But their hard work also makes us conscious of the lack of time they have for themselves. Just like anyone else, they deserve time out to reflect and reboot.  

“At Co-Creation we recognise the importance of looking after our own wellbeing and the real benefits this brings for ourselves and our organisation. We wanted to create a day which enabled our own consultants and coaches with the time and tools to focus on themselves and their own wellbeing.”

Our recent CPD Day at the beautiful Manley Mere was an opportunity for them to pause, share and reflect. So they could take their professional and personal development to the next level and grow closer as a Co-Creation community. It’s also part of our commitment to ‘give back’ to our community, to help the team develop new skills and techniques that will not only help Co-Creation clients but also help them in their own businesses too. 

Additionally, it’s an opportunity for us to practice what we preach.  We spend all our time helping clients transform their businesses through coaching and personal/professional development and it’s important that we also take time out to reflect and develop. 

Here’s what happened on the day, plus some employee wellbeing tidbits you can use to maximise your team’s performance and happiness.   

Walk With Purpose  

Mindfulness isn’t just a buzzword. It’s an essential component of survival in this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous) world we live in. It helps you live in the moment without being held back by past negative experiences or worry of the future. Our first activity was an exercise in mindfulness to help our consultants master this skill. 

Inside Manley Mere’s serene woodland, we asked the delegates to take a stroll in nature and appreciate their surroundings. 

The goal was to let their minds wander freely. And to check in with their body to notice how they were feeling physically or emotionally. Liz Needham, one of our consultants and coaches explains how valuable this exercise was to her: 

“We are so busy helping everyone else to work effectively that we neglect to take time out for ourselves. Getting outside was the perfect way to really slow down, shift my focus and work on me and my business.”  

The beauty of mindfulness is that once you understand how to do it, it can be practised anywhere – even in the office. See if you can incorporate a similar activity into your next team away day to help your employees master this skill and improve their wellbeing.  

An Exercise in Resilience  

After a relaxed lunch and time for networking and idea sharing, it was time for our second ‘walk with purpose’. The focus was now on problem-solving: previous to the event we asked our consultants to think of a particular problem or challenge that they were facing.  

The walk was a chance for them to think clearly about this challenge and how to overcome it. They had to ask themselves the following questions to get to this point: 

• What would you like to happen? 
• When you achieve this, what will you be able to do?  
• How would it make you feel? 
• What haven’t you thought of yet?  
• Who could help you?  
• What needs to stop/start/continue?

By going through this thought process, our team could address their problems objectively. We then encouraged our delegates to share their thoughts in groups and worked together to come up with a solution.  

Here’s what Michelle Pratt, one of our coaches, had to say on the value of this experience: 

“I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to slow down and focus on my wellbeing. This, combined with support from the peer-to-peer coaching has helped me get more done than weeks of rushing about.”

This is key to building resilience. When you can face your challenges head-on and overcome them with support, your emotional strength grows and future problems don’t seem as daunting.   

How can you build resilience within your own team and give your people the confidence needed to push through their personal challenges? Teach them HOW using the questions above can help them and encourage them to share their discoveries with their teammates.  

Managing Energy, Wellbeing and Resilience  

Next was our second CPD session. We shared three tools to help our associates in their own businesses:  

Managing Our Energy tool – Delegates learnt how to be their most productive self by understanding their energies and the best way to channel them. 

Managing Our Wellbeing tool – By identifying ways to be more mindful, our consultants can take consistent action to improve their wellbeing. 

Managing Our Resilience tool – Delegates gained practical advice on how to build resilience to overcome personal challenges and maximise their potential.  

These are resources we use for our clients to help them gain control over their emotional wellbeing so they can achieve their personal and business goals. The purpose was to help them uncover negative habits that are potentially holding them back and develop new positive habits to implement in their daily lives. 

Giving our consultants the opportunity to master these tools means they can enjoy the same benefits. They can also harness what they’ve learnt for their coaching sessions to add even more value to their businesses.  

Committed to Positive Action  

Finally, we wanted our delegates to commit to one action in relation to their personal wellbeing and resilience. They had to write their commitment on a brick, and at the end of the session, those bricks were used to create a visual wall representing delegates’ promises to themselves. 

