Latest Seminar Event

Recently, our CEO attended a seminar in which one of the speakers was Dr. Hugh Cormican, founder Andor Technology and he noted the following very useful points from Dr. Hugh Cormican:
 
1. The best time to eat a frog is first thing in the morning. In other words, get the difficult unenviable tasks over with first.

2.  Question: five frogs are in a log, four decided to jump. How many are left? The answer is five, just because you decided to do something it doesn't follow that you will do it.

3. Realize the power within yourself.  

4. Measure everything. Encourage risk taking but control it. You should worry about what your team will worry about next. 

5.Men don't multitask but they do segment very well. 

Finally and very importantly please repeat the following. To be more effective as a leader, be yourself but with more skill.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the 

High Quality Investigative Practice.

Social Effectiveness Training

One of my colleagues went to a really interesting seminar on Wednesday evening of last week organised by the Association of Coaching in Belfast. It was delivered by Michael Mallow, a very entertaining speaker. He learnt the ten following things:  

1.    All we can give another person is information.
2.   We can only control our own behaviour. 
3.   All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
4.   The problem relationship is part of our present life.
5.   What happened to the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.
6.   We satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.
7.   All we can do is behave.
8.   All behaviour is Total Behaviour and is made up of four components: acting, thinking, emotions and physiology.
9.   All Total Behaviour is chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components. We can only control our emotions and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think.
10.  All Total Behaviour is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognisable.


We're busy at the moment marketing our new mediation services for Northern Ireland

Mediation Seminar

A colleague of mine attended a mediation seminar last Saturday last in Letterkenny Donegal and came away with the following learning points :

* It's advisable to ask all parties for any notes they have taken for you to destroy after a mediation has finished.

* A good mediator should hold onto a closed mediation file indefinitely afterwards

* In most employment cases a mediator should eschrow an agreement giving parties time to seek professional advice before signing an agreement.

* "Professional advice" is a better term than "legal advice" for it wider and encompasses medical and business advice where necessary as well as legal

* Any person shadowing a mediator should be referred to as an assistant rather than an observer. Co-mediators are just that and share responsibility and liability equally.

We're currently busy marketing our seminar rooms for Northern Ireland

David Meade's Insights

I attended a course two weeks ago hosted by David Meade. I got 5 helpful important points from the conference:

1.        Awareness – when given a task be aware of the other things going on around you. It is amazing how you can miss the most obvious thing because you are so busy focussing on the task in hand. 
2.       Know when to take a risk – David Meade relayed the story of how he took the chance and left his University job to start a career doing Mentalist TV work. On his first appearance on the Stephen Nolan radio show, he was expected to be “car crash radio”. His determination and desire to succeed proved otherwise.
3.       Power of positive thinking – being told you are terrible at something will make you worse at the task, being told you are good (even when you are not) will make you perform better as you believe you are good at the task (research carried out by team of ballet dancers who were asked to play basketball. They were then randomly selected and told some were good and some were terrible at playing – even if they were really good. The ones who were told they were great outperformed the ones who had been told they were terrible).


We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Employee Engagement

Our CEO has been researching staff engagement recently and has come up with the following conclusions:

1. Engage remote teams: Use web cams

• An inexpensive web cam can be tied to your Instant Messenger. It is a great way to humanize people who are just names on a "cc" list.

2. Spot an Engaged Employee, engaged employees are:Authentic

• Employees who are themselves are more effective in the workplace.

3. Define and refine your culture to engage: Keep your “culture to engage” in the front of employees’ and managers’ minds.

•  Make “culture,” “engagement,” and similar subjects frequent items for discussion.

4. One of the most important rules of Employee Engagement: Rules are meant to be broken.

•  Sometimes, you may find that it is necessary to break a rule to easily proved extraordinary service or just to make things work as they should.

5. One of the most effective strategy to impact engagement across an organization: Start at the top

• It will be an uphill battle for everyone if your most senior teams are not true believers of the power engagement.

We're currently re-working how we market our employment law email service

Common Purpose - Passion and Resonance

Passion and Resonance was the second topic discussion in the course, "Common Purpose" that I attended to last week. I got some helpful learning points from the discussion:

• "Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~ Donald Trump

          Communicating a business’ passion:

-          How is it we want staff to communicate?

-          Think about the content, be creative.

-          Engage in conversation with our customers through our website/ Twitter/ Facebook

-          Be strong, honest, true and accurate

• "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

• "Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about" ~ Steve Pavlina

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Social Media Marketing

Legal-Island has been studying social media marketing closely this week and have gleaned 5 important key points to remember:

1.  The End of Business as Usual -  We need new 'mindsets', new business approaches and new performance measures. It's not all about being a broadcast medium. It's about listening to and engaging with customers, partners and community 
2. It's Social - Marketing as a conversation is a two-way dialogue. New 'mindsets' are required to be successful in social media
3. Power Shift - Social media empowers the customers and the network
4. Declining Effectiveness - the traditional approaches to sales and marketing are not as effective as before
5. It's a Revolution - A fundamental and revolutionary change in online behaviour, expectations and in the online customer experience


We're busy at the moment marketing our new mediation services for Northern Ireland

Young Leaders Conference

The Young Leaders Conference was also one of the coursed I attended to two weeks ago. It was all worth it and I learned the following important points:

1.       Vision was again reiterated at this course, the importance of sharing the vision.

2.       Taking risks – a good leader should not be afraid to take risks – whether they be good or bad.

3.       Make a decision and stick to it – even if you know it will mean people may dislike you for it. If it needs to be done, stick to the decision and carry it through.

