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”

In my previous post, I wrote about how it’s important for leaders to take advantage of the quiet time that comes with the end of the year to take stock of what was accomplished over the last 12 months and reflect on what those achievements gave rise to in terms of reaching their organization’s shared goals.

Although my blog is not an organization, I felt this exercise would be also beneficial here, in terms of looking back over the year and reflecting on how far things have progressed in terms of the vision I have for my blog; of what I’d like accomplish and share through my writing for this site.

One of the things that stood out what was how fortunate I was to have so many talented and diverse writers write a guest post for my blog. I was also reminded of the many invitations I received from my blogging colleagues to share my writings with readers of their blogs, something I plan on doing over the course of the upcoming year.

As it seems to be a constant of human behaviour to want to create some form of a list to mark the end of the year, I decided I would end this year not by creating a “Best of 2010” list, but rather by creating a list of all the guest pieces that were presented here on my blog, as well as the various guest pieces I’ve written on other blogs over the past 12 months.

The pieces are listed below according to the month they were published in order to make it easier to peruse and discover some interesting reads to enjoy over the course of the holiday break. Click here to continue reading »”Looking Back at 2010 – With a Little Help From My Friends”

Image courtesy of sicoactiva

Have you ever noticed how discussions on improving business operations or possible solutions to today’s economic challenges rarely consider what the emotional impact will be on employees? In some ways, it’s not too surprising given how many of us have had leaders who taught us to not take things personally at work given that “it’s just business”. However, the findings from a recent report should get many of these leaders to reconsider the role human emotions play in how they lead their teams.

The UK business magazine “Management Today”, along with the Institute of Leadership and Management, carried out a survey of 2,405 managers and 2,595 non-managers to determine how much trust employees have in the CEOs who run their organizations. In what should certainly be an encouraging sign for both leaders and their organizations, 47% of those surveyed felt that leaders had done a good to very good job managing their companies through the current global recession. Where things get interesting, though, is when they compared the trust levels attained by male and female CEOs.

For the second year in a row, female CEOs rated higher trust levels than male CEOs. What’s more, in this year’s survey, they also found that male employees have a greater level of trust in female CEOs than those who work for male CEOs. In fact, the level of trust for female CEOs was especially high among men who work in non-managerial roles within their organization.

So what’s behind this growing divergence in trust levels employees have for female CEOs over male CEOs? After reviewing their data, the report’s authors found it comes down to one word. Click here to continue reading »”A Revealing Look at One of The Dirty Words in Business”