How To Utilize Your Strengths At Work

Why is it important to find your strengths

Where do you spend your energy, working on what you are already strong at or trying to improve where you feel you have weaknesses?

In life, it can be beneficial to know what areas you excel at and which ones need some work. When you take the time to find your specific strengths, you can know what goes best with your personality while not overwhelming yourself.

Even though you might have heard growing up that weaknesses are “failures,” that’s actually quite the opposite. By taking the time to learn, grow, and find what you’re good at, you can become more successful because you can hone in those specific areas.

Examples of common strengths in the workplace

This table showcases some of the most common strengths in the workplace. I want to challenge you to pick your top 3-5 skills and write them down on a piece of paper. Then take a look and see how you’re currently utilizing these skills in your job, and then for the ones you’re not using, take those to your boss and ask how you might be able to incorporate them into your daily tasks.

Dependable	Hard Working	Flexible	Team-Oriented
Leader	Interpersonal Skills	Self-Motivated	Organized
Strong Will-Power	Focused	Motivated	Analytical Thinking
Strategic Thinking	Willing To Help	Always Eager To Learn	Able To Communicate
Fast Learner	Disciplined	Confident	Reliable
Patient	Active Listening	Honesty	Strong Work Ethic

Consider this, if you are working in your strength areas, you may find that you can work longer and more energized than when you have to do things that are not your strength areas. Here is an example, one of my Clifton StrengthsFinder Strengths is in the Influencer category: Activator. I love to put new ideas into action. I have most of my energy at the start of a project.

My strength is not dealing with day-to-day or execution of a project, whereas other people like having a checklist of things to do and feel a sense of accomplishment for completing tasks. I feel best when I am getting things started and moving ideas into action, then I want to find the next idea and help put it into action. When it comes to Execution, my top Strength is in. The arranger is a strength where I like to look at resources and optimize them for the situation that they are in.

This is great when things need optimization, but I may not be your guy when things are optimized already, and people with strengths like Focus, Deliberative, and Discipline may be the right people to execute the plan to completion.

Examples of common weaknesses in the workplace

Follow the same protocol we did above for the strengths, but now for your weaknesses. Write down 3-5 areas that you wish to improve on a piece of paper. Then create a couple of ideas that can help you mitigate these areas. This may be a goal, a tool to help you, and/or talking to your peers, your boss, or other trusted people (Executive Coach?) to figure out how to overcome your weaknesses.

Yes, it can be uncomfortable talking about your weaknesses. But your vulnerability and honesty in recognizing these areas can help you and your team put the right people in the right jobs for success.

Complainer	Unwilling To Learn	Constant Complaining	Lazy
Impulsive	Impatient	Hesitant	Overburdening Themselves
Can’t Delegate To Their Team	Low Confidence	Lack of Patience	Low Productivity
Perfectionist	Unorganized	Unmotivated	Unwilling To Help
Passive Listening	Tardiness	Timid	Talkative
Can’t Create A Work-Life Balance	Selfish	Micromanaging	Constant Self-Criticism

Now, I shared about strengths above, what about weaknesses? I recently spent way too much of my time scheduling youth lacrosse for K-8^th grade kids in San Diego. I love it from the point of view of arranging teams to play each other, and continually tweaking the schedule to keep things optimized. However, details often sneak by me and I miss some things. It is embarrassing and humbling when people start calling and telling me that the schedule is all messed up. Next year I need to find a person to help me with this, but going over the schedule and making sure all the details are right before it is published!

Here is another example: when painting a room, I am all over the roller, doing big picture application of paint to the walls (another strength is Strategic), whereas my wife is more interested in brushwork along the edges and ensuring that the detail is correct, as well as filling in the areas where maybe the roller did not apply paint as evenly (it’s the roller, not the painter!).

