Richard Maun

Author: moderncareers

  • Playtime For All

    Richard making a friend (literally).
    Richard making a friend (literally).

    Christmas time can be a serious business, with mince pies to make, turkeys to stuff and massive amounts of small twinkly lights to hang outside, where we can’t see them. I’ve often wondered at the sense of spending all year diligently separating rubbish into different piles for recycling, buying eco-hessian bags at the supermarket, using energy saving bulbs and then turning your house into a crazy UFO for three weeks. There’s a house near to us on a main road that has so many lights NASA has asked them to turn a few off because they’re blinding their surveillance satellites. Mind you, I’m not entirely sure what they’re looking at in Norfolk…my best guess would be the pier at Cromer, but I’m open to suggestions.

    Snowman

    During this festive time, when life can get a bit too serious, it can be helpful to get a nudge in the ribs and be reminded that we can stop and play. A case in point: Yesterday I was about to leave the house and walk to my office (where I have installed myself, rather grandly, as ‘writer in residence’ at a local PR firm) when I realised that the children were all in the back garden playing in the snow. As this was a moment to be savoured, I joined them. We threw snowballs, built a snowman and rescued the tiny twins from snowdrifts, largey because they couldn’t bend in their snowsuits and laid on the ground like helpless starfish. It was a fun thing to bunk off work for a while and great to have some ‘Natural Child’ playtime.

    Stop and Play

    Natural Child is a term from Transactional Analysis and means when we’re in a playful state, having fun or being creative, without a Parent figure telling us what to do and how to behave. Just because we have turned into ‘grown ups’ doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy ourselves too.

    So, when things get serious over Christmas and your stress levels start to boil; take a deep breath and stop. Then find something to play with and have fun, because five minutes of fun can put a smile back on our face and remind us that without some Natural Child time, life is really very dull.

     

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  • Three Questions To Ask Your Team

    Real blue sky thinking.
    Real blue sky thinking.

    What’s the difference between leadership and management? A question that surfaced again last week when I was coaching a client. In my experience, people need leading, whereas detail needs managing. My client had increased on-time delivery from 24% to 94% in the space of a couple of months. We were chatting about this success and I realised that what he had done really well was to give his team clear direction and encouragement to solve the problems they had. He had also set up regular morning meetings, focused on simple capacity planning issues and doggedly kept his team aimed squarely at the problem. Curiously, he didn’t think that he had done anything himself, which surprised me, as he had done a great deal. A great deal of leading that is. Leading is work too and it was great to hear how his clear leadership, as opposed to detail management, had brought success for them all.

    I tried to pin down the root of what made him effective and the answer was very simple. He tended to ask questions. Questions engage us, they force us to think and to confront issues that we have been ignoring. I wrote down three of his favourite questions and here they are, reproduced in all their splendour:

    Q1. How can you make your life easier?

    Q2. How can you get around this problem?

    Q3. What do you think?

    I like these. They remind us that great leadership is often about asking great questions. Simple really.

     

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