The Success Zone

The Success Zone has just released its 2012 Educational Leadership program that integrates one-on-one development with leadership team development, mentoring and coaching. Based on the principles in the Success Zone book, and congruent with leading brain-based practice as outlined in John Medina’s Brain Rules, this exciting new program takes school senior leadership teams from good [...]

  As David Rock writes in Your Brain At Work, mindfulness has long had association with spirituality, even religion. Ask someone to describe mindfulness, and if they can, they’ll often make reference to things like meditation, Buddhism, prayer or perhaps being one with nature. Whilst all these involve, even promote mindfulness, they are not, themselves, [...]

Recently I wrote of the 5 hallmarks of a great listener. In summary, these were: Quiet mind listening Full observational attention on the speaker Listening for the speaker, not for you Absence of agenda, assumption, advice and judgment High self awareness Perhaps not surprisingly, great listeners are quite rare in our current world. Try counting [...]

So you think you are a great listener? Test yourself against these five traits and see how well you do. Give yourself a rating from 1 to 5 on each trait (1 is rarely or poorly expressed, 5 is habitually and permanently a part of the way you listen). 1. Quiet mind listening Great listeners [...]

Reflect on Your Potential… Often, we plug away at our game, our job, our relationships without stopping to assess any corrections we could or might make. A bit like being in the trenches, head down, without ever coming up for air, and to see things as they are from some distance. Moments of reflection, whether [...]

We continue to develop our thinking around the importance of listening.  We have discussed previously that we are able to listen on four distinct levels (downloading, attentive, empathic and emergent).  What we have not understood previously is WHY do we have these four different levels (when we seem not to have an analogous system with [...]

Sibson Consulting in conjunction with WorldAtWork publish reports on the global state of Performance Management.  We have developed our approach based on what works in one of the most complex environments – schools – and the strengths of our approach match exactly what are regarded as the top three challenges in this area, and that [...]

Last week I talked about listening moving to the centre of our understanding about what matters to people for them to develop fully and effectively.  The two most superficial levels at which we listen (downloading and attentive listening) limit our ability to learn very severely.  In downloading we simply hear what confirms our own views [...]

Image by Getty Images via @daylife As it is the new academic year in Australia I have been busy over the last week setting up two schools for full implementations of our upgrade to their performance management systems over the coming year. Both sets of interventions have been exciting and energising as gradually people have [...]

Image via Wikipedia I was recently recommended to read “The Spirit Level – why more equal societies almost always do better” (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett) and I read this on a flight from Australia to the UK (on an eBook reader on my iphone).  I would recommend it. The authors are UK-based epidemiologists and [...]