0418 126 652   phil@thebiggergame.com.au
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Back to office or back to the future?

Back to office or back to the future?

By in behaviour, change, communication, culture, decision making, engagement, organisation, Performance, structure, teams
10 months ago
10 months ago 0 0 373

Summary: Return to workplace scenarios following COVID are loaded with challenges. Staff have new expectations, experiences and capabilities after being forced to work from home over the past 12 months A leader would benefit from taking a considered approach to getting staff back to the office, and use the opportunity to redefine the way work is performed. Opportunities also exist to build culture, enhance relationships and deepen staff commitment by doing it right. In Australia, we have done an outstanding job of suppressing the Coronavirus, allowing us to contemplate shifting to a post-pandemic footing. One of the big questions that is challenging businesses and business leaders is that of getting the staff back to the office after mandatory work-from-home scenarios. What should a leader consider as they make this assessment for their business?  Should back to the office be simply a return to the past, or should something more valuable

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Making resilience real

By in change, Coaching, culture, Customer focus, decision making, Performance, resilience
1 year ago
1 year ago 0 0 334

In times of extreme change – as we have seen in 2020 – resilience becomes a key property of individuals, teams, and organisations that want to not only survive, but to thrive. Resilience is often used to describe an ‘ability to cope’ – like a spring that bends under pressure that then ‘snaps back’ when the pressure is released. As we have learned from the accelerated and amplified change of 2020 and the COVID pandemic, not everything that changes ‘snaps back’ – which means that the change pressure doesn’t go away, it remains in place and may even get greater. Consider your business circumstance through the pandemic, and in particular what has changed for your customers: What changes have occurred that will now remain as the new ‘normal’? What changes occurred that will ‘snap back’ to the way they were when the change pressure is removed? What changes have been

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Is it time to fight your biggest enemies?

By in behaviour, business development, change, Coaching, culture, decision making, Performance
2 years ago
2 years ago 0 0 832

Sometimes they feel like your closest friends. They seem to want to keep you safe, keep you comfortable. But these two ‘false friends’ are your worst enemies if you want to succeed in business or in life. These old friends are fear and habit. They are insidious. They don’t walk around bold as brass. Most often they hide themselves away and ‘whisper’ into your ear. They sprinkle just enough of their magic on what you do to keep you stuck, keep you scared and keep you small. Have you ever sat in a meeting where someone says “yes, but we don’t do it that way!”. Or someone might find a way to get their point across with something like “But what if we don’t do it!” These are simply versions of your false friends speaking up to keep you stuck. There is some sort of comfort in not changing, not

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snap out of it! – your workplace trance is stifling your performance

By in behaviour, change, communication, culture, decision making, Influence, Performance
5 years ago
5 years ago 0 0 980

We can’t help it – we all get hypnotised by our circumstances. The quality of your performance and culture is often a direct result of the workplace ‘trance’ that you and your teams are in. So many people seem to get stuck in low quality ‘trances’, where poor performance is the only practical outcome. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. We can consciously choose a higher quality trance and then achieve so much more. Hypnosis works by placing people into trance. Whilst there are lots of scary ideas about hypnosis and trance, world experts in the field define trance quite pragmatically: Trance is a simply a state of focused attention. Consider when you are absorbed in a great book or TV show. People can walk in and out of the room, and you may not even notice them. You can be absorbed in the story, and instead of

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How the status quo is quietly killing your change efforts

By in change, culture
5 years ago
5 years ago 0 0 1178

Working on many change projects, you often see highly motivated people, with brilliant change plans and clear benefits to all. And yet these best laid plans simply fail. The time, investment and effort put in counts for nothing, and somehow the organisation manages to veer back to its old habits and its established status quo. There are several key factors that ensure that your change process will succeed. The most overlooked one is hidden within the culture and fabric of your business – the human systems that have developed over time. Your business is actually full of these human ‘systems’, which actively work to derail any change efforts you seek to make. A business full of human systems A system is any group of interactions between individuals or groups. Most businesses have many overlapping ‘systems’, which each develop their own rules, structures and processes, becoming more and more closed to

