Wednesday 13 July 2011

I’m off on my holidays in a couple of days time so this will be my last blog for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to a week at home with the boys, fishing and watching / playing cricket and then we’re jet-setting off to Devon for a week. As I lay on my sun bed in the drizzle, I often like to reflect on the principles by which I strive to live, work, manage and lead, so I thought I’d share these with you today. These are originally from Tony Schwartz, slightly adapted by me and I find them a great guide, especially when things get tough.

1. Always challenge certainty, especially your own. When you think you're undeniably right, ask yourself "What might I be missing here?" If we could truly work it all out, what else would there be left to do?

2. Excellence is an unrelenting struggle, but it's also the surest route to enduring satisfaction. Getting there requires practicing deliberately, delaying gratification, and forever challenging your current comfort zone.

3. Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you're feeling. Think of the best boss you ever had. How did he or she make you feel? That's the way you want to make others feel.

4. When in doubt, ask yourself, "How would I behave here at my best?" We know instinctively what it means to do the right thing, even when we're inclined to do the opposite. If you find it impossible, in a challenging moment, to envision how you'd behave at your best, try imagining how someone you admire would respond.

5. If you do what you love, the money may or may not follow, but you'll love what you do. It's magical thinking to assume you'll be rewarded with riches for following your heart. What it will give you is a richer life. If material riches don't follow, and you decide they're important, there's always time for Plan B.

6. You need less than you think you do. All your life, you've been led to believe that more is better, and that whatever you have isn't enough. It's a prescription for disappointment. Instead ask yourself this: How much of what you already have truly adds value in your life? What could you do without?

7. Accept yourself exactly as you are but never stop trying to learn and grow. One without the other just doesn't work. The first, by itself, leads to complacency, the second to self-flagellation. The paradoxical trick is to embrace these opposites, using self-acceptance as an antidote to fear and as a cushion in the face of setbacks.

8. Meaning isn't something you discover, it's something you create, one step at a time. Meaning is derived from finding a way to express your unique skills and passion in the service of something larger than yourself. Figuring out how best to contribute is a lifelong challenge, reborn every day.

9. You can't change what you don't notice and not noticing won't make it go away. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. To avoid pain, we rationalize, minimize, deny, and go numb. The antidote is the willingness to look at yourself with unsparing honesty, and to hold yourself accountable to the person you want to be.

10. When in doubt, take responsibility. It's called being an adult.

Speak again in a couple of weeks.

Carlton

Thursday 30 June 2011

It’s been a week of travelling around the county for me meeting teams in the department. On Tuesday I was in Salisbury – Milford Street with the customer services team and then Bourne Hill with the registrars and a number of other teams. Today was Shurnhold with the transformation and rroperty teams and then over to the East Wing with the payroll team in shared services. I always enjoy these opportunities to talk with staff face to face about the challenges we face and how we’re going to meet them. I always learn something new about how we can improve the effectiveness of our business.

The Salisbury team had numerous ideas for improving things in the face to face contact centre. Ideas about capacity, queuing, improvements to the Civica payment systems as well as ideas around improving communications internally with other services. I’ve shared these with my management team and we’ll work on these together. I was struck with the positive “can do” attitude of everybody I met. Thank you for this.

At Shurnhold it was good to see the police integrated with the transformation team. We are working closely together to develop our campus and hub proposals to include facilities to share between both organisations. More on this anon...

The payroll team wanted to know more about the new transformation and resources team, and we worked together to explore some of the business challenges ahead that we face, particularly from a shared services payroll perspective. We then discussed some of the issues emerging from the staff survey and planned how we might engage staff to address these together.

If you would like me to visit your team for chat about anything then please do get in touch and I’ll come along.

Thanks for reading and speak again soon.
Carlton