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This blog is designed to keep our readers up-to-date on events in North Texas and Oklahoma, to provide them information on our solutions and to be a place to find articles and information related to our solutions.
Showing posts with label Training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Training. Show all posts
Friday, May 3, 2013
Speed of Trust Webcast for Small Business 5.21.13
Friday, June 1, 2012
Choice 1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
The five
weeks during the month of June will be dedicated to content from FranklinCovey’s
newest program, The 5 Choices of Extraordinary Productivity. Please enjoy today’s post, written by my
friend and colleague, Mark Murphy.
___________________________________________________________
Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, MD of the Hallowell Center
for Cognitive and Emotional Health says that
“the key symptoms of ADD; distractibility,
impulsivity, restlessness, disorganization, trouble planning, procrastination,
have come to be key attributes of most people working and living in today’s
world”. “The symptoms of overloaded
circuits are very similar to the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder”.
___________________________________________________________
Choice 1: Act
on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
How many of
you get e-mails in the middle of the night?
How many of
you sleep with your phone?
How many of
you feel buried by a mountain of gravel and keep thinking if you just work
harder or faster you can get it all done?
The Paradox:
It’s both easier and harder than ever to achieve extraordinary
productivity. In most organizations,
there are fewer people doing more things with fewer resources in exactly the
same amount of time. And technology,
with all its benefits, creates an expectation of immediacy to most everything.
An ongoing
survey of more than 350,000 people since 2005 shows that people, by their own
admission, spend about 70 percent of
their time on whatever is urgent and only about 30 percent on relevant and
important priorities. Think about
that! What if your cell phone only
worked three of every eight hours? What
if your car only worked a couple of random days a week? Also think of the possibilities if you could
do no more than just reverse those numbers?
Productivity
is not just about “getting it all done”.
It’s about getting the right things done. It’s the product of our decisions, where we
focus our attention, and our energy levels.
The Promise:
There are 5 Choices that, when consistently made, ensure that you will
achieve extraordinary productivity in your work and life.
Choice 1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the
Urgent
The
prefrontal cortex part of the brain is the action center of the brain. It’s where we do higher-level tasks like
planning and making careful choices. And
it’s overwhelmed.
Meanwhile,
the reactive, primitive/emotional part of the brain has more and more stimuli
to react to, given the constant flood of interruptions we live with.
It’s
interesting to consider that we are physiologically programmed to respond to
urgencies. That response mechanism has
been passed down to us from our ancestors whose response to urgency was often
truly a life-or-death decision. When faced
with a threat, our ancestors got a shot of adrenaline that raised the heart
rate, widened the blood vessels, and sped up breathing. It made them quick, strong reactors.
But what was
once a rare occurrence now happens all the time. We confront urgent demands all day long. And that same circuitry that can make us
reactive can also make us addicted.
An excellent
model to illustrate this is the Time Matrix.
We often
spend our time in the urgencies of Quadrants 1 and 3 all day long. We become so exhausted that our natural
tendency at the end of the day is to go straight to Quadrant 4. And the next day we start the whole process
over again. We, in essence, create a
Bermuda Triangle for ourselves that literally sucks us in. And the only Quadrant being neglected ends up
being Quadrant 2 which is where real productivity most often occurs.
There are
very good reasons for this. In many
organizations Quadrants 1 and 3 are high visibility and are often the most
recognized and rewarded activities.
Quadrant 2 activities are often “under the radar” and less noticed at
the time.
Also, if
urgent things are neglected there is a very quick negative impact to not doing
them. So we often focus on them to the
exclusion of Quadrant 2 (important) items, which if neglected, often have a
deferred, but much larger negative impact.
In short, we become addicted to the urgent.
It becomes
critical to create a Quadrant 2 culture, which may not be as hard as we might
expect. It often begins with the courage
to start some conversations around topics like:
- Identifying the top two or three Q2 activities
that could make a significant impact on the team or organizational goals.