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you get what you deserve

Your culture – you get what you deserve

By in behaviour, change, culture, Performance
6 years ago
6 years ago 0 0 1652

It is interesting when working with organisations that are struggling with culture issues, poor performance and less-than-desirable behaviours, how often the leaders believe they are ‘victims’ of some sort of cultural ’virus’ to which they can just seek a cure. The truth can be a little more confronting. The culture of the organisation is the culture that the leadership deserves. Either the leadership allows the culture to form by chance, and be controlled by others (making them the ‘victims’), or they create a culture consciously, developing the elements of the culture with clear direction and intent. The effort to do so will provide the organisation with the culture it deserves – one of high performance behaviours. As a leader, how do you contribute consciously to developing and maintaining your culture? Culture can be defined as the social pressure that shapes an individual’s behaviour in the context of a group. It

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Are you making the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ mistake?

By in behaviour, Coaching, culture, innovation, Leadership
6 years ago
6 years ago 0 0 1203

Focusing on both successful outcomes and successful behaviours is the key to building sustainable high performance in business. Caveat emptor – buyer beware. It really is true that you get what you pay for. This is absolutely true when you consider the things we focus on – and incentivise – in the workplace. Consider the following examples: • Jordan Belfort – the ‘Wolf of Wall street’ only focused on outcomes (making money), which encouraged behaviours which ended with him in prison. • Companies set their salesforce a goal, and once they achieve it, they start ‘banking’ sales for the next quarter. • The business puts out a behavioural edict to ‘manage costs’ – and misses business opportunities because it becomes more important to ‘watch the penny’ that capitalise on opportunities to deliver business results. In these examples, if we focus only upon ‘outcomes’ we may get exactly what we pay

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7 ways you are screwing up performance reviews (and what o do about it)

By in Coaching, culture, organisation, Performance
6 years ago
6 years ago 0 0 1396

I get calls at this time of year from leaders in organisations who have left the mid-year assessment to the last minute (or their managers have). Regardless of which side of the review they are on, they all say something like: “Phil, I hate these things. They are such a waste of time. They just do more harm than good”. They seek help to make the performance appraisal process more palatable for them, and more valuable for the organisation. It raises an important question- should organisations do away with performance appraisal processes? My simple answer is an emphatic NO. Performance reviews are critical on a number of levels, and simply because people perform them poorly is not a signal to ditch them, but rather a signal to somehow do them differently. Why are they critical? Performance reviews are important for individuals and for organisations. They provide the link for learning

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‘Trance formation’ for brilliant transformation

By in business development, change, culture, organisation, Transformation
6 years ago
6 years ago 0 0 1357

When we talk about change, we seek transformation to something better. What if, to borrow from the world of hypnosis, that the transformation was really a ‘trance’ formation? How can understanding the concepts of trance help us to lead change? What has hypnosis got to do with it? Hypnosis is characterised by the ‘state’ of trance that people experience. Often it is misunderstood, as a state of ‘mind control’ where the hypnotist exerts some special power over the person entering trance. This concept has been completely debunked over the last thirty years, with over 4000 clinical papers into understanding hypnosis and trance. Even more recently, with the availability of new brain imaging modalities, we are learning to understand trance in a whole new way. What has been discovered is that trance is simply a state of personal absorption. This means that parts of our experience are in focus and more

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Creating Creativity – what you can do (part 2)

By in business development, change, creativity, culture, decision making, engagement, Leadership, organisation, Strategy
6 years ago
6 years ago 0 0 1255

In part one of this series, we explored the elements of individuals and teams that limit creativity and innovation. In the second part of the series, we will explore what organisations can do about it.  By creating a culture of innovation, designing your thinking and taking true innovative leadership in your organisation, you can move beyond the things which impede creativity, and really create something special. Create the culture for innovation For innovation and design to be a reality in an organisation, it has to move from being a peripheral activity to a culturally accepted process, central to the business. This means the culture has to be accepting of the time and effort that creativity can take, and reward ‘exploration’ rather than outcomes. Peter Murphy, design instructor in Melbourne suggests that creativity is a difficult process, and to be truly innovative, they must “roll their sleeves up, say goodbye to

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Phil Owens – Founder of The Bigger Game

Phil is one of Australia’s leading performance and leadership specialists. He honed his skills working with executives and leaders around the world, coaching and consulting in over 30 countries, from entrepreneurial start-ups to boards of multi-billion dollar businesses.

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