For example, one delegate wrote: “To invest time in myself guilt-free.” While another pledged to: “Practice mindfulness every day in an outside space for a minimum of 15 minutes.”  

It was a wonderful way to summarise everything our associates learnt during the day and give them a tangible way to commit to embedding positive habits in their own personal and business lives. It’s also an activity you could easily recreate for your team that gets them thinking about how to improve their emotional and physical health.  

Over to You 

Is there something you’re going to take from our CPD day and apply it to your own life or business? We’d love to hear about it, so please share with us on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Also, for access to more resources on wellbeing, mindfulness and resilience head over to Anxiety UK’s website, our chosen charity.  

 If you would like to explore further how Co-Creation can support you with your own wellbeing and team effectiveness, please do contact us and let us help you achieve your aspirations. 

In this blog, we consider that with less than 6 months until the end of the year, it’s worth taking stock of how you’re progressing with your personal goals.

Keeping the Plan Alive

How many times have you been involved in a “new initiative” at work? How many meetings have you sat through, where a fresh and exciting project was passionately evangelised? The whole team left feeling energised and enthused by the possibility of change. Only for the “new initiative” to slide off the radar within a month and never be mentioned again after 6 weeks.

It’s a common experience in many areas of our lives, not just at work. Plans are made and objectives agreed. Only for them to be placed in the bottom draw of our daily activity and never looked at again.

Halfway through the year, it’s worth looking back at the resolutions you began with in January. How are you performing against your aspirations/goals? Are you optimising your strengths as best as you can towards your aspirations? Are you on target to achieving those goals, maintaining the energy of your changes? Or have your plans been left in that bottom drawer? Have you managed to make any changes, or are you still where you were six months ago?

Reviewing the Situation

If, on review, you’re maintaining the energy of your change, well done!

But if, despite the initial good intentions, you haven’t managed to do anything significant to use your strengths to effect change. Or haven’t managed to achieve any of your personal objectives, now is the time to review and take stock.

Whatever you do, it’s important not to beat yourself up about it. Don’t dwell on your shortcomings, as that takes you down the spiral path of limitations but revisit your dream, go back to the possibilities and think about the strengths that you can focus on to help you achieve those goals.

Here are 5 Steps that can help you get back on track before the end of the year.

1. Review your Objectives

Was your resolution realistic? How are you measuring yourself against it? Now is the time to be honest with yourself. If you haven’t managed to meet your goals, it’s worth asking, were your objectives realistic? Did you have a SMART plan?

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Based

Making a plan to achieve your goals, make sure it’s realistic rather than too optimistic. Most of all, make sure that it is attainable; what else could you do to make it attainable? Do you need to upskill yourself or draw on the skills and support of someone else? Check yourself against it regularly to see how you’re doing, it is often easier to see the incremental changes than the big change; get feedback from other people to help you gain perspective on yourself. That will help you to see that you are making progress, even when progress seems slow and difficult.

2. Review what truly motivates you?

During tough moments you begin to realise what really keeps you motivated. To reach your goal, you need a deep understanding what motivates you individually. What do your strengths mean to you? What combination of strengths will help you to stay focussed on your objectives? Take some time, go back and review your strengths using the tools on this website. An awareness of how and when to dial-up / dial-down and stretch your individual strengths will help you bring the best out of yourself.

3. Get amazing support

Motivation from others can never be underestimated. Compliments are like a mini-orgasm for the brain.  A simple “well done” or congratulatory message can boost your self-confidence and give you the extra motivation to achieve your goals. To achieve your long-term resolutions, you are going to need to draw on the strengths of those around you and share the load. You need the support of colleagues, friends, family and dedicated professionals to keep you focussed. Motivating yourself is a daily challenge. If you actually ask for help and support, people will be delighted to give it. Ask for feedback, but ask for them to be specific, to describe the behaviour they observed that made the difference and the impact; ask them avoid generic feedback, platitudes or overly general criticism.

