Being effective in what you do, managing others or leading organisations, means starting with understanding yourself, and maximising your own potential. We need to continuously raise our own game before aiming to raise that of others or our business.

Being Effective

In order to effectively manage others, we need to understand yourself: our world, goals, motivations, drivers, ways of working, and so on.

Once we have some understanding of the world we live in and how we like to interact with it, then we can start to consider how to organise ourselves to maximise the way we operate. This tends to split into things under our control in some way, pro-active work, and things that just 'hit us', re-active work. In all cases we first need to corral incoming work, deal with or defer it, action deferred work at the best time and finally dump what's left in the right place. Easy to say, but lots of things get in the way.

One of the areas we can all improve to make us more effective is how we use our brains. Areas such as creativity, memory, intuition and speed reading can all be improved to varying degrees, helping us handle work more efficiently.

Finally in this area there is the concept of ongoing personal development. If we continue to do what we have always done, then we will continue to get what we always got.

In modern business good relationships, internally and externally, are critical to success, as well as making work a better place to be.

Working with People

Self awareness, and personal effectiveness, are critical starting points, but we also need to be able to look outwards, expounding our vision and directing the business.

The first stage in achieving this is becoming excellent at communicating with others. The fundamentals of good communication are simple, in the same way that music is based on a simple set of seven notes, plus sharps & flats. But the way in which the notes are put together, and the pitch at which they are played is what creates the great music that moves us.

In the end all communication is about influencing others to some attitude or way of thinking, or to perform some form of behaviour. However, there are ways in which we can increase our chance of achieving the influence over others that gives us the best chance of succeeding.

If all this is done with integrity and honesty then we are well on the way to building strong relationships, and there are other ways to accelerate this.

Finally by building up groups of relationships and communicating with a range of people we start to build the communities that make business and the whole of modern life thrive.