New things used to scare me. Until recently, I had a long mental list of “things I don’t do” and would have no trouble saying no if there was even a hint that I might be asked to do something on that list. This attitude was fixed and applied both at home and at work. You will note that I’ve been writing in the past tense and I hope you’re asking “so what’s changed?”, well here’s where the story begins… Over Easter last year I went on a trip to New Zealand. This was a holiday and the chance to [...]
CPD
On groups and teams
In the latest workshop on the management programme I am participating in we spent some time looking at the difference between a group and a team in the workplace. In our learning sets we were given 30 minutes to prepare a short presentation on this topic. Our group chose to illustrate this difference using the idea of a relay race. We ran two races around the room, one as a group and one as a team. In each race the baton being carried represented a task. by tableatny In the group’s race the runners encountered problems with lack of direction, dropping [...]
Levels of listening
One of the learning themes on the managing self workshop (part of the Warwick Administrative Management Programme) was communication. The introduction to this was a look at that key component of communication, listening. There are four levels of listening: not listening listening to interrupt listening to contradict listening to understand by eknath gomphotherium Following the workshop I had an interesting conversation with my line manager about this. I find that because I’m quite quiet, and like to consider fully what I’m going to say before I speak that I often find myself not listening, or listening to interrupt. We talked about [...]