4. Celebrate successes

It’s hard to stay motivated if you’re only focused on a distant finish line as the point where you can celebrate success. Breaking up your goals into smaller, more achievable targets can help keep you motivated for longer. Find a buddy who is on the same mission so you can jointly share reaching your successes; make your aims and successes public. Research shows public visibility of goals increases the chances of you achieving your goals significantly. Don’t miss obvious opportunities to celebrate small successes along the way!

5. Keep a positive mindset

Enthusiasm and optimism are often cited as the drivers behind achieving goals. And it is certainly the case that unrealistic optimism can help you achieve successes that you never thought were possible.

But, equally important, is allowing yourself the space to feel negative and occasionally despondent. It might sound odd, but it is imperative to understand why you feel that way, when you do. There will be a reason you feel you can’t achieve your goals or that your strengths are not being utilised in the best way they can be.

The solution when you are going through the negativity, is not to push yourself through, but rather to chunk up the challenges into realistic bites, which you can quickly achieve to feel back on the path of possibility! Recognise that all feelings have value, the negative ones as well as the positives; come to appreciate that feelings are also transient. Whatever you feel now, will pass. headspace.com

Optimise Your Strengths to Achieve your Goals

If you are using your strengths properly, it’s easier to stay energised. We’ve covered some essential points here, but for more help with optimising, engaging and utilising your strengths, contact Co-Creation and let us help you achieve what you didn’t think possible.

Getting people behind you and giving you that extra push to lift and carry you at those moments you need them the most is highly beneficial. 

When it comes to your personal goals and resolutions, the good news it doesn’t just have to be January to pick up a new habit or start a new way of being. With a focus, consistency, determination and support, the resolutions you’ve abandoned could become natural to you long before the next New Year comes around.

In this blog, we’re looking at aligning those strengths and potential with aspirations.

If you’ve already done some work understanding your individual strengths, linking those strengths to your aspirations is a valuable activity. We’re going to be using the 5As as a guide to get you thinking:-

1. Aspirations
2. Awareness
3. Actions
4. Agility
5. Achievement

With these 5 steps as a guide, you can use your strengths to achieve your goals.

The 5 As – 5 Steps to Understanding and Achieving Your Aspirations

 Step 1 – Aspirations – What are they?

Marathons, half marathons, triathlons, tough mudders, park runs, 10Ks … they are all the rage right now. Particularly for those going through the first traumatic experience of middle-aged health kick!

All these physical endurance tests are aspirational. And they have a deeper aspiration at their heart than simply completing a race. They are the stimulus for a healthier lifestyle, the proof of retained youth, and the evidence of personal achievement and stamina. They are the motivators we use to achieve a desired goal. An aspiration that requires something better of ourselves.

And, as the people who are preparing for these personal trials will happily tell you, they can’t be entered into lightly. They require serious preparation of both mind and body. In fact, all the physical endurance tests we put ourselves through, from week-night 5-a-side to ultra-marathons require regular practice and “stretch” to build up physical and psychological strength.

In simple terms, we have to put in the hard miles and do some work, before we can achieve our goals.

In the same way, the goals and aspirations we have in our employment also require preparation and work. The strengths we use to achieve those aspirations need to be practiced and stretched if we want to achieve our aspirations and make the best use of our potential.

Step 2 – Awareness – Write Down Your Aspirations!

It is amazing how few people actually sit down and record their aspirations in any meaningful way. You might think we know what you want to achieve, but do you really? Are you aware of how your aspirations may have changed? When did you last review your aspirations against your current situation?

By writing down your aspirations and reviewing them regularly, you are more likely to be able to articulate and understand them. By answering why each of your aspirations is important to you in your current situation, you can gain an awareness of how you can use our strengths to achieve them. 

With a better understanding of your aspirations you can begin to look at which of your unique strengths you will need to employ and practice to achieve them. Using strengths development tools provided by Co-Creation, will help you identify how your strengths can combine most effectively to deliver on aspirations.

Step 3 – Action – Time to be Doing

How many times have we heard phrases such as, “actions do speak louder than words”, or “procrastination is the thief of time”?

The fact is, we are often very good at writing down and making plans, but never actually acting on them. Now is the time to give things a go. Having a growth mindset is about understanding that failing and feeling incompetent is part of the learning journey to achieve your aspirations.

