-created action – an experience isn’t something you do to someone, it is something that happens in partnership. So the most powerful experiences are co-created.
Celebrate – when you create a better experience, celebrate it, each step of the way, even if you still have more to do.

Think of the difference that could make — the difference not only to your organisation’s success but to all those lives.

Originally published on SmallVille

5 Ways to Transform a Toxic Workplace

There are times where you can be facing a power battle in a toxic workplace. It is a tough time when that is going on. You can feel torn between going against your values and toeing the line or standing up for your values and faces waves of resistance.

Healing toxic workplaces — Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

Today I offer you these snippets to release the toxicity and reclaim some of your inner power.

Refocus your power.

Now look we could start this process by searching around, pointing fingers, throwing blame around. Look for who the wrongdoers are and then what? Stand up and point out what is wrong.

The problem here is that often everyone thinks that they are right, and blame often clouds the way through.

Refocus your power to avoid toxicity in the workplace — Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

The other part of this is petitioning others to come in and fight your battle. And while this is an essential part of bringing change, it can’t be the only way as waiting for someone else to make it all better often doesn’t feel very empowering.

So before you go down the obvious path to create change, let’s focus your inner power first. Then seeking support to help change the toxicity will work in a very different way. And doing it without blame, that is truly powerful.

Clear your inner toxicity.

Let’s look at what you can do to clear the toxic stuff going on around you:

To do this, we start with expanding inner strength and positivity.

One of the ways we get dragged down into the toxic workplace environment is by meeting it at its grotty level. How about trying this: Before we even set foot in the door, build up a strong sense of inner strength.

Now, this process is different for everyone. That might be:

Going for a run or other exercise
Doing power posses
Doing meditation (I like something heart-based for this like loving-kindness meditation (meta) or heart coherence.
Visualisation
Journaling (I like to start with the line “I chose to know and believe…”)

And there are many more. Find your way to start your day on a high so that you can walk into work fully charged.

Using anger as it is designed to be used.

One of the ways to transform a toxic workplace is to do activities that help alleviate the mind. — Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Anger is a powerful emotion. It isn’t there to challenge our self-mastery (although when out of check it can be great for that). What our anger is trying to tell us is usually that one of our boundaries has been crossed. And when I say boundaries, I mean, crossed a line that isn’t ok with us.

So when our anger alert has sounded, we have an opportunity to do two things.

The first is the question of our boundary or line in the sand of ok. So whatever boundary has been crossed, ask:

Is this boundary reasonable?
What does this boundary protect/support/enable?
Am I willing to compromise this boundary?

Once you are clear on that, the next step is to look at how are you going to defend that boundary. Now, this is where a bit of anger (not too much or it can overwhelm you) can come in handy as it helps you speak up.

What are you going to do or say to stand up for what you believe is crossing a boundary

Choose constructive communication over gossip in a toxic workplace.

I know how frustrating it is to be in a toxic environment, but blowing off steam is like adding full to the fire. We all need to talk about it when things are hard, but to be stuck in discussing a litany of problems is adding to the toxicity. Instead, after looking at what isn’t working, ask:

What can I do to make this better?
What are the positives I can see in this?
Where are they coming from?

Start the reconciliation process.

Reconcile with your colleagues and see how this can transform a toxic workplace — Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash

From a workplace level, it is crucial to start the reconciliation process.

Reconciliation has three stages:

Understand the different viewpoints and what each group needs. There needs to be a healing process around this, especially where things have got nasty.
Creating a safe dialogue to create a combined vision and action plan to move forward in a morally respectful way.
Build-in processes so that all involved can heal starting with a strong circle of safety, blame-free workplace culture, and a healthy support system.

Working through conflict in a way that heals, builds understanding, and creates agreed values at the same time as setting up future support and approaches to working together is key to creating a sustainable cultural improvement.

Everyone in the workplace is adding to the energy of the culture. Real change happens when everyone commits to doing their part to build a connection throughout the workplace. And that can start with one person. It can start today with you.

Originally published on SmallVille