Gary Ryan helps talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good®.

When you imagine your long-term future, dream big. Be as clear as possible about what the direction of your success will look like, without being too specific.  Leave open a thousand possibilities to make your dreams become reality. Let your four step plans bring to life the specific things that you will achieve over the short to medium term.

When establishing your plans for success, you must be grounded in reality. The good, the bad and the ugly. If you miss this step and either gloss over your current situation or paint a picture that isn’t as bad as you make it out to be, your plan is doomed to fail. You can’t plan for the future if the starting point that you are using for your plan isn’t your real starting point. If your industry is suffering from a range of economic factors that have caused a slow down, then you need to accept your brutal reality. Your plans need to be grounded in the fact that you will need to address how you are going to first survive and then thrive throughout the economic downturn. Behaving as if nothing has changed is doomed to fail.

Recently the CEO of a Shire Council with whom I was working re-enforced the positive vision that the organisation he serves is striving to create. He also painted a very real picture of the challenges that his shire is facing and the strengths that his team have in addressing those challenges. Rather than place his head in the sand, he took ownership of what he and his team could control, and identified the issues that were out of their control. You’ve heard it before, control what you can control and be prepared to mitigate as much as possible what you can’t control.

He spoke about the role that innovation would play in enabling his team to move from their present situation toward their vision. He recognised that just talking about these issues wasn’t going to be enough. His staff had to make a decision. Did they accept their current situation and were they prepared to do what they could to continue to build on the great outcomes that had been achieved over the previous two decades?

So how do you plan under these circumstances? Here are four steps that work for any type of planning.

1. Clearly identify what success looks like. Use timeframes to take the direction of your vision and make it specific. As an example you may have a personal vision to own a healthy property portfolio by the time you retire. You may have a five year plan that you are using to focus your activities. Your goal in this plan may be to pay off your own mortgage and to have purchased your first investment property.

2. Honestly assess your current situation as it relates to the success that you wish to create. Your current situation needs to consider all relevant variables including both the positive and negative ones. Continuing with our example you may have a secure job and a combined gross income with your partner of $120k. You may be renting in a wealthy area and have both vehicles on higher purchase. You are regularly charged interest on your credit card. You may have set budgets with your partner in the past but not followed them. You may also have a strong superannuation balance given your age and the contributions that you and your partner have been making over the past five years.

3. Identify all the actions that you will need to take to move from your present situation toward your goals. One action will always involve research. You will need to investigate the possible options that are available to you so that you can take the most optimised actions that will help you to achieve your goals.

4. Once you have completed your research and tapped in to subject experts, your task is to prioritise your tasks. Which actions will give you the highest leverage? Do these ones first. Then re-assess your current situation because it will have shifted and complete step three again. Then do step four again. Keep this process going until you achieve your goals.

This four step planning process ensures that your plans remain both dynamic and grounded in reality, while also providing you with focus for your actions.

Gary Ryan helps talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good.

You’ve had enough. You can’t handle your job anymore and you want to quit.

Don’t do it. Not if you live in Australia and you haven’t secured a new job, that’s for sure.

On Monday 23rd February the ABC Four Corners program The Jobs Game revealed the true state of unemployment in Australia. I don’t know about you, but despite all my education and experience I have always struggled to make sense of the reported unemployment figures. On the 12th of February, The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported that Australia’s unemployment rate was 6.4 %, a rise of 0.1 percent since December 2014.

What does an unemployment rate of 6.4% mean? In all honesty I can’t tell you and I haven’t been able to find a definition that is clear enough to share with you.

What I can tell you is that according to the ABS, 795,200 people are looking for work. The ABC Four Corners Program revealed that there are only 150,000 jobs available in Australia.

Ratios I can understand. This means that there are, on average 5.3 unemployed Australians looking for each available job. Why isn’t unemployment reported as a ratio of job seekers to jobs available?

Surely it is much easier for the average person to understand what that means, versus a figure such as 6.4%. I don’t know about you, but the figure 6.4% doesn’t represent the reality of the unemployment situation anywhere near as clearly as 5.3 people looking for each job. And that’s only an average. Clearly some jobs will have higher ratios.

Perspective matters. If more people understood the reality of the Australian unemployment situation then I believe that more people would be taking action to create more jobs, because clearly more jobs is what we need. In addition, more people will think twice about quitting their job.

If you are thinking about quitting your job, make sure that you have secured another job before you resign. Create a plan and treat your job hunting as a project. Above all else, don’t quit if you don’t have a job to go to. Not now. It just isn’t the smart thing to do.

