Personal Effectiveness

When I was a young site engineer I worked for a project manager called Richard. He was very accomplished, one of the companies top project managers and went on to become a director. He was a superb manager, really good with people. He knew construction inside out and was never phased by any problem, so…

One of my passions in life is writing – mine and that of others. I am an introvert – I ‘think my talking’, whereas extroverts tend to ‘talk their thinking’. Most often I think my talking by writing things down: in my journal, my note pad, blog posts and books that I have written and…

Communication is an issue for teams and organisations; as a topic of concern it gets raised in most of the sessions I do with project and business leadership teams. I have a theory on communication which goes something like this: In our current form humans have been on the planet for 195,000 years. Writing was…

As Christmas approaches many of the people I am working with are feeling tired. A client told me he’s been full on for six months, is worn out and has had a cold that he cannot shift for the last eight weeks. I’m also feeling tired – 2015 has been a challenging year though work…

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the World; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the World to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw Here’s an example. In the late nineties I joined a national contractor as operations manager. One of the project managers I inherited was responsible…

When I was a young project manager I wanted to be a contracts manager. Every time my boss came to site I would hassle him about promotion. At first he would tell me the skills I needed to develop, which I did over time, then “Dave you need to do a few more big jobs”…

As a contractors site agent I was exercised by getting the money in and holding on to it. My boss drilled it into me, he constantly reminded me that “cash is the life blood of the business”. Now, after nearly twenty years as a performance coach I have a different perspective. I think confidence is…

From bitter personal experience I recognise the signs.  You have withdrawn into yourself.  You are oversensitive to comments and are not listening to the people that care for you, including your boss by the way.  Your ‘everything must be perfect, do it all yourself’ approach is no longer serving you. The evidence is clear –…

Rob has just accepted my invitation to connect. He is my 500th connection on LinkedIn. Getting to 500 connections was a target I set myself at the beginning of this month – check out The LinkedIn Leader for my rationale http://dsabuilding.co.uk/linkedin-leader/ Rob and I first met earlier this year in a collaboration workshop I facilitated…

Debate is what you see in the House of Commons. There is no listening. Each side is set on proving they are right and the other side is wrong. The side with the most power wins, irrespective of the merits of its argument. The origin of the word debate is to beat down. The route…