Over the past couple of years, I’ve been increasing the frequency of public speaking that I do as part of our overall brand reputation strategy.  Being seen as a person of influence in your sector, provides substantial benefits to your brand and puts you significantly higher up the consideration chain of your target audience.  It reaches out further and deeper than any advert you can ever place.

This week I hosted the annual Shared Services Forum UK conference in Harrogate.  Bringing together around forty really large private and public sector organisations to share examples of excellence, the names of businesses attending was like a who’s who of top flight companies.  There was a brilliant line up of keynote speakers during the day, including Molly Harvey, Adrian Webster and David Yeoman , each delivering different takes on leadership, motivating others and personal development. I was able to spend time with each of them during the prior evening dinner and during the day to talk about what makes them tick.

The one common characteristic of the three speakers is that they all continue to develop themselves, in order to develop others.  They sat in on the keynotes of the other speakers, observing, taking notes and learning.  They all possess a hunger to raise their game, refine, test, learn and be their best.

It was fascinating to see the contrast in styles and engagement between the three speakers.  Harvey, with a soft Irish accent, delivered some powerful content which had the audience listening intently. Webster, turning energy up and down in explosive stage fits of a sparky performance and Glaswegian Yeoman, engaging the audience and challenging people with his forthright views on use of words and behaviour.  He managed to get everyone up and spontaneously clapping to the Gypsy Kings, cleverly anchoring a moment where we had all just let go of tension by blowing our negative thoughts into a balloon.

Observing the audience, it’s amazing how people love to be inspired by others and catch the wind of enthusiasm of clever thoughts, connectedness and potential for change.  Molly Harvey made a great point during her keynote about “watch who you spend your time with.”  What she meant was, you have to spend your time with people who have the mindset that you aspire to, have or are developing in order for you to be challenged and grow.  If you have a think about the five people you spend the bulk of your time with, what does that say about how you are influenced?

That’s why it’s important to get out of the office, meet new people, discuss, debate and network.  To listen to others, grow, share and challenge yourself.  I learned a huge amount just being in the presence of others, I’d encourage you too.  Consider it an investment, not a cost.  Invest in a day, don’t justify a day.  Excellent people do.

  I posted back in February about something called Cognitive Distortions.  Basically, those pre-programmed reactions formed from previous experiences, which drive our future reactions to situations.  If you’re aware of them, you can do something about them, by re-framing the way you see/digest or internalise things.

I was reminded of how diferently we all see the world just recently whilst doing some reviews.  Taking a look back at some personality profiles that I’d had done on some key individuals showed how differently people communicate, process information and think.  Just because I can think and talk at the same time, it doesn’t mean somebody else can.  It makes them no better or worse than me, we just do things differently.

A great example of this can be seen in brainstorming sessions.  If you put a roomful of people together, don’t be surprised if some people look they are generating far more ideas than some others, it’s just how they’re wired.  Other people in the room can generate those same valid ideas, but may need a little longer, or pre-notice, or a couple additional days after to process and think.  Until you start to appreciate such matters, you may not get the full potential of your team, assuming that one communication style fits all – it doesn’t.

We use the Meyers-Briggs profiling system, of which there are sixteen characteristic profile types.  What’s amazing when you ask your team to do it, is that you get that “aha” moment, when you begin to understand why some people are highly organised, some disorganised.  Some introvert, some extrovert, some ideas people, some reflectors.  The bottom line is that there is a huge variety of personalities out there, some more common than others, and all subject to change based upon personal circumstances (personal pressure etc).

The lesson is this, you can’t to use the same style with everyone to get the same outcomes.  If you can adapt your style, by having a deeper understanding of your own personal style and the style of others, it can lead to really meaningful interactions across your team.  If you want to understand more about how you can use profiling to enhance performance, give Impact Consulting Psychologists a shout, I’ve worked with them for years and would thoroughly recommend their approach.

Last week I sat on a panel in Manchester, aimed at SME’s discussing technology.  Representing the views not only of a hardware manufacturer, but also as a Director of a large business who uses technology to gain competitive advantage.  Any conference examining tech needs to cover the advantages of cloud computing.

The main triggers for IT upgrades in SME’s tend to be the following: -

1. They are moving.
2. They are a new business.
3. They are growing.
4. They have an urgent need to repair something that is broken (what we call a “distressed purchase”).

In my view, businesses that are new or moving (1 or 2) are much more likely to adopt a higher level of cloud services into their business than those that are growing or repairing (3 or 4).  Once a business is established, in a premises and focussed on growing, it becomes all about adding or growing to the existing IT set-up – evolution, rather than revolution.

One of the primary reasons that large enterprises, who have the resources to look at such things, are considering cloud computing is business agility and competitive advantage.  It means less people plumbing technology, less software development, server maintenance and support – in fact there’s a lot to be said for it.

The number one consideration continues to be security, closely followed by available network speed for access.  It’s a big job to move away from a network infrastructure, however many large enterprises are developing plans towards virtual private clouds.

A new start can doesn’t need a server, applications,  e-mail server, CRM system or finance system, they can rent all these services in the cloud.  They can benefit from the latest software developments, don’t have to worry about capital expenditure for hardware and can focus on what matters most for their new business – sales, marketing and growing like crazy.

They, potentially may benefit from competitive advantage over more established SME’s who may stick with what they’ve got, preferring to not change for reasons of business continuity.  Those that continually refine what they use, how they use it and how they can review their working practices will continually benefit from these new services.

They may well come down to earth with a bump as the future is predicted to be smartphone/tablet based and the concept of “BYOD” (bring your own device) is already being investigated by major CIO’s as part of their future technology policies.

The lesson is this.  It’s worth reviewing what you do and how you do it regularly.  Some major advancements are right here and right now, you could be benefitting from them.  Read up a bit, see what others are doing, go to a conference, invite a supplier, check out a few blogs – the possibilities are endless.