That’s great, what they need to ask themselves is whether it’s realistic at the current stage of their business.

There’s nothing wrong with aspirations at all. However, using goals to try and achieve them in the short-term (by that I mean a year) can be counterproductive.

After all aspirations by their very nature tend to be out of our comfort zone and more difficult to achieve.

So in order to get around the problem of mixing aspirations with goals I like to use a 3 year target so that I can show my aspirations developing over three years.

Aspirational Target

For example maybe I want to have an office in Australia. However, there are a number of things I need to do before I can achieve that. So it makes sense to put the project "opening an Australian office" into year 2 of my target. Year 1 might contain things like increase profit by £250,000 to £750,000 and recruit a new sales person.

So in the target picture the numbers 80 to 60 would represent year 1 (this year), 50 to 40 year 2 (next year) and 30 to 10 year 3 (the following year).

Then on the target you’d write down your aspirations as a line leading from the centre. Then along that line you’d write what could be achieved in each of the 3 year rings.

The net result is that I can show my aspirations being achieved over three years. And obviously each year I create a new aspirational target.

The good thing about doing it this way is that it’s a visual prompt to your brain that reinforces your aspirations and what you want to achieve over the next three years.

Vital Few Goals

Now I have my aspirational target I can look at those I believe can be achieved, or part achieved, this year. Then I decide what are the 3 or 4 Vital Few Goals I need to meet to move forward on those aspirations

I list those down and then brainstorm projects that can help move me forward on one, or preferably more than one, of the vital few.

I assign project deadlines for each project and also a measurement of how I’ll know that I’ve succeeded.

Then I breakdown the projects into steps I need to take to achieve each one.

As I work on each of the projects I know I’m working towards completing them. In completing them I’m meeting the Vital Few Goals and in doing that moving forward with my aspirations.

Ultimately those aspirations are what makes a company grow and prosper.

And this approach is part of what is incorporated into my time management workshops.

Here are some ways that a meeting can go wrong:

a) attendees arriving late
b) People talking to their neighbour (off-topic) during the meeting
c) People wanting to only talk about their topic and hijacking the agenda
d) Weak chairmanship
e) No agenda, "because we know what we’re going to discuss"
f) No follow-up on action items from the previous week
g) Missing attendees who are needed and didn’t say they would be missing
h) Action minutes from previous meeting not available for the meeting
i) Having people attend for the whole meeting when they are only needed for one topic and could leave after it
j) Allowing one person to dominate the meeting and make their point, air their grievance, change the topic mid-stream or give their biased point of view
k) Allowing agenda items to go way over their allotted time (remember the time allocation is only a guide, but it’s a good guide)
l) Meeting length is dictated by the agenda
m) The agenda should not be so long that people lose the will to live part way through. Only you will know what is the right length. Saying it should be 10 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour is irrelevant if you don’t cover your agenda items.
n) The type of meeting makes a difference, for instance an IT project status meeting can be short, whereas a manufacturing plant meeting could be half a day. It all depends on what you need to do and by when
p) The worst thing to do is to come out of the meeting with no action notes and with people unclear as to what they should be doing. So always have a summary of actions at the meeting end.

q) Not sending out an agenda based on the required actions from the meeting and new issues since

r) Having regular meetings that are no longer productive or required

Unfortunately from long and sometimes bitter experience I can attest to the fact that there are very few people who are great presenters from the day they start.

I’ve actually sat through presentations where the presenter simply read from their notes, without looking in their audiences direction. One presenter I saw even got so befuddled with their notes they had to stop and go off stage in a fluster. Others wind their way round to the point they’re making and take so long  that it feels like you’re sliding down an old-fashioned helter-skelter.

At other times I’ve witnessed presenters who obviously thought they were the cream of the presenting crop and yet lack of rehearsal meant they inflicted pain on their audience. That pain was from the obvious fact that they didn’t know which slide was coming up or whether the questions they were asked came up in a later section of the slides.

And of course we’ve all seen presentations where the presenter is so taken with their company that they waste a lot of air talking about their business, their history, their clients, their success and worst of all make their audience sit through the company video.

So if you’re looking to improve a little on your presentation skills learn from what others get wrong…

Presentation technology

It really doesn’t matter how you do the presentation: webinar, Powerpoint slides, flipchart, video or simply standing on a stage. Never blame the technology if you fail to deliver your objectives for your presentation.