This is where working with professional support can help you to “train” yourself.

Step 4 – Agility – Positive Challenges to Stretch your Strengths

It’s important to regular test your ‘limits’ – to see what you are capable of achieving when you use your strengths productively and in different ways. This builds what we call “agility”.  That crucial capacity to be flexible across different situations and operating environments.

The process of stretching strengths means taking an area that energises you and learning new skills within that area, which will take your natural energy in a new direction

Just like training for a marathon, stretching your strengths can be difficult. It takes you out of your comfort zone. But without a positive challenge, you are unlikely to get the most out of your strengths, skills and knowledge and will never discover the true value they offer to achieve your aspirations. 

Stretching strengths is a concept that we don’t often use. We are not programmed to think in this way. More often than not, there is a focus on working on our weaker areas because we believe they provide the greatest opportunity for development.

However, by working on our strengths we remain motivated for longer and can gain far greater achievements. Stretching strengths takes time and practice before it comes naturally, just like learning to drive or ski. It might seem awkward and unnatural at first, but the more you do it, the more it will feel natural and can be done almost automatically.

We recommend the 3Es approach to development: –

• Experience
• Engage
• Educate

This is based on a well-researched and practiced 70:20:10 adult learning model. Which shows that effective learners get 70 percent of their learning from job-related experiences, 20 percent from engaging others to support, coach and help them and only 10 percent from formal education and training.

 Step 5 – Achievement – Learning to Grow

Learning to grow is all about recognising and celebrating success. To do this, you need to know when knowing when you’ve hit your targets. Which requires you to have SMART targets:-

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Timebound

We do this all the time for those physical challenges. When you ran the 10k in 49 minutes, which was one minute under your target time for completion you know to celebrate.

The same can is true of all your aspirations. Take the time to reflect on why you achieved that success, so you can use this learning for future growth. Was there a new technique you tried that helped?

The most important way we can recognise achieving a goal is to celebrate! It’s highly motivating for the next time you decide to take on a challenge and set new aspirations.

Remember, Your Aspirations Can Change!

Your aspirations won’t always remain the same. They will change as you grow. Few teenagers feel motivated to run a marathon, but more and more of us become motivated to do physical endurance activity as we approach our middle years. In the same way, your aspirations when you first started work may not be the same as they are now.

Aspirations will change because of what’s going on in our lives. And it’s important to remember that not everyone’s aspirations will be focused on an upward drive to leadership.

Following the 5As and regularly reviewing your aspirations, strengths and goal setting can help you and others to learn and develop and achieve, without being tipped into stress.

With a clear understanding you can create new goals that to a point where you feel challenged and engaged, but not overwhelmed.  This ongoing process will keep your confidence, commitment and contribution high, giving you the best opportunities to achieve your aspirations.

Planning for Growth

Spring is all around us, with signs of new growth everywhere. Although we may have finished our physical growth spurts many years ago, we never lose our potential for growth. We always have the ability to increase our knowledge and skills, and to make better use of our strengths. 

For organisations, the same is true. To be effective in the fast-paced uncertain world of today, organisations need to constantly grow and develop their offerings. It might be that there are issues to overcome, a bottom line to increase, or a disruptive rival to keep up with. Whatever the reason, development and growth are generally expected if your organisation is to continue to perform well.

The starting point for this growth is usually the team. Team development is high on the priority of most business and organisational leaders when it comes to planning for growth. And with good reason. Stats show that engaged employees increase customer loyalty by up to 44 percent. And a 5 percent increase in customer loyalty can increase bottom line by up to 85 percent.

It’s no wonder then that developing employee’s skills and harnessing their strengths is a highly productive activity for any organisation who wants to grow.

What Are Your Talent Needs?

The starting point for growth is to identify where you have strengths in your team and where there are needs in your organisation. Measuring the personal strengths of your workforce will help you to see where certain strengths are well represented. You will also be able to see any imbalances and talent shortfalls that might exist and where potential within your team can be developed in alignment with your organisational requirements.

Problems arise within organisations where a team, or even the entire workforce are lopsided in terms of personality strengths. A team made up of mainly results focussed people, whose strengths are in execution, might well be missing opportunities to build strong relationships with customers.