One of my weaknesses is details. What do I do about that? Should I go out and take a class, get training, or find a mentor? I think that is appropriate to some degree, but what I think is great is that I found a teammate who has a different strength than me, in this case, detail work, so that we as a team can accomplish more, better.

How to utilize your skills at work

When it comes to my wife and me, we are very different, but together we make things work. The same can be said for your team. Can you get your team working where they are energized and excel, and figure out where that is, and where they can complement each other?

If you’re a natural-born leader that knows how to motivate your coworkers while keeping the team moving together cohesively, then speak with your boss about how and what you need to do to start making the transition into a leadership role.

Or maybe you are detailed oriented and want to start transitioning from the sales team into data analysis for your current employers. Go to your boss and see if there’s a way to start making that dream a reality.

Now, sometimes it’s not possible to incorporate your skills into your current role, and if that’s the case, it would be wise to start looking for a new position that will put your strengths to good use. When you can do that, you may find more success and optimization in your organization.

Get Professional Help

Here at Tackship Consulting, we can help you or your team discover their strengths and how they can start incorporating them into their everyday tasks. Whether transitioning to another role or providing more opportunities where they can shine, we are here for you.

Activate your passion, and optimize your performance with Tackship Consulting. Schedule your free consultation to learn more about the process!

April 4, 2022April 4, 2022

The Data Component of Traction

Data Component of Traction

Data is a great and comforting thing for me. I like to see numbers, so I know where I stand. Am I improving? Has my performance declined? Statistics about performance abound, in sports, business, and even our personal lives. Fantasy sports is all about tracking the performance of individual players or teams, and we create competitions based on this data.

The stock market is all about different metrics on the performance of companies, which we invest or divest of so that we can increase our personal value.

Personally, my 100-yard freestyle swimming time is something that I’d like to see go down over the years that I have been swimming.

Measuring something can help to maintain focus on that thing. Numbers are a fascinating way to track our lives, personally and professionally. I think about the number of people who track their performance in running, swimming, weight lifting, cycling, weight loss, and calories. If we focus on numbers, we can figure out what we need to do to move the number in the direction we desire. For example, Weight Watchers has historically been a way for people to lose weight by focusing on calories or points and tracking those numbers daily to create change in weight for people.

Similarly, in business, focusing on our data can allow us to see the performance of our company and see if we are moving towards our goals (10-year target, 3-year picture, 1-year plan, Quarterly Rocks). As we set our goals in the Vision component of Traction, we want them to be SMART, and if you recall the “M” in SMART, it stands for measurable. When we measure and keep track of the data, it will allow us to see how close or how far away we are to the desired outcome.

Providing people with measurables and targets can help them focus on something important. There needs to be a balance to set the right measure for people to track their performance while integrating it into the rest of the organization. If your sales team is bringing in more work than your operations team can service, you may want to adjust your sales team number to larger clients rather than the number of clients.

EOS Measurable Advantages:

Numbers cut through the murky subjective communication between manager and direct reports
Numbers create accountability
Accountable people appreciate numbers
Numbers generate clarity and commitment
Numbers create competition
Numbers produce results
Numbers create teamwork
Numbers help solve problems faster

Create a scorecard

Creating a scorecard is a great way to track data. The Traction scorecard looks like this:

Who – is the person accountable for the measurable.

What is the Measurable? Anything that you can easily track: revenue, cash flow, new leads, and customer satisfaction.

What is the goal for the metric? The goal of the Company Scorecard is to go over it at the weekly meeting. Then track the number each week of the quarter to monitor progress.

As with most Traction approaches, there should be a limited number of measurables, 5-15, and less is more since you want to focus on what is essential and not just measure things for measurement’s sake. Allowing for objective, data-driven analysis of performance, helping people to stay focused on tasks that help improve the numbers.

Keep focusing on the measurables for at least the quarter, and if something needs to change, then it needs to wait until the next quarter. Eventually, you will dial in the right measurables so that your employees, divisions, departments, and company are all tracking the right things that help to achieve your rocks, plan, picture, and target – this is Traction.