The oft-quoted “Death by Powerpoint” is not Powerpoint’s fault. It’s the fault of the wielder of the technology. The types of issues you tend to get with people who use Powerpoint as a crutch are as follows:

1) They start off running without any introductory slide or estimate of how long they’ll take

2) They don’t investigate what their audience is interested in

3) They deliver the same canned content to different audiences (related to previous point)

4) They have slide after slide of text with no images to break it up

5) They have more than about 5 bullets per slide and/or they have long sentences on the slide

6) They read from the slide verbatim without adding any thoughts related to the slide content

7) They spend too much time on each slide, or one particular one they think is important and no one else does

They don’t look at their audience, rather looking at the screen or their notes

9) They have large amounts of data and/or text on a slide, which tends to mean an impossible to read font

The Presentation itself

When it comes to the presentation there are aspects which only the presenter can do. And if they fail to do them a dire result is inevitable.

The issues presenters have include:

1) Not rehearsing so they’re struggling for words or ways to phrase what they’re talking about

2) Going on about them, their company or their product. Instead of talking about the things the people they’re presenting to are interested in: themselves, their company, their issues

3) Not keeping the pace of the slides reasonably fast so that people read ahead and get bored

4) Not varying their tone, pitch and energy levels during the presentation

5) Not having appropriate images to illustrate most slides, even though they’ve heard more information is retained with image and text together than just text alone

6) Not rehearsing the whole thing OUT LOUD, that way they’ll see whether they trip on words they think they say well when they’re rehearsing internally

7) Not looking at their audience or engaging them in some way

Post Presentation thoughts

A bad presenter considers themselves to be an expert and if the feedback is that some of their content wasn’t clear, well it was the fault of the audience. Others might be complacent, because the audience really liked the content and yet they know they could do better. In reality they should go back to their presentation and polish it so that it is better. Particularly so if it’s being emailed out to one or more audience members.

They never sit back with a trusted friend and see what they could have done better.

Does any of that describe you? I must admit to one or two of them, but having learnt by trial and error I’m better now! The thing is you don’t need to learn by trial and error. Learn from this. And thanks to some of the people before I’ve trained them in Presentation mastery and in the horrible pitches I’ve sometimes had to sit through for giving me these ugly examples of presentation hell!

Think about it for a second…

If you recruit people and they perform to the best of their ability they will reach a plateau.

That plateau will allow them to continue to do the job. However, there can be no further improvement without training.

Because if you already knew what you had to do the likelihood is that you’d be doing it.

So training is the key element that grows an organisation.

There are two extremes in training, and I’ve been in company’s that practice one or the other.

Throw Training At Them And Hope It Sticks

This type of approach involves either the Human Resources department assessing all the training that everyone in the company would benefit from and then simply sending everyone on it.

Or the company employing a consultant to say the same thing and the net result is the same thing.

This is never a good way of running training.

For example I was in a company that sent everyone to time management over a period of a few months. However, when the initial batch of trained employees returned to base they had to deal with people who hadn’t been trained and so didn’t really implement the time management process effectively.

Then when subsequent batches of course attendees returned they already “knew” that the time management process didn’t work! An expensive waste of time and money.

Also sending someone on a course well before they use the new skill means they’ll lose most of the skill. So again a waste of time and money.

I also worked at a company who tried to implement a vast library of training courses that could be accessed online. People could choose their own courses. The only problem?

Employees didn’t really look upon them as a set of proper courses and didn’t give them the attention they deserved.

So simply throwing unfocused training at an organisation is not the way forward.

Let Them Learn From Nellie

At the other end of the scale is the unwillingness for a company to invest in training their staff. The reason may not be financial, they may believe they’re unable to manage without the member of staff for the duration of the course.

So the next best thing to training is to stick the employee with Nellie, who “knows” all the ropes and can train them in what to do.

The problem with this approach is that Nellie may not give all the information required to do the job. Or Nellie might not even have discovered the best way to do the job herself. Remember she’s unlikely to have had training herself. Or Nellie, without even knowing, may send someone in completely the wrong direction for the company’s purpose.

So the problem for the organisation is that Nellie becomes a focus for everyone who isn’t sure about what to do and her productivity declines until the skill has been transferred. Even when it’s been transferred she may still get further queries from time to time.

How Does Training Work For Leaders?

You’re a leader.

How often have you been on a course that you identified you should go on?

What about the executives that work with you? When did you sit down with them all and identify what aspects of their skill set should be built up with training?

How often have you put a new manager, or executive with “Nellie” to learn the ropes, rather than take the time your self – because you’re too busy?

And yet there are 12 key skills that I’ve talked about before in this blog that really make an enormous difference. Improving just those 12 skills will power a business forward. And applying them to the leaders to begin with is the best strategy for a company.

Once the leaders have begun to practice the core skills they need to be mentored by an outside agent who can be trusted to hold them responsible for improvement.  Then the skills improvement can be applied to the other employees in the organisation.

Whatever you do formalise the improvement of those 12 key skills to take you business to the next level.

You do want to get your business to the next level?