The Bigger Game culture Archives

Is it time to fight your biggest enemies?

By Phil Owens in behaviour, business development, change, Coaching, culture, decision making, Performance

2 months ago

2 months ago 0 0 170

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

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

By Phil Owens in behaviour, change, communication, culture, decision making, Influence, Performance

3 years ago

3 years ago 0 0 651

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

How the status quo is quietly killing your change efforts

By Phil Owens in change, culture

3 years ago

3 years ago 0 0 829

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

Your culture – you get what you deserve

By Phil Owens in behaviour, change, culture, Performance

3 years ago

3 years ago 0 0 1156

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

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

By Phil Owens in behaviour, Coaching, culture, innovation, Leadership

3 years ago

3 years ago 0 0 794

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

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

By Phil Owens in Coaching, culture, organisation, Performance

4 years ago

4 years ago 0 0 968

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

‘Trance formation’ for brilliant transformation

By Phil Owens in business development, change, culture, organisation, Transformation

4 years ago

4 years ago 0 0 889

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

Creating Creativity – what you can do (part 2)

By Phil Owens in business development, change, creativity, culture, decision making, engagement, Leadership, organisation, Strategy

4 years ago

4 years ago 0 0 848

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

Creating creativity- overcoming the corporate blocks to innovation

By Phil Owens in change, creativity, culture, decision making, engagement, process

4 years ago

4 years ago 0 0 1325

In a two part series, Phil Owens explores the concept of creativity in organisations. In part one, Phil looks at what makes innovation and creativity difficult, and in part two proposes some new ways to approach creativity to make it a core part of your differentiation and success strategy. Creating creativity: Part 1 – what gets in the way? Why do organisations struggle with creativity? How often do you attend meetings that have lofty ambitions to reach agreement, but simply fail? How many ‘innovation’ or ‘creativity’ sessions have you been a part of, only to walk out with the same ideas that always seem to come up? Creativity is such a vital asset for business. Peter Murphy, design instructor in Melbourne points out “Apple is a classic example – they put design at the centre of their business rather than the periphery. As you build an organisational culture around creativity,

Organising behaviour – learning from Zappos shift to holacracy

By Phil Owens in business development, change, culture, Customer Service, decision making, Leadership, organisation, process, structure

4 years ago

4 years ago 0 0 1436

We create structure and process in a business for only one purpose – to organise behaviour so as to create efficient and effective ways of getting things done. With Zappo’s in the news for instituting a ‘holacracy’ model of organisation, it raises some interesting questions about how we can – and should – organise behaviour. How well does it work when you tell someone with depression to “Be Happy”? The paradox implied in the instruction “Be spontaneous” should be clear – how is spontaneity spontaneous if you have ordered it? This has never been better demonstrated in the corporate world than is currently happening at Zappos: “You will become a holacracy”! Forcing the organisation to become self-organising has an ironic paradox buried at its heart. However, as the organisation pursues this idealised structure, it will provide a fascinating case study over time. With it reported that one in seven employees

Is it time to fight your biggest enemies?

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

How the status quo is quietly killing your change efforts

Your culture – you get what you deserve

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

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

‘Trance formation’ for brilliant transformation

Creating Creativity – what you can do (part 2)

Creating creativity- overcoming the corporate blocks to innovation

Organising behaviour – learning from Zappos shift to holacracy

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