Get Professional Help

Our professional team can help you create measurable goals that everyone can easily follow.

Activate your passion, and optimize your performance with Tackship Consulting today. To learn more, schedule your free consultation.

April 4, 2022April 4, 2022

The Process Component of Traction

Your Values & “Why”

There is a lot of value to “why” your company does something. The why can help your customers resonate with your product or service or potentially even your ability to attract and retain talent.

A process is the “how” you interact and serve your customers. In the Traction book, it’s referred to as the “way” you conduct business. It is an essential aspect of the definition of your company. If your team can articulate it, it gives you an air of professionalism, giving confidence to your customers that you know what you are doing.

The process is often associated with large corporations and can also be associated with bureaucracy or rigidity that does not allow for creativity. However, everything we do in life follows processes.

Processes are a part of life

What we do when we wake up in the morning, to our arrival at work, is all a process that we do every day. Similarly, how you serve your customers can be easily articulated. When you document your process, you can better understand customer touchpoints and who is interacting with the customers– allowing you to better train employees.

Likely, you have sales/marketing and operations departments, where the product gets generated, or the customer gets served, and a finance/admin team where functions like hiring and payroll get done.

One TackShip customer has an overarching process of Design, Build, Maintain – three basic steps that when combined with their “why” and their “what,” sets them apart from their competition.

Another TackShip customer provides real estate services. Documenting how they can serve their customers in the discovery process and secure the space for their customers, allows them to provide the needed insight for customers who may not understand the process. The brand is their process, and you could even go so far as to trademark your own process.

Keeping the process simple

In previous blog posts, we’ve talked about the process of creating an Accountability Chart. You may have already started by identifying core functions and who is accountable for their performance. Eventually, you want to be able to identify the steps of each of these functions so that they are repeatable and do not rely on a single “hero” to complete.

If you find that your process is lacking, you may want to create a new aspirational process, which is how you would like your customers served better. In this case, determining where you are and where you want to go can help create a roadmap for investment in tools, process development, or people who can take your system to the next level. In documenting processes, as with all things in the EOS world, the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle applies.

Similarly, to the process, the easier it is to understand, and the easier it is for employees and customers to learn. In Traction, this can be done by documenting the 20% of the process that gets 80% of the results. Write down the steps of your process with some bullet points of specific procedures.

Here are some examples of core processes in an organization:

1. HR

2. Sales

3. Marketing

4. Operations

5. Accounting

6. Customer Retention

By focusing on the individual core processes for each department, you can help to ensure the intended success of the organization as a whole.

Get Professional Help

Figuring out the process for your company and documenting it can be daunting. Tackship Consulting is a professional executive coaching firm that can help. We specialize in helping organizations like yours navigate the pain points to take their business to the next level.

Activate your passion, and optimize your performance with Tackship Consulting today. To learn more, schedule your free consultation.

March 25, 2022March 25, 2022

What Is A High Performing Culture

Creating a Culture That Lasts

“Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” – <attribution>

Culture is a critical part of your company. If you don’t get the culture right and ensure that it continues to develop in meaningful ways, toxicity, dissatisfaction, and retention can become real issues.

When the focus turns towards creating a high-performing culture, it gives everyone a better understanding of what is needed and expected to keep the company healthy and performing at a high level.

Seven key aspects for a High Performing Culture

During my time at the Townsend Institute at Concordia University Irvine, the following seven aspects were identified as critical in helping employees work as effectively as possible while also creating value and optimizing the company’s performance.

Trust– Trust is an ability to personally connect beyond a task at hand and work together as a team.

There are two types of trust, predictive trust, and vulnerability-based trust. First, let’s look at predictive trust. When it comes to this type of trust, there’s this idea that if I ask you to complete a task, you will do it.

