Mark Donovan & Associates – News & Blog Section
When trying to engage and retain your staff – beware the law of diminishing intent!
I was recently working with a company to raise its employee engagement and increase its staff retention. Study after study has shown that appreciation is one of the key workplace engagers. When I work with leadership teams one of the first things I ask them is, ‘what...
read moreAre you fed up with people kicking sand in your face?
The question I want to ask you today is… Do you want to be liked or do you want to be respected? When I ask this question to leaders that I work with, they all say they want to be respected. But when we start to examine the behaviors they exhibit, it is quite the...
read moreStop trying to motivate other people…
Motivation is often seen as something we can ‘do’ to another person. This is not so, we can’t motivate someone else to do something... try getting your kids to study! What we can do is, create an environment where people will be engaged to motivate themselves. ...
read moreCount your blessings, not your troubles!
My mother told me a story once which I feel is apt for these strange and challenging times we sometimes live in. My brother and I were going off to school one morning when my mother said to my father as he was also leaving for work. “I feel sorry for the boys having...
read moreAre you holding up the mirror?
As leaders, we need to ‘continually challenge the perception of ourselves’. When a large gap exists between how we see ourselves and how others see us, this leads to ‘leadership blind spots. This is why feedback from others is so important, it’s like a mirror that...
read moreWhy it’s important for leaders to keep their word and do what they say they’ll do!
For many leaders today, organizational life is like being a hamster on a wheel. We are working extremely hard but we are getting nowhere fast! We make promises with good intentions but then don’t deliver on these. This hits the results we achieve and the personal...
read moreThere are 5 major reasons why it is so difficult to change!
When we initiate a personal campaign to improve ourselves, it takes longer than we thought. Our need for instant gratification trumps our patience and discipline. 1) It’s more difficult than we thought - improvement is hard, if it were easy, we’d already be better… 2)...
read moreAccepting self-responsibility and taking action!
One of my key philosophies is accepting self-responsibility and taking action. The problem with most people today is not the absence of knowledge, it is the absence of doing. The starting point for achieving anything is accepting the self-responsibility for doing it. ...
read moreThe confidence you will gain by developing your personal brand!
One of the most important value-added areas that I work with my clients today is in helping them develop their own personal brand. Or as I prefer the put it, helping them define, ‘what do you get when you get me?’ A personal brand is not a goal to be achieved, it is a...
read moreGet Your Car out of the Garage!
A great many people live in the self-imposed imprisonment of low expectations about life. I call this, the ‘car being stuck in the garage’, it’s not moving so it is going nowhere. How do we change this? Accept self-responsibility and take action! Pick a goal and start...
read more
Recent Comments