Gary Ryan helps talented professionals like yourself, your team and organisation move Beyond Being Good.

A high performing team is one where the output or performance of the team at least equates to the output that you would expect from the collective talent of all the teams members. This statement is easy to say, but hard to achieve. In fact, 93% of my clients report that from a professional perspective they have never worked in a truly high performing team. They have worked in good teams, but not high performing ones.The Teams That Matter® model for creating high performing teams includes seven key elements. Most teams naturally do three or four of the seven elements. But it is the three or four that they aren’t doing that stops them from being a high performing team. The main reason for not doing three to four of the key elements is that they don’t know about them and they haven’t seen them modelled in the past.

1. Decide
If you intend to create a high performing team, then you must make a conscious decision to become one. Why? The three to four elements of the Teams That Matter® model that you haven’t completed in the past will require some getting used to. Your team members won’t be used to them either. Having a conversation as a team about what you would look like if you were a high performing team will help your team to clarify exactly what this statement means for them. It will then act as a catalyst for you to complete all the seven key elements of the Teams That Matter® model.

2. Purpose and Goals
Why does your team exist? The answer to this question highlights the purpose for your team. Your goals reflect the specific outcomes that you are striving to achieve. Your goals should reflect your ‘purpose in action’. Have you even been in a team where you have discussed your team’s purpose?
What if you discover that your team doesn’t have a purpose? Well, thank everybody and close the team down. Clearly time spent with this team would be a waste of time and who wants to do that in this time poor world that we live in.

3. Skills and Composition
Most teams have completed an assessment of the experience and skills of the members of their team. No doubt you have done that too.
I bet you haven’t taken steps to better understand the personality profiles of the members of your team. Or if you have, you haven’t done it in a way that has enabled you to use that information to improve communication on a daily basis among team members.
I use the What Makes People Tick tool, not because it is the most scientific, but because it is a tool that participants can use on a day to day basis beyond the introductory workshop. I find that other tools are too complex and require you to become an expert on the tool for it to be useful. Most people are too busy being experts in their own field of work to also have to become an expert on a personality profiling tool!
The benefit of understanding how each of your team members ‘tick’, is that you can modify how you communicate to ensure that your message is being delivered effectively. Effective communication is essential if you wish to become a high performing team.

4. Agreed Behaviours
Do high performing teams accept or reject unacceptable behaviour? I understand the answer to this question is a ‘no brainer!’. Yet, are you and your team members clear about what behaviours are acceptable or not for your team? Or do you assume that ‘everyone knows how to behave properly’? I’m telling you, they don’t know! Which is why you and your team need to make those behaviours explicit. Three questions is all it takes (I’ll share them in another post).

5. Plan and Measure
This is one of the elements that most team do. Although be careful with your measurements. Russell Ackoff, Professor Emeritus at the Wharton Business School said,

“It’s better to do the right thing wrong, than the wrong thing right. If you do the wrong thing right you just get wronger and wronger.”

Make sure that your measurements are measuring the ‘right’ things.

6. Perform
This means that you ‘do’ all seven elements in the model. It also means that you never, ever forget that if your team changes only by one person, it is a brand new team. You need to quickly review all seven elements and make any necessary adjustments. This is a critical lesson that most teams don’t know exists.

7. Monitor and Review
No doubt you monitor your progress toward your goals. Do you monitor your agreed behaviours? It’s hard to do if you haven’t made them explicit! This key element works hand in glove with the Agreed Behaviours and Plan and Measure elements.

In addition, when you complete a milestone or achieve a goal, the following four After Action Review questions are very powerful.

What did we plan?
What actually happened?
What did we learn?
What will we do next time?

Now you know how to create a high performing team. Give it a go!

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good.

If you take something (a process, a service, a product) and put it with something else (an idea, a concept, a new process, another service, another product) and what they produce when they are put together is useful, then you have innovated.

In terms of the recruitment process interviewers are more regularly asking interviewees to share how they have contributed to innovation. Seeing innovation from the perspective that I have shared with you will enable you to have clear responses to those questions. And that has to help your chances of getting the job you want!

Take out your tablet and note down the innovations that you have helped bring to your organisation. If you can’t find any, then remember the simple formula. If you take something and place it with something else and what they create together is useful, then you have innovated.

Gary Ryan enables talented professionals, their teams and organisations to move Beyond Being Good.