With vulnerability-based trust, people accept their coworkers, even though they might make mistakes and aren’t perfect. Patrick Lencioni calls this “bare naked trust”. Basically that you are able to accept and be accepted by your coworkers, both for strengths and weaknesses.

Autonomy– Autonomy is the ability to use talents and implement new ideas that help the company.

Letting people have the ability to try and learn, fail and grow helps them become more capable and take on more responsibilities. And as we mentioned in our last blog post, make sure that the visions and values of the company are clear so that it gives a guide for future decision making. The opposite of autonomy, is micro-managing, which no one likes.

Ownership– Ownership is about taking on responsibility while performing roles with ease.

Employees should be able to take ownership of their place within the organization and have the ability to make decisions on how they want to get tasks done. This directly correlates with autonomy because as long as the standards are set up front, let employees do their job and see if they can achieve or exceed the expectations set for them.

Truthfulness– Truthfulness is not being afraid to speak and receive the truth.

Similar to ownership and autonomy, if you’re able to trust your employees to have a clear understanding of the vision and values, then they should also have the ability to speak the truth based on how they perceive it.

By having the space to bring up what is bothering them or ways things could improve within the organization, helps the team continue to grow, understand, and feel ready to take on more responsibilities. It also can provide a sense of ownership within the organization

Facing and resolving negative realities– It’s normal to make mistakes in life, don’t be afraid of talking about them.

No one is perfect, and regardless of how hard someone works, things won’t always go according to plan. Often, mistakes are made by employees. These mistakes can be from a number of reasons, lack of training, misguided enthusiasm, and rarely they might even be malicious. Understanding and allowing imperfect people room to learn allows for growth and trust within the corporate culture. That said, there is a difference between a misdemeanor mistake and a felony mistake.

A misdemeanor is when someone makes a small mistake but with the right intentions, or possibly needs more training. A felony is when someone makes a big mistake, from a position of malice or neglect which may have significant or grave consequences for the company.

It is up to leadership to determine the difference, and figure out how the potential of their people. Don’t spend time trying to fix something that won’t change.

Development– Development is the opportunity to focus on bettering your current skills or even taking the time to learn some new ones.

In life, the only constant thing is change. This means you need to understand how to help support your team, both technically and relationally. It doesn’t matter if the support comes through coaching, conferences, or training. What matters is providing opportunities for your employees to continue to be successful and knowing how to assist them along the way.

Mission orientation– Mission Orientation is knowing the bigger picture while ensuring that everything aligns with the mission and vision. When you understand the mission and values of the organization, you feel a part of the team, you can relate with your coworkers, which means the culture can continue to grow.

The importance of a High Performing Culture

Culture is essential to the success of any company. It doesn’t matter how skilled your employees are or how long you’ve been in business. When the culture is toxic, nothing will go according to plan.

Values need to be lived, not just aspirational. As a leader, you have opportunities to celebrate values and ensure that those who are behaving in ways that exemplify them are recognized. You cannot over-communicate your values. The success of any business comes from everyone working as a team. If there’s a toxic environment, the organization can’t function properly. If you have a toxic culture, your company won’t function well. But once you deal with the toxic culture and provide a place where employees can grow and develop, you’ll start to reap the benefits.

Get Professional Help

Knowing where to start and how to create a high-performing culture can feel intimidating, but you don’t have to do it alone.

Tackship Consulting can help you understand the areas you’re doing well in and where you can improve while creating a culture that supports the growth and development of your employees.

Activate your passion, and optimize your performance with Tackship Consulting today. To learn more, schedule your free consultation.

March 25, 2022March 25, 2022

Core Values And Finding The Right Employees

Who’s the right fit for your organization?

A tenet of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) is making sure that you have the right people in the right seat within your organization that follow your core values.

While ideally, one would identify the critical functions of the company, often companies grow with limited human resources and many people are filling many hats trying to keep the cash moving and flowing, as the company grows. Eventually, understanding the core functions of your team, and assigning accountability for these functions will allow for better use of people, within your organization.