In the same way, teams made up of task centred individuals, might not be engaging in visionary or creative problem solving. For instance, when dealing with challenges arising from disruptive technological change.

By using strengths as a starting point, you can better understand your team’s potential and identify where particular skills are under-represented. You can also see where potential strengths are not being utilised in the most efficient and productive manner or motivations are being missed.

For instance, one of your team might be doing tasked with something that is de-energising for them, but they do it as part of their job. If you discovered another team member found that task energising, you could swap the tasks around so you are making the most of what people find motivating on the team.

Once you have this data, you can begin to plan the development of your existing team, as well as recruiting for missing areas or talent short-falls. One thing not to do, is to assume that a talent short-fall can automatically be filled from within your existing workforce.  If you’ve hired all the same type of people, you might need to bring in someone with different strengths to enable your team to really perform.

Weakness Bias in Employee Development

Traditionally, employee development plans have tried to help employees develop skills they are less able with, focussed on “overcoming weakness” and “learning new talents”, rather than engaging strengths and utilising existing motivations.

The reason this happens is because of the strong “negativity bias” that is present traditionally in our society. It’s very common to find that most people don’t understand what their strengths actually are. And even if they do, they often haven’t purposefully developed them, or learned how to use them in the best way for themselves or their organisations.

Traditional models of employee assessment often don’t help. Research shows that there is an 80/20 split that many performance reviews naturally fall into. Eighty percent of the time is spent focussing on weaker elements and areas where the employee falls short, and just twenty percent reviewing strengths and any positive achievements.

The result is of this kind of split is that employees become overly obsessed with their weaker skills and abilities. They spend too long trying to develop a skill that does not fall in their strength zone,  which at best they’ll only be able to be ‘acceptable’ in. And less time on the tasks they are good at and which motivate them to work harder.

This has a detrimental impact on their other work. Without the motivation of using their strengths, performance drops and employees quickly become disengaged with their tasks and the organisations objectives.

Flipping the 80/20

A simple approach to counter this effect is to flip the 80/20 split completely on its head. This would mean spending eighty percent of the time on positive performance and developing dialogues about strengths – how to use them with purpose and how to develop them. In this way, employees can begin to learn the value of their strengths.

They also begin to learn how they can work collaboratively to optimise strengths and achieve their individual and team goals. It enables team members to help one another in weaker areas where they are less effective and have lower levels of motivation. It also helps team members understand each other better

Weaknesses and other issues are not to be completely forgotten, however. Twenty percent of your time should still be focussed on discussing and addressing areas that are limiting in an employee’s role. But the focus should only be on those weaknesses that are directly relevant to the role and can’t be done by anyone else on the team.

Pushing the Comfort Zone

Focusing on a person’s strengths is not a licence for them to drift. Without a challenge to use our strengths in new and different ways, it is human nature for us to tick along, doing what we like, without realising our full potential.

In developing your team, there will always be the need for employees to push themselves to achieve results. But they are far more likely to be successful if this push is within an area of strength.

Additional training in those strength areas can be highly productive. A complicated project that requires a range of strengths can stretch all the members of a team beyond their comfort zone. It can teach team members how to apply their strengths in new and different, helping them grow and develop in alignment with your organisations goals and objectives.

By giving them the freedom, support and coaching to find their own pathways, your employees can achieve results based on their unique strengths, skills, beliefs and background. This is highly motivating and can lead to real, long-term success and development.

Identify Potential for Long-Term Success

Achieving longer-term success in your team requires strengths-building to create and manage the diversity in your employees. By focusing on utilising strengths more effectively, you can create an organisation where people learn to appreciate and value others for their strengths, skills and perspectives.

If you’d like to learn more about how to engage in a strengths based team development programme, talk to Co-Creation for more information.

Know Your Hidden Strengths

We all have unique strengths – those skills and abilities that engage and motivate us in our work and daily activities. Your strengths are qualities that energise you. They are things you are good at, that come naturally to you and simply flow from you.

If you’re aware of your strengths, you may grow to enjoy and even love using them.

Knowing and understanding your strengths helps you to work more effectively. Doing what you are good at makes you feel great and motivates you to get work done. It’s a vital cog in your working life.

