A new way of working is emerging: more innovative and collaborative

Getting inspiration from Renaissance

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

 

Co-working spaces are rising, the concept of craftmanship is at the base of a new form of people engagement, art is a channel to access wholeness and co-creative space and inspiration: it will be interesting to see if with our cultural pillars we (Italians) will be able to take advantage of our heritage. It seems fitting well with the emerging trends of a new way of working.

Inspirational question from the article you can read on the below link:

"What can those who want to create more innovative and collaborative workplaces today — whether that’s a better office in a traditional organization, a coworking space, a startup incubator, or a fab lab — learn from the workshops of the Renaissance?"

Read more here

Leadership styles

Emergent Leadership

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Very interesting article on a new emerging style of leadership.
The external environment is pushing to adapt to new form of leadership which can bring fast adaptation to continuously changing conditions and co-creative engagement.

Emergent

• Catchphrase: Be here now
• Source: Care
• Strategy: Co-create safety for change through dialogue and improvisation
• Pioneers: David Bohm, Keith Johnstone

Read more here/

Leadership skills: networking

Some tips on how becoming a "pro" at networking 
By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

We all know networking is not necessarily easy: entering a room full of people we do not know, understand how to approach people that are already talking and  trying to say something without being too embarrassed....
The attached article gives some interesting tips on how to handle all this. If curious: 

Read more here

Are you following your purpose?

Purpose

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Leadership skills: Empathy (Put your feet in my shoes)

What is Empathy?

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting



The concept and the behavior of empathy are not the easiest ones, but more and more often we hear that the ability of being empathic is a critical one in our complex world, especially if we are leaders or change maker or simple human being looking for improvement. I collected from different sources some explanation that seems to me very effective:

• A very simple and effective video where Brene' Brown explain the difference between simpathy and empathy: Watch the video
• The website of the Empathy museum created in London, a powerful and inspiring initiative: Empathy museum
• The video of Otto Sharmer (founder of U-Theory and professor at MIT University - Boston) explaining how listening with empathy can affect the effectiveness of our conversation with other people: Watch the video

Self-empowerment

Going out of your comfort-zone

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

In order to learn new things it is important to go out of our comfort zone.

Not easy right?

Let's see a nice video about it.

Open here the video

How to leverage bad feedback and coaching

Bad feedback hurts

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Sometimes we receive from our manager a feedback we do not agree on.
How to deal with it, do not break the trust relationship and turn it to useful coaching?

Read more on: Forbes

APRIL 21th - Public speaking training on line - free of charge

MOOC Training

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Today there are many free resources for skill development. Why not taking advantage of it?

The training you can find opening the below link has a title and contents which seem interesting and there are many others published in the website.

If you try let me know if it is worth.

Read more on: training

The importance of experience instead of performance

Stop Focusing on Your Performance

By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting




Enjoying the experience without focusing too much on the outcome and our performance make us more effective in life-long learning. Being afraid of others' judgement may stop us from experimenting and this reduces our opportunity to learn new things.

In this article from Harvard Business Review the author says:  "If you want to get better at anything, you need to experiment with an open mind, to try and fail, to willingly accept and learn from any outcome." ... " The best performer are life-long learners, and the definition of a life-long learner is someone who is costantly trying new things. That requires performing poorly much of the time and, often unpredictably, brilliantly some of the time".

Read more on HBR

Leadership - Presentation skills

The three Essential Elements of a Great Presentation

By Zhuang Le & He Yuan Marco Polo Consulting

Delivering a great presentation is a crucial professional skill for leaders. A killing presentation can inspire audience and make them more likely to embrace ideas or opinions of the speaker. However we may be confused on how to make a compelling talk.

Are you tired of listening to some tedious presentations made by others? Are you sure that your speeches are attractive to your audience?

Gail Zack Anderson in this article gives advice on delivering a terrific speech and organizing the structure of a talk: the three essential elements are the speech opening, body and closing. Read more on Management help blog

Leadership competencies: emotional intelligence (Being humble)

“It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.”