What are your core values?

Your company’s core values really are your company’s “lived values.” That is, the values on the wall that one or two people came up with, may not be the same values that are lived out every day within the company. A couple of ways to identify your true core values include identifying the core capabilities of highly respected people in the organization, as well as aspirational values that your want all of your employees to strive for. Either way, the ability to recognize and celebrate your values within your organization will ensure that they are lived.

In an interview with the CEO of Titus Talent Strategies, Jonathan Reynolds shared the importance of lived values and how his company is committed to creating a culture that truly sets them apart from the competition and allows them to continue to evolve alongside their partners.

From our conversation, I learned that creating core values is essential, but you need to make sure that they’re being lived out through the actions of everyone in the organization.

Ask yourself this question: are my values “lived” or are they just words on a wall? Then think about this: if you asked an employee what your company’s core values are would they be able to tell you? If they can’t, then you don’t have lived values.

Keep in mind that values should be specific to your organization and clearly defined, communicated to be truly lived by everyone within the company. If they aren’t, this could lead to you not filling your organization with the right people.

People Analyzer

One of the ways you can ensure that employees are living out your values as a company is by using the people analyzer tool from EOS.

This tool allows leaders to evaluate employees against their core values, something many companies don’t do but is essential for creating a successful culture built on these values.

An example of utilizing this method could be by putting your company-specific values, and the names of each employee, into a people analyzer sheet, then rating each person with a +, -, or +/-.

The ultimate goal is to find people who get a “+” in each section because if they have the same values, that gives you a better idea of whether they’d be a good fit for the organization.

Yes, this tool is useful when hiring people. But it can also determine where current employees need help living out your values. Assessing how people live core values can be utilized in annual performance reviews to ensure that they are moving in the right direction.

Finding the right person

Just because someone shares the core values, does not mean that they can do any job in the company. Ensuring the strengths, personality, abilities of your employees match their tasking, is also critical to ensuring your people are in the right seats.

If your people are not working in areas where they can thrive, their personal growth, as well as the success of the company, might be hindered. Taking the time to ensure a good fit with people and positions, roles and responsibilities ensure a place within your organization where they can shine and where they can fully use their skills because, in the long-term, it will benefit both of you.

Conversely, qualified people who don’t measure up to your core values may look good on paper but will tend to create headaches, division, have other adverse effects on company culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” is often attributed to Peter Druker. Interestingly your core values are also the core of your culture, and a strategically talented hire can go sideways pretty quickly if they do not mesh with your core values.

Accountability Chart

Another way to ensure that your company is functioning to its full ability is through the Accountability Chart. This idea focuses on keeping track of responsibilities throughout the organization because everyone has their span of influence that they’re accountable for working on; there won’t be multiple people in charge of the same task. For example, HR takes on hiring, firing, training, employee benefits and helps to resolve problems within the workspace.

When you utilize an Accountability Chart, you can keep track of the different roles and functions within the organization while keeping track of the performance of your employees.

If you don’t know where to start, that’s okay. We recommend beginning with the sales/marketing, administration, and financial department because these are often the core functions within any organization.

From there, clearly state the job functions for the positions within those different departments. By doing this, you’ll be able to figure out the roles and responsibilities for both your current and future employees.

The Accountability Chart also provides specific individuals who are accountable for these functions. They may not be the people who handle every little aspect, but each person in the organization should have some sort of accountability for something that they do for the company. This helps to establish ownership with the employee base.

Get Professional Help

Trying to find the right fit for your company doesn’t have to feel impossible. Tackship Consulting can help you examine the difference between your written and lived values, how to incorporate them into your organization, find the right people while helping you activate your passion, and optimize your performance.

Schedule your free consultation today to learn more.

