Category Archives: Professional Development

Expert Tip – Motivation Factor 4

In the fifth of the short videos in the 11 part series on how to create motivated employees, I share the fourth of 10 key factors that when present will collectively enhance the motivation of your team members/employees.

How do you rate for this factor?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Expert Tip – Motivation Factor 3

In the fourth of the short videos in the 11 part series on how to create motivated employees, I share the third of 10 key factors that when present will collectively enhance the motivation of your team members/employees.

How do you rate for this factor?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

How strategy and S&Ps support great service

All staff, whether the CEO or the lowest paid employee in the organisation have a high sense of job satisfaction when they are able to serve their customers properly. When systems & processes exist to support the passion of people, great service can flow through an organisation.

The staff satisfaction that comes from providing great service is an outcome of the support that an organisation’s strategy and systems & processes provide for the staff members when they are in the act of providing their service. In turn, this type of internal relationship results in a virtuous cycle that generates great service at the customer interface, whether internal or external to the organisation.

In this sense, it is absolutely vital that systems & processes support staff in building positive relationships with clients, customers and stakeholders. Without this support delivering great service and staff job satisfaction fall through the floor.

How well do your organisation’s systems & processes support staff to deliver great service?

Copyright Gary Ryan 2011

Relationship employees work harder and smarter. They care about the business, its future, its destiny. The business becomes their business. 
Leonard L Berry – researcher and author
Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Webinar Recording OTM Plan For Personal Success

This is a recording of the OTM Plan for Personal Success™ Introductory Webinar.
In this webinar you will learn about:
* One concept;
* Five principles; and
* Six vital strategies.

That are all required to achieve personal success.

More information on all the options available for creating an OTM Plan for Personal Success™ is available here.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

What Really Matters! Volume 3, Number 1, 2011 ebook released

Hi folks!

Please access your free copy of the most recent addition to the What Really Matters! ebook series. Selected articles from January 1st 2011 through to March 31st 2011 have been included in this ebook.

Please download your copy of What Really Matters! Volume 3, Number 1, 2011 here.

Please send your feedback and suggestions for the next ebook in this series to feedback@orgsthatmatter.com .

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Leadership Insights Series – Michael Josem, Senior Manager, Game Security Team, PokerStars.com Webinar Recording

This is a recording of the first of our ‘Leadership Insights Series’ Webinars for 2011. Gary Ryan interviewed Michael Josem, a successful young professional who has created a highly successful career as a result of playing games!

Michael shares a series of turning points and decisions that enabled him to ‘out’ an online gaming fraud, which created a series of events that resulted in him being offered a job in the field of work associated with playing online poker, a passion of Michael’s that had developed while he was at university. One of these events resulted in Michael being interviewed on the USA 60 Minutes program for his role as an internet security expert in discovering the online fraud which result in over $20Million being returned to players.

With a strong sense of personal values Michael’s role involves ensuring that ‘fraud’ is kept out of the system and that online poker players all have a fair chance for success.

Michael shares how his practices of service excdllence, personal development and getting things done were shaped in his days as an elected student representative at university. If you have wondered how jobs such as Michael’s are discovered, or how online poker can be driven by an organisation with a strong sense of fairness and integrity, then view this 40 minute webinar, I’m sure you will find it intriguing.

Michael, in his late 20s shares his story and how his passion has him setting sail to work in the United Kingdom’s Isle of Man.

Length: 41:11

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Are your actions undermining what you have asked your team to do?

One of my coaching clients is a coach of a semi-professional sporting team in Melbourne, Australia.

We were having a conversation about the excuses that he is receiving from players regarding their inability to make it to training. He was planning to ‘have a go at them for their lame excuses‘ at their next training session.

He provided an example that one player had told him that he couldn’t attend training because he would be attending his niece’s birthday party.

My client was frustrated. He felt that such excuses were pretty lame. “I would never have missed training for my niece’s birthday party. How lame!”

Just as I asked him if it was possible that this player did in fact place his niece’s birthday party as a higher priority than training, at least for this one day in the year, my client’s phone rang. It was one of his assistant coaches so I encouraged him to take the call.

