Attending meetings that are created mostly for people to share with others various updates from their divisions instead of discussing what needs to be done next. A partnership initially created between two companies to allow them to land a large-scale project ends up becoming a source of distrust between the collaborating businesses, leading to costly delays as each side questions the real motives of the other firm. Spending hours in a committee meeting attempting to decide which option should be pursued over others as the least likely to end in failure.

These are just a handful of some of the scenarios that author Russell Bishop delves into, breaks down and provides clear strategies to overcome and hopefully improve on in his new book “Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work”.

From the very beginning of the book, Bishop makes it clear that the key to overcoming any obstacle or challenge that stands before us is ourselves – specifically our own perception or how we choose to frame a given situation. He divides the work environment into three distinct sections – what we can control, what we can influence, and what we simply respond to – and points out how most times, our focus is on what we respond to and not on that which is within our abilities to control and manage.

Working from this vantage point, Bishop describes three key steps that readers can take to ensure any change or improvement they put forth is more than a mere band-aid solution: Click here to continue reading »”Coffee House Book Review – “Workarounds That Work” by Russell Bishop”

The following is a guest post by Russell Bishop. Russell is an educational psychologist, author, executive coach and management consultant whose clients include Fortune 500 executives in aerospace, healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology, information technology, telecommunications and oil and gas.

Russell serves as the Senior Editor-at-Large for the Business and Living sections of The Huffington Post. He is also the author of the book “Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work”, which I will be reviewing in the next installment of the Coffee House Book Review series. You can learn more about Russell and his book on his website at RussellBishop.com.

When it comes to internal roadblocks or organizational obstacles, more often than not the culprit behind these problems is an organization’s own bureaucracy. Ironically, even bureaucrats need workarounds when they run up against the frustrating bottlenecks created by other bureaucrats. Corporate bureaucracy and its close cousin, business process, often snag their own staffs in an impossible tangle of rules and regulations. Customers and suppliers frequently encounter roadblocks as they try to navigate the labyrinthine maze of the bureaucrat. One of the most perplexing aspects of process and bureaucracy stems from the fact that those frustrating rules were most likely created for good reason, but may have outlived their usefulness.

If you are trying to overcome internal roadblocks, you can complain about the other team, escalate issues through upper levels of management, or simply try to ignore their rules altogether. However, none of these strategies is likely to produce an effective result, much less one that will have the legs to survive. In trying to find an effective workaround strategy, you may need to actually get closer to the other team in order to find your way through.

In my book, Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work, I suggest that the first workaround may be with your own self, with your own mindset. In order to move from blame and complain to effective movement, you may find it useful to ask “what difference could I make all on my own that requires no one’s permission except my own?”

Sometimes, that question alone will point you to steps you can take to Click here to continue reading »”A Simple Workaround to Overcome the Bureaucratic Mindset”

A few months ago, I decided to update my office space in response to the growing needs of my business. One of these changes involved rearranging one of the office walls to accommodate a new whiteboard and bulletin board for brainstorming and keeping track of client projects. Although they’ve proven to be welcome additions to my productivity arsenal, they left me with a problem – the best layout for these two items left a very noticeable gap on that wall. A white space that looked more intentional than merely a consequence for how I chose to place these wall hangings on that wall.

At first, I decided that I would leave that space as is, waiting until some future need required the addition of some new wall hanging that would help me manage and grow my business. After a few weeks, though, the presence of this white space began to bother me. It was making me feel as though I wasn’t maximizing my new office layout to ensure that there were little or no dead spaces found within the room.

So, my first thought was simply to fill this gap with some type of artwork or maybe even a frame with one of those motivational quotes you find in so many offices these days. As such, I started to wander around various art shops, looking for some print or art piece that would help to fill in this gap on the wall.

Although there were many choices, nothing really seemed to fit and yet I still felt compelled to find something to help fill in this space. At one point while searching for ideas of what I could hang on that part of the wall, my wife looked at me and asked ‘would it really be such a problem to just leave the space blank?’. It was in that moment that I realized that there wasn’t really a problem here. Rather, all I had done was create one of out this misguided notion that leaving blank spaces on the wall left my office in an incomplete state.

Of course, how we perceive these white spaces not only impacts our sense of decorating aesthetics. In our day to day activities, it’s also easy to feel like Click here to continue reading »”Learning To Appreciate The White Spaces”

Today’s piece is a guest post by Mike Figliuolo, the founder and Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC. Mikes writes about leadership on the The thoughtLEADERS Blog and has an upcoming book on leadership that is slated to be released later this year. I encourage you to check out his blog, which you can subscribe to here. If you’d like to learn more about his upcoming book “One Piece of Paper”, here’s the book’s main information page.

For as many words as we use, we’re terrible communicators. Voicemails are jumbled streams of consciousness. Emails are “text bombs” with no rhyme or reason. Presentations are nothing but crippling piles of slides. But don’t worry – here are three rules of three to make your communications clearer, more compelling, and more efficient/effective.

All good things come in threes. Blind Mice, Stooges, Wise Men, Little Pigs, Musketeers, and Rocky movies (for the record, Rocky IV and Rocky V were terrible – see? They should have stopped at three).

Rule of Three #1: It’s Always Three Things
When you convey information, don’t rattle off a list of 47 things the listener must understand. Don’t hand them an incoherent pile of slides and expect them to make sense of them. Structure your work. Chunk up the information into manageable bites. You will find there are usually three bites regardless of what flavor of pie you’re serving.

Why is it usually three topics, sections, ideas, etc.? If you’re only sharing one concept, you likely haven’t broken it down into understandable component parts. If you’re sharing 5 or more concepts, they’re hard to follow and remember. When you chunk your ideas up into groups of three, it’s manageable, understandable, and memorable.

For example, in the above list of 47 items, it’s likely Click here to continue reading »”Three Rules of Three for Successful Communications”