February 17, 2022March 25, 2022

How To Create SMART Goals

In our last article, I shared information about creating a Vision for corporate and personal use, and now I want to share how you can work to obtain these through SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym, and when you break it down, you’ll get:

Specific: Specificity in your goals helps you know and qualify what success will look like because it is hard to say you achieved your goal if you don’t know how to define it.

Measurable: My first college degree was in science. Understanding data gives you an objective way to evaluate your progress. If you can define your goal with a metric, you can see how close you are to achieving it.

Achievable: Make sure that these goals are action-oriented, which means having the ability to control the outcome. In life, there are only two things you can control–your attitude and effort. If your goal will require too much effort, it may become unachievable.

Relevant: Keep the big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs) as something to work towards in the longer term. Break it down as weekly, quarterly, 1-year plan, and even a 3-year picture to help create more realism. As one client said the other day, “Meeting a goal makes you feel great. Failing to meet a goal makes you feel like sh…” uh, well, not the best.

Timebound: Working with companies, we have a specific time frame that we set goals for, namely 10-year target, 3-year picture, 1-year plan, and quarterly rocks. Breaking down the days, weeks, and months into actionable steps allows us to accomplish our goals while measuring the progress towards completion and celebrating once we finish.

SMART Goal Example

Let’s say you’re a business owner and want to increase your monthly sales. Rather than just saying, “I want to triple my revenue,” break it down into the SMART goal steps.

Specific: Triple my monthly revenue by selling my business services.

Measurable: I will go from bringing in $5,000 a month in sales to $15,000.

Achievable: I know the metrics of my digital marketing efforts result in 30 new leads per month, and of those 30, 10 become customers. If I can ramp up my digital marketing efforts, I can triple my new leads through new connections, networking, targeted advertising, or training courses.

Relevant: I want to increase my revenue from $5,000 to $15,000, so I will set aside 30 minutes a day to focus on sending out 20 connection requests based on the geographic, demographic, and psychographic characteristics of my ideal customer.

Timebound: It will take me three months to ramp up to 120 new leads a month, so I think a realistic timeframe is by August 31st, 2022.

Now, when we put everything together, your new goal will be: Increase my monthly revenue through business services from $5,000 to $15,000 by August 31st, 2022. To achieve this goal, I will send 20 LinkedIn connections per day to my ideal customer, double my budget for digital marketing, and attend one trade show and one training session.

Get Professional Help

Tackship Consulting can help you activate your passion and optimize your performance by helping you create SMART goals and implement them into your business and even your personal goals. Check out our website, or schedule a free consultation to learn more!

February 17, 2022February 17, 2022

Visioning A Process For Setting Your GPS

Visioning, A Process for Setting your GPS

The corporate visioning framework that I use comes from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), which was published initially in Gino Wickman’s book Traction. There are six parts to EOS, but one of the most crucial is the Vision. The Visioning process uses the following eight questions:

What are your Core Values? – This is an honest evaluation of what would make your company great and an assessment of what you live out in your company. Work may come in ensuring you are living out the desired values.
What is your Core Focus?
1. Purpose – what you do best
2. Niche – who do you do it for, and why do they want it done?
What is your 10-Year Target? – A measurable big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG) is your quantum leap, and achieving it will mean great success. It could be revenue, a certain number of units sold, etc. The 10-Year Target is something that excites, inspires, and motivates the leadership team and the company.
What is your Marketing Strategy? – Think about:
1. Target Market – geographic, demographic, and psychographic
2. 3 Uniques – discriminators that make your company
3. Your proven process for serving your customers
4. Your guarantee, promise, or commitment to your customers
What is your 3-Year Picture? – SMART goals that are achievable in the next three years. Defined by measurable progress toward achievement in key metrics. Three years is not too far off, like ten years, and this is where you can actually see the progress toward your BHAG, and you will have a great start on achieving it.
What is your 1-Year Plan? – Also, SMART goals feed the 3-year Picture but are bound to the next 12 months. Achievability becomes even more essential. Prioritize and simplify your life. If you spend all your time working on 100 goals, you will not accomplish anything. Achieving goals is way more fun than failing at goals!
What are your Quarterly Rocks? – Rocks are the imperatives to achieve over the next 90 days. Someone needs to be the accountable person for each rock. Again, keeping the focus on the most important things and spending 90 days getting them done. Everyone should have rocks, at the corporate level, or at the divisional.
What are your Issues? – Look at what needs to be identified, discussed, and solved by your leadership team, that might be blocking your achievement.