- Determining the value of those Q2 activities
(impact on the bottom line, customer loyalty, problem prevention, key
relationships, etc.)
- Identifying two or three Q3 activities that hinder these Q2 activities and discuss how to eliminate them.
Based on the Time Matrix we can
create a culture that is focused on the important and not just the urgent. It allows us the ability to have
conversations within our circle of influence that are focused on Q2 and reduce
the time spent in Q3. “The very best
leaders are focused on the language of importance instead of the language of
urgency”. We can ask questions like, why
should this be done now? Or how does
this help us achieve our goals? If
everyone understands the Time Matrix we can create a shorthand language with
questions like, is that really a Q2? Or, are you sure that’s a Q1 because it
feels an awful lot like a Q3? In
short…so we can create a Q2 culture that allows us to spend time on what is
most important and will generate the best results.
Without a shared language of
importance it is really easy to get distracted from the things that really
impact the results.
-
Mark Murphy, FranklinCovey Consultant
Copyright © 2012 - Mark Murphy
___________________________________________________________
Enabling Greatness, One
Organization at Time,
John Vakidis
Friday, December 2, 2011
What is low productivity costing you?
At FranklinCovey, we’ve been studying individual productivity for over 25 years. To date, we have sold over $1B in productivity training, so I guess you could say we are an authority on the subject. We have had over 350,000 people respond to our “Time Matrix” survey. As of 2011, we have found that the average employee spends about 70% of their time on urgencies and irrelevancies. That means it’s possible for your employees to only be spending 30% of their time on important priorities. Take a moment to do the math on what that is actually costing your organization. With layoffs, cutbacks and a major focus on organizational spending, these statistics should get you thinking.
Let’s take a look at an example of ABC Organization. They have 500 employees earning an average of $20/hour. If everyone gets 2 weeks of vacation a year, that leaves 50 weeks at 40 hours per week, so 2,000 hours of actual work per employee, per year.
In the example above, this means the company is spending $14,000,000 to pay employees to work on urgencies and irrelevancies. Now you don’t have to be a CFO to understand that this is a problem. What if you could improve productivity by 10, 20 or 30% or more? This would have a dramatic effect on your organization's effectiveness and your bottom line!
Giving your employees the right “mindset, skillset and toolset” to become more productive is a worthy investment. Not only will you see an immediate ROI in your first year of application, but over time, you Create a Culture of Productivity throughout your workforce where everyone is spending more time on important, meaningful work. This allows for improved sales activities, better time spent on customer service, more time for collaboration between departments, time for creative thinking, planning and more.
To learn more about FranklinCovey’s NEW Productivity Solution, give me a call to set up a meeting with your client partner. We’ll be happy to help you achieve your top strategic goals in 2012 and beyond!
To your success in the coming year!
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
The Learning Explosion
Earlier this year, two of my colleagues from our Online Learning Department at FranklinCovey released a great book titled, The Learning Explosion. Authors, Matthew Murdoch and Treion Muller, discuss the importance of bringing Online Learning into organizations.
As a company rooted in standard LIVE instructor led training (ILT), making this leap was huge for FranklinCovey. But after plenty of market research and studying industry trends, we realized we needed to embrace this change, rather than shy away from it. Matthew and Treion break the book into two main parts, The New Mindset and The New Rule Set. If you are involved in L&D, consider picking up a copy of their book or checking out their blog.
In a recent blog post, 21 Ways To Create a Personal Learning Lab Today! Treion and Matt provide 21 tips, tools and apps to leverage the information available to you to make your own controlled learning environment. To learn more about Online Learning, please go to our website to see what FranklinCovey has to offer or contact me directly. At this time, we have approximately 40 webinars available and other types of self-paced learning (InSights On Demand and 7 Habits Interactive) that can be purchased individually or for an enterprise engagement. Keep checking in regularly, because more offerings are in development and will be coming soon!
Taking learning to people everywhere!
- John Vakidis
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