People Discovery is founded on the concept of Inspirational Leadership.  Most people have a good definition of what that means, for me it means you lead from within.  We all have wisdom inside of us; some of us are better practiced at tapping into that wisdom than others.   If you lead either a team, your family, or yourself from inner wisdom, it is a win/win scenario because you are also helping others tap into their own inner wisdom.   We aren’t always in the right state to tap into our…

Reject Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom says “Treat others as you would like to be treated” and yet this is the root cause of most performance problems and communication challenges in the workplace (not to mention personal relationships!).  In a massive study of managers who were leading high performance teams, researchers Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman discovered that great managers have very little in common.  However, they all…

There is no more compelling evidence than the use of psychometric tests in recruitment, that parts of modern organizational life are drifting back in to the dark ages.

Recruiters are making unsubstantiated promises to businesses by using unreliable, invalid and inappropriate psychological tests on often bewildered job seekers and staff.

In Australia about 40 percent of recruiters and employers ask job applicants or their staff to sit psychometric tests. The tests are insulting,…

Distraction via email is the prime culprit of low productivity in the workplace. Our recent research* into distraction led us to explore why emails are a temptation too hard to resist.

You may be familiar with the famous ‘marshmallow experiment’ which was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s; four-year-olds were given a marshmallow, but told that if…

Let me ask you…what is sales enablement? Is it training? Is it coaching? Is it research? Is it gadgets? Is it big data????

It’s all of these things and more…but one thing it is not is sales training alone.

Sales enablement is about enabling your business to sell as much business as it can, as profitably as it can.

I’d like to put forward 3 tenets of sales enablement:

1. It’s…

Sometimes a paradigm or a philosophy you live your life by isn’t at the forefront of your conscious mind. When I was naming our new monthly E-zine; The Extra MILE became the perfect choice because I realised that it epitomised the effort I try to put into life, most of the time.

When I was younger I raised around £1000 on a charity event I organised. I was fairly pleased with this. A friend of mine asked if they could replicate the event and use my resources. Of course I agreed. When…

The most frustrating thing about communication is that it is never good enough. There is always someone who will get the wrong end of the stick; they will choose to interpret what you're saying in a completely different way than what you intend, or they simply won’t take a hint.  It’s all about below conscious motivation and once you know what to look for you can become even more effective. 

Expert communicators will always take responsibility for what they are saying and what gets…

Over the past 12 months we have undertaken a variety of workplace investigations or mediations that have centered around unresolved conflicts.  In some cases we identified that the Human Resource professional within the company (at a range of levels and most often our direct client) had chosen to undertake an informal mediation that had invariably failed and the conflict between the parties escalated as a result.

From these experiences with Human Resource professionals, and I count…

Today on Smart Company, Fi Bendall discusses gamification and how everyday companies can use it to produce real results. Read the full article here.

Searching for an exciting job in the best companies has made Gen Ys famous for being job hoppers, but this should not deter companies from hiring younger workers, says Ben Fuller, Sales Manager of Bullhorn Australia.

A perceived lack of company loyalty combined with the high cost of turnover for employers has earned Gen Y a reputation for being unpredictable and impulsive.

However, it’s not quite as black and white as that. Gen Ys have proven to be talented, tech-savvy…

From our experience of working with many and varied clients, workplace bullying happens because managers allow it to. Some managers may condone bullying (and in fact display bullying behaviours themselves) because they either consciously or subconsciously subscribe to such ideas as:

-          this is the way a person is treated when they are ‘different’ or not liked;

-          a colleague deserves a bit of a ribbing or needs to be put ‘back in their place’ from time to…

Writing about the “darker” side of our human nature could well be depressing if I didn't wholeheartedly believe the best in people. Make no mistake about it, we all have traits which maybe we need to think about. More often or not, the traits we don’t like are unconscious and we simply aren't aware of them. The beauty of identifying unsavoury traits is by bringing these into our awareness; it gives us an opportunity to change them! 



Being a great leader is…

Imagine everyone on the planet simultaneously getting in contact with 150,000 other people.  This is what is actually happening with each of the neurons in the brain of a young child.  Scientists now know that by the age of three there are up to fifteen thousand connections for each of the one hundred billion neurons in our brain.  Not surprisingly this is far too much information to cope with, so we have developed a way of making sense of it all.  Our own unique sense of it!  During the…

“It’s That Time of Year Again – I’ve Just Sent You an Invite”

For those of us in any type of management position, it is in fact soon to be ‘that time of year’.  It will soon be that time in our organisational calendar and life cycle when the six or twelve month performance reviews will occur. Even the mention of them can send a shiver down the spine of employee and manager alike. The planning, the booking of meeting rooms, sending the Outlook calendar invite, the dry mouths,…

The Ernst & Young Australian Productivity PulseTMi began checking Australian Workers ‘sentiments’ about individual and organisational productivity 18 months ago. The latest findings report that 85% of workers could be more productive, and 21% said that just a few things would need to change. These things were: poor staff management, lack of motivation & reward and…

While few people in recruitment, the JSA’s or corporate Australia, have heard of the Experience+ Corporate Champions program (it’s for employers of mature age workers), there’s a curious development about the $15.6 million tender, which is newsworthy.

Recently DEEWR put a tender out to get qualified providers to deliver the program. You can find out who they are here.…

For those of you who read my blog regularly you will know that one of my favourite questions is “Would you rather be right, or be happy?”. This is literally a choice many of us are making every day.  When we judge a situation or someone, we often filter out any information which doesn't accord with our belief or our perception. 

So for example we might want to believe that we have to go to a job we hate because we need the money, when in fact the truth is, we simply don’t want to make…