Personal Vision

A lot of these same exercises are beneficial in helping people to transition. As you move into a new phase of your life, often you need to figure out what you want to do, where you want to go, how much money you want to make, or how long you are willing to commute. Taking time to reflect on what you want and where you want to go and then the path to get there can help provide you with a solid plan to move forward. Whether you call it a vision or a purpose for your life, figuring out a BHAG, personally, professionally, or spiritually, combined with SMART goal setting, can put you on your path and help you achieve it!

Tackship Consulting Can Help

In our next blog, we will be sharing everything you need to know about SMART goals and how to make them attainable.

Whether you personally or the entire company wants to work towards specific goals and aspirations, Tackship Consulting is here for YOU!

We can help you activate your passion and optimize your performance. Schedule your consultation today to learn more!

January 26, 2022January 26, 2022

Rules of Engagement For A Difficult Conversation

How To Have A Difficult Conversation

Having a difficult conversation is never easy, especially in the workplace. If the conflict doesn’t get solved, it can lead to employees feeling invaluable, having emotional confrontations, and being insecure about their ability to handle the workload.

Company Values Are Important

Values are ideas that are core to who you are and who your business is, and any violation of these values is not compatible with how you want your business run. Therefore, ensuring your employees and staff share in and respect these values will reduce friction and ensure that everyone aligns with the work that they’re doing.

For example, if transparent communication is one of your core values, you want to find employees that aren’t afraid to share information and aren’t afraid to speak frankly. Similarly, managers and supervisors need to be able to hear and process news that may not be what they expect, be capable of dealing with bad news, and not take things personally nor negatively treat bearers of bad news.

By setting the ground rules upfront, you can find like-minded employees, and your business will only be more successful because your team will have the same values you have created for the company.

How To Have A Difficult Conversation At Work

One of the reasons why difficult conversations are nerve-racking is because many grew up in a world where their parents told them, “if you have nothing nice to say, then don’t say it at all.”

Before you take this as me saying to go ahead and criticize people, don’t. That’s not what I mean at all. Rather, what I want you to do is start with two positives. Then, in the next step, identify the issue at hand while owning your own mistakes.

Maybe you forgot to update the other person about a deadline change or didn’t clearly communicate your standards for the project at hand. Whatever it might be, taking ownership of your own mistakes can help the conversation go smoother and show others what you’re trying to do to prevent a similar issue from happening in the future.

Since this is a conversation, remember to let the other person have an opportunity to respond to what you said. Rather than listening just to respond, remember to try and listen to understand the other’s point of view. Try putting yourself in their shoes. It can help give you a new perspective on the matter at hand and help you make more progress.

Next, ask who you are talking with to make the needed changes and clearly state the standards again, all while letting them know of any consequences of not meeting these expectations. It can range from not receiving the promotion they wanted to even losing a job.

The last rule of engagement is to leave the conversation on a positive note. Talk about the strengths that you see and what you love that they’re doing. By ending the meeting on a high note, you can motivate them to fix the problem.

Follow Up Is Key

The next day, follow up with the person to see if they have any questions, how they’re doing, and if you can help with anything.

Let them know you care and want to see them succeed in this position. When you take this time to check in, it helps to reinforce the idea that you’re a safe person to talk with if they need help.

Get Professional Help

Tackship Consulting is here to help you and your business navigate through the issues at hand while helping you learn to deal with any future problems that come up and overcome those obstacles to optimize your overall performance.