The Strengths of Your team

If you’ve spent some time identifying your own strengths, you may also have started to identify the strengths of others in your team. You will begin to see when they get into that natural state of ‘flow’, and when they seem energised, excited, positive and proficient at their tasks. 

Where teams are encouraged to understand their individual and collective strengths, there is a marked increase in performance. If you know the skills, motivations and values of those you work with, you’re more likely to have a balance in your team, which in turn leads to greater efficiently. Individuals become more engaged with their goals and the objectives of their organisation, because they are actively engaging their strengths and feel that their strengths are valued.

Where teams are not working harmoniously, it’s often because team members individual strengths are being overlooked. Individuals are being encouraged to be “all-rounders” rather than focussed on the things they enjoy. Engagement generally drops and efficiency and profitability drops accordingly.

Knowing the Why

To harness and utilise a team’s strengths effectively, it’s important to understand “the why” that sits behind all strengths.

• Why do different people have the strengths they do?
• What makes them motivated to complete one activity, yet unmotivated by others?
• Why should your team utilise their strengths for you or your organisation? What motivates them in their work environment to use the strengths you’ve identified?

When it comes to motivation, in most organisations, the standard for achieving results is the performance bonus. Hitting KPIs brings rewards. These are not to be dismissed, financial incentives can be motivating factors when it comes to achieving goals. But they are not the only motivator when it comes to utilising strengths

Another motivator that is often rolled out is the inspirational “Mission Statement”, plastered over walls, internal communications and everywhere employees go. The hope being that by a process of magical osmosis, all employees will become engaged and motivated with the organisation’s objectives.

The problem is that rarely do either of these methods breed true loyalty and ongoing, long-term motivation. To quote Simon Sinek, “People don’t work for the sake of figures, they work for the sake of people and relationships.”

The Need to Belong

The most basic human desire is to belong – to share values, belief and a common sense of purpose. As much as a performance bonus can be an excellent motivator, employees don’t get up out of bed in the morning for a KPI.

The key to understanding why people have strengths and why they use them is to understand their values. It is our values and core beliefs that are at the heart of our motivations.

If the values of the individuals in your team are aligned to your organisational objectives and values, you are more likely to feel that you have a motivated team, utilising their strengths in the best ways possible. In this way, your team members feel as though they belong – they are sharing in a common goal and where their values are being fully aligned.

Where organisational objectives feel distant – a dry decree sent down from on-high – individuals often struggle to feel aligned to them. It’s here that motivations dwindle and strengths are underutilised.

Alignment with Organisational Objectives

Translating team objectives to what they mean to the individual is an important step in understanding why members of your team should engage their strengths towards a common goal. If a team feel as though they have a say in the what and how of the tasks they are being asked to complete, they can see more clearly how to meet their objectives.

It’s the role of a leader to help them connect with that. To understand why the people who work for you come to work and especially why they choose to follow you. From there, you can begin to understanding how you can mobilise them to maximise their strengths and manage their performance blocker.

The much-quoted story of the janitor at Nasa is an excellent example of how employees can feel valued and can share in the overall objective of an organisation.

When asked to describe their job at NASA, the janitor who swept the floors responded: “I helped put a man on the moon.”

Alignment with organisational objectives is not simply a box-ticking HR exercise. It’s vitally important for an employee to feel as though they belong to a shared set of values and beliefs, and that their unique strengths are focused in the right direction.

Beware! The Why is Multidimensional

The danger in understanding why someone is motivated is to believe that there is a single answer for each person. In identifying motivations it’s important to be mindful that the “Why” is complex.

There are multiple, complex reasons why we all go to work. The financial obligation is strong, but financial obligations alone do not drive loyalty in a team. Social motivators also figure highly in individual’s needs and values. 

We have a need for belonging, for connection and for enjoyment. All of these feed into The Why and can be motivating factors in the engagement of our strengths.

Finding out what your team is energised by and what motivates their strengths allows you to connect those strengths to your common objective.

As long as your objective is clear in the first place …

For more information about understanding your team’s motivations and engaging your team’s strengths to a common objective, talk to us at Co-Creation.