After a few minutes he came back.

“Gee. The excuse was true. His sister is extremely unwell and her daughter is without her mum on her birthday. He’s doing the right thing.”

I couldn’t have been more excited. The information that my client received was perfect for what I was about to ask him.
“What have you asked your players to do if they can’t make training?” I asked.

“Ring or text me” he replied.

“Is that what they are doing?”

“Yes”.

“So they are doing what you have asked them to do?” I re-enforced.

“Yyyeeeesssss?” He said, his brow slightly furrowed.

The penny had not yet dropped.

“It seems to me that your players are doing exactly what you have asked. They are ringing you or texting you when they cannot attend training and providing their reasons. Yet your focus has shifted to the content of their reasons. You are focussing on whether or not you think their reasons are valid. As this example with the niece has shown, clearly you thought the excuse was lame, but when you found out the whole story you found out that it made sense.”

“What if,” I continued, “you stopped worrying about the content of the excuses you are being provided. Why not believe whatever they tell you, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. This example shows that the player involved was being honest with you. Ultimately, isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes it is” he replied.

He then said, “If I had used the niece’s birthday party as an example of the types of excuses for not training that I was getting, as I had planned to do, and I had ridiculed such an excuse I could have ruined my relationship with that player and shown the players that I didn’t really want them to be honest with me. Maybe I could use this example to show that I will believe whatever they tell me. Ultimately, if players want to lie to me, that’s about them, not me.”

He continued, “I was getting pressure from the other coaches to stop accepting all the ‘lame‘ excuses we believed we had been getting, but training attendances are actually far exceeding those of previous years. The collective data on the whole group is actually very good. I want the players to be honest with me and that is what they have been doing. I can see how easily I could have changed that behaviour and inadvertently encouraged them to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. I’m glad we’ve had this chat!”

If you have ever played sport, or acted in a play or played in a band and felt the ‘sweetness‘ of perfect timing, this is how I felt at this point in the conversation.

I see this a lot in my work. Leaders asking their people to do something, which they then do, but the leader loses focus on what they had asked their people to do and shift their focus onto something else, albeit closely related. But they effectively ‘move the goalposts’. This causes confusion and triggers the “Guessing Game”. Team members start guessing what the leader really wants. This is extremely destructive. Yet the leader, from my experience, has little awareness that they had in fact moved the goalposts.

One of the great challenges for leaders is to maintain behavioural alignment between what they say and what they do. Fortunately, in the above example my client was able to maintain his.

What are your examples of this challenge?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Creating Shared Value Contributes To Creating Organisations That Matter!

Michael Porter and Mark Kramer have released an interesting article about organisations creating shared value in the Harvard Business Review.

Porter and Kramer argue that organisations need to operate from a new paradigm. One where value creation is not just about profit generation but also about how organisations can contribute to solving community and societal problems. They are not talking about social responsibility either.

They are talking about a genuine paradigm shift in which profit and social responsibility create equal value and they argue that it is possible to create such an organisation.

Shared value provides value to the organisation achieving its objectives, provides value to the employees of the organisation in helping them to contribute to worhtwhile projects and provides value to the broader community in contributing to solving social problems.

You can access the full article here.

Establishing the skills to create an organisation that matters is paramount to being able to create shared value. Yet most organisations are unaware of the skills required to undertake such a paradigm shift. Developing the skills to dialogue is one of the critical skills required. You can learn more about the seven skills of dialogue here.

What are your experiences of creating shared value?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Inspire 2011! ebook out now

Congratulations and thank you to all our OTM Academy members who contributed to the creation of our first ever OTM Academy member created ebook – Inspire 2011!

I’m confident that you will agree that after reading Inspire 2011! you will be bursting for 2011 to come along so that you can hit the ground running!

Please note that the entries in this ebook are, for most people, their first written piece to be published, so a huge congratulations to each of them and thanks again for taking the time to make your submissions.

The purpose of this ebook is for it to be shared, so please follow the instructions on page one and share it as broadly as possible.

You can download Inspire 2011! here.

Enjoy!

Gary Ryan

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com