January 26, 2022January 26, 2022

What Makes Executive Coaching Unique

The Different Coaching Professions

I often get asked what’s executive coaching, and how is it different from other coaching professions. That’s a great question because, more often than not, there will be confusion about what makes an executive coach unique.

Before we get into what makes executive coaching stand out from other types of coaches, I want to explore the differences between life, business, team, and career coaching.

Life Coaching

In a sense, a life coach helps clients live their life better.

They seek to encourage and offer support to their clientele for both personal and professional issues in their lives. These topics can range from personal goals, life transitions, or even projects that they’re currently doing.

Business Coaching

An entrepreneur would benefit from having a business coach because they help assist and guide business owners with decisions regarding their company.

For example, “how would adding a new team member fit within your business goals?” Or “how can you continue to achieve your personal goals while running the company?”

These are just a few example questions that have a possibility of being asked during a business coaching session. In general, during these meetings, it’s a goal to help the business owner hone his or her strengths while mitigating their weaknesses.

Team Coaching

Teamwork is a crucial part of many companies to be successful, but when there’s miscommunication between the team, it can lead to problems for the entire company.

Team coaching helps to facilitate the performance development of the team as a whole and helps them meet their objectives.

For this to work, though, the coach needs to understand the team dynamic because the focus isn’t solely on an individual.

Career Coaching

Looking for a new career but don’t know where to start?

Then a career coach is a beneficial tool because they focus on job searches, negotiating salaries and promotions while providing clients accountability.

Executive Coaching

An executive coach acts as a sounding board that helps clients improve professional and organizational performances.

Even though executive coaching is similar to the other examples, it does have a unique aspect.

Executive coaches focus not only on challenges in the current moment of a client’s life but their life as a whole. This allows an executive coach to help facilitate a client’s desire to move towards improved performance.

Work With Tackship Consulting

As an executive coach, I’ve been trained and certified to help clients explore their goals and the steps they need to reach their goals and make their dreams a reality.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can activate your passions and optimize your performance, fill out the contact form today.

April 30, 2021April 30, 2021

Truth and Perception

Lately I have been thinking about the truth and about perspectives on truth. I think of the truth as facts. I think of the truth as unchangeable, I think of the truth as what is real and what I may or may not know. Let us use this elephant throwing red dirt on its back as an example of truth.

Perspectives are more the way that I view the world. This is based on my experience, my training, my upbringing. These are lenses through which I see the truth. They may also be the affected by my ability to see or understand things. If I can only see a tree, do I miss the forest? If only the forest, not the individual tree? If I can only see the ear, tail and front leg, do I know that these are portions of the same picture above. I don’t have the whole picture. The three zoomed in images are not even in the same order as the portions are in the original picture. In life, these perspectives incorporate both my conscious and my unconscious biases. These are things that affect my beliefs.

Perspectives of zoomed in parts of an animal

My beliefs are not necessarily the truth. My beliefs can be changed through thought, acquiring new information, talking with people, and even experiencing the world. In fact, our beliefs create ways for us to deal with the world. They help us to deal with pain and trauma, and prevent future pain and trauma from occurring again. Based on our previous experience we create mechanisms, thought processes, and mindsets to keep us from having to deal with hurtful things. But did you realize that by changing your experiences, you can physically change the neurological pathways in your brain? If you can experience different outcomes from expected situations, you can actually reprogram your brain. At the Townsend Institute, they call this having mismatching experiences. Like when you don’t speak up, because when you were a kid everyone told you to be quiet, or that you were dumb. If you can be motivated to try it, and get a different experience, like someone saying, “Wow, that was very thoughtful, thank you for sharing” you may find that those types of validating experiences will make it easier for you to move forward and changing your behavior…which is a result of your experience, your perceptions, and your beliefs.

So can we ever get to the full truth? Please tell me what you think!