4.       Power of psychology/ persuasion. Think about how you put a suggestion forward. Say for example you have 5 ideas and there is one in particular you would like the person to choose. Place it at number 3 in the list. Research shows that the choice at number 3 is most likely to be chosen as by then the person feels they know what you are talking about and are drawn to number 3. If you have 4 ideas, still put it at number 3 and if you have 3 ideas, make up a first or fourth and place it again at number 3. (David Meade)

5.       Don’t hide away from the bad stuff – don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away when there are problems, deal with them head on even if you know the outcome could mean change.

We're currently busy marketing our training centre for Northern Ireland.

Common Purpose – Broadening Your Vision

I underwent a lot of courses last week and one of them is entitled "Common Purpose – Broadening Your Vision". I learned 5 important points from this course:

1. Heard from Baroness May Blood, truly inspirational woman who clearly had a vision for what she wanted to achieve and showed the energy and determination to match it.

2.       Baroness May Blood also demonstrated how humour and humility can take you far in life.

3.       Heard from Peter Dixon from Phoenix Gas, provided a very interesting insight into how a business needs a vision in order to achieve results. Results cannot be expected without the vision behind them.

4.       The day itself raised questions on our own visions – do we have a personal vision? and do we know what the true vision of the organisation we work for is?

5.       Paul Rooney from PWC gave an interested session on Leadership and who he looked to for leadership and vision both in his career and personal life.

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Good to Great

One of my colleagues told me about a great book he read, it's called, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. He took five key learning points from it:

1.     Pursue the big 3 traits. Good-to-great companies move ahead of their competitors by pursuing only those projects that have three traits;

        a.     What their people are deeply passionate about

        b.    What drives profitability for their     business model

        c.     What they can be ‘best in the world’ at

2.     Stick to what you’re good at – The Hedgehog Concept. Good-to-great companies are those that consistently stick to doing what they do best and avoid getting distracted into new fields of business that are away from their core competencies.

3.     Good is the enemy of great. This is one of the reasons why so little becomes great, but ultimately good companies can become great companies if they push themselves and don’t settle for great.

4.     Do not get side-tracked on non-core ideas. Instead, good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding what lies within their Hedgehog Concept and ignoring everything that does not.

5.     Creating a good-to-great company takes time and is an iterative process rather than a blinding flash of inspiration. To guide this process, many use a ‘Business Council’ approach to gain the depth of understanding required to come up with a unique differentiating Hedgehog Concept.

We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland

Active Listening

A colleague of mine listened to an audio cd  by Peter Thompson called ‘The best kept secrets of the world’s great communicators’ – the following is a summary of one chapter on ‘Active Listening.’ These are the points that he noted from the session:  

Listen actively when there is high emotion or the possibility of misunderstanding, when the person is important to you, or when you need the information they have. The better you listen and respond to others, the better they will listen and respond to you. The more attention you pay when someone else is talking, the more attention they will pay when you are talking. The following are ways to listen actively:

1.       Make notes. This will reinforce your memory. It is advisable to ask permission first in some situations. That permission is seldom refused. If you wish to take a tape recording, it is vital to ask permission.

2.       Maintain eye contact. It shows others that you are paying attention.

3.       Think of listening based on the ratio of having two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. Listen twice as much as you speak.

4.       Allow people to finish their own sentences no matter how enthusiastically you want to jump into the conversation. Doing so will indicate respect for what the person is saying.

5.       Get all the information that is available within a conversation so you will not jump to any false conclusions. Wait for the end of the sentence or end of the conversation to be sure this conversation is unique from any other that may sound similar to you.

6.       Respond so the other person knows you are listening. Your response may be “Yes” or “I see” or merely nodding your head. Any of these will do.

7.       Be accepting rather than judgmental so you can truly hear the message being given. Different accents, catch phrases, speeds of speech, and cultural generalizations can get in the way of hearing the actual message.

8.       Ask questions when you do not understand something that was said. This goes a long way to building strong communication.

9.       Ask core questions. That is typically a series of “why” questions that go deeper into a particular subject to gain the greatest understanding of a situation. Start with broad information and continue seeking more specific responses.

10.   Pause before replying. Pausing will add power to what you say. It indicates you are giving a considered response, that you thought about it, that it is not just some answer you offer every time this question comes up.

11.   Use the Rapid Repeat Method to improve your listening skills and concentration abilities. Do this by simply repeating, silently in your mind, what is being said a fraction of a second later. This holds your concentration and improves your recall of what was said.

We're currently busy marketing our seminar rooms for Northern Ireland

Diversity Management Workshop

A colleague of mine attended a Diversity Management workshop delivered by Tanya Kennedy today at Legal-Island's training centre and took from it the following five key learning points :

• Jane Elliot’s “A Class divided” is a superb video that shows just how easily people can fall into prejudice and the ugly consequences. See here
• Zappos has some great core values worth examining including :

1. Embrace and Drive Change
2. Deliver WOW Through Service
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

• Pret a Manager have simple core values  : passionate about food; passionate about people; passionate about success
• No-one is born prejudiced. It’s a learnt process. We can unlearn it.
• Are we all age obsessed? I think we are…

It's hard going sometimes in the employment law field. We still feel we're organising the best employment law seminars around.

Andy Bounds's Sales Seminar

6 key learning points from Andy Bounds's Sales Seminar in London, 26th of April:

1. Money is never a money issue but a priority issue. We need to help customers give us priority.

2. People buy because they are interested in your value proposition not your unique proposition.

3. Success, not perfection is what selling is all about.

4. The aim of the marketing brochure is to cause something to happen.

5. You need an incentive on Facebook for customers to like you. For example, to receive 5 top tips a day, join us on Facebook.

6. Facts tell, stories sell. A good selling technique is what is known as the "BO" technique. Where 'B' stands for Benefits and 'O' stands for Options. Give them a choice of 'Yeses' rather than a 'Yes-No' option.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the Absence From Work Conference.