By ZhuangLe & HeYuan Marco Polo Consulting

It was generally believed that people are supposed to be prideful and competitive to be good leaders,nevertheless,we often ignore that humanity virtue and being humble is a crucial factor in managing, besides professional skills. We all experience hardships. Some people can bounce back easily and learn from losses,  but the others don't. What is the difference between these two kinds of people? John C. Maxwell believes that  not pride but humility is what that allows us to learn from mistakes. See how did he learn from a T-shirt gift with the sentence "It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am." on it.

John C. Maxwell is an internationally respected leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold more than 18 million books. Dr. Maxwell is the founder of EQUIP, a non-profit organization that has trained more than 5 million leaders in 126 countries worldwide. A New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best-selling author, Maxwell has written three books that have sold more than a million copies. Read more on success.com

Leadership competencies - active listening

Active listening is much more than just hearing

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

The Chinese ideogram TING, which can be translated in English as active listening, is an interesting combination of carachters (see below). It teach us that if we want to listen carefully another person, all our attention has to be involved and also all our body: mind/eyes, ears and, heart.
This is an important lesson by Chinese wisdom to everybody, especially people managers, which daily have to practice this difficult skill.

During an interview, how you explain your experience is key for success: tell it as a STORY

What's your story?











By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

How well do you introduce yourself and your experience to recruiters? Do you just explain listing facts or you  present your professional journey as a compelling story? 
Continue to read the related HBR article

Understanding better your self means better career choices and development

A useful (Free of charges) personality test

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

You can find here below a link that you can use to make a test and understand better your personality. It gives you useful insights to better plan your career or develop your soft-skills. Continue on Findingpotential.com

Self-management

The "workaholic" syndrome is bad for you and also for the company

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

As many executives and entrepreneurs I have the tendency to be "workaholic" expecially because (luckily)  I am passionated about my work. Long working hours are the norm for me: passion, research for excellence, pressure from market, clients, project deadlines, iperconnection are only some of the reasons. During my career I learned that this is very dangerous because we do not have unlimited energy and we need to re-charge our batteries in order to have a long-term sustainable job performance. How about you?
On this topic I recommend an interesting article by HBR Continue on HBR

Leadership & Career management books - recommended by us (3)

The five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni

Recommended by Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Managing effectively an executive team is not a easy task and often unsuccesfull business results come from un unsuccesfull team. Patrick Lencioni in this book describes  the main 5 dysfunctions that teams mostly face and, using a "novel" style, tell us how Kathryn Petersen, newly appointed CEO of fictional company DecisionTech, Inc.ibe solve the issue.

Five dysfunctions of a team:

1. Absence of trust—unwilling to be vulnerable within the group
2. Fear of conflict—seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
3. Lack of commitment—feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization
4. Avoidance of accountability—ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards
5. Inattention to results—focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

Self-learning

Leadership & Career management books - recommended by us (2)

Working identity: unconventional strategies for reinventing your career by Hermina Ibarra



 


How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into Reality Whether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we're doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we've invested in our current profession.

In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we've learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.

Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities. Through engrossing stories-from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist-Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share.

She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can: " Explore possible selves " Craft and execute "identity experiments" " Create "small wins" that keep momentum going " Survive the rocky period between career identities " Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition " Make time for reflection-without missing out on windows of opportunity " Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new " Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming.

A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us. Herminia Ibarra is Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.

You cannot change other people behaviors but you can change your reaction to them

By Giorgia Madonno
Marco Polo Consulting
Posted September 06, 2013

Harvard Business Review's video: Defuse difficult people.

 

How to deal with difficult people and their bad behaviors?

 

1) Shift your attention to your own feeling and thoughts

2) Respond with not judgemental observations

3) Ask a thoughtful observation

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzXLfLjzNJE&list=PLPvxi5oPkFoH69PN_eSHIzTVyaKGmHuWA