Category: Soft Skills

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Time Management – How can it improve performance?

One of our most precious commodities is ‘time’. We often find ourselves believing that we don’t have enough hours in the day to complete all the tasks we have. This post examines this mindset and provides some tips as to how to prioritise effectively in order to achieve what’s important whilst learning to identify, and let go of those things that are not.

What is Time Management?

Time Management is the process of organising and planning how to divide your time between specific activities. Good time management enables you to work smarter, not harder, leading to increases in efficiency and productivity.

How can you improve your Time Management?

There are many techniques to help you to improve the way you manage your time. Here are some for you to try:

Prioritise tasks.

Time Management - What is it and how can it improve my performance?

Sometimes we allow ourselves to get overloaded with the sheer number of tasks we have agreed to complete. To prevent this, we can allocate a simple measurement that allows us to prioritise:

Importance: (A=high, B=medium, C=low)

Urgency: (1=high, 2=medium, 3=low)

Always work on the most urgent and important goals and tasks (A1) first, and then move on down your list. Don’t be afraid to reach a point with your list where you make decisions as to whether you should do the goals and tasks at all.

Pareto’s Law (The 80/20 rule)

Pareto reminds us that 80% of results come from 20% of actions. It’s a way of focusing our minds when it comes to making decisions. We ask ourselves whether, or not, we’re concentrating on the 20% of activities that provide the 80% of desired results. If we’re not, we take steps to change what we’re doing until we are.

STOP PROCRASTINATING BY USING THE 4D SYSTEM

Drop it: What is the impact of not doing the task at all? Consider the 80/20 rule; maybe it doesn’t need to be done.

Delegate it: If the task is important, ask yourself if it’s really something that you are responsible for doing. Can the task be given to someone else?

Delay it: If the task is one that can’t be completed quickly and is not a high priority, simply delay it.

Do it: Postponing an important task that needs to be done only creates feelings of anxiety and stress. Do it now!

In Summary:

In this post, we’ve defined what Time Management is and explored techniques for getting better at it. Some people will be naturally drawn to one of the techniques referenced, other people might be comfortable with all three.

Whatever works for you is ok the really important thing is to commit to the choice to improve how you manage your time and to keep working at it. The key is to keep checking in with yourself:

  • Are you working smarter, not harder?
  • Are you more efficient in the way you manage tasks?
  • Are you able to be more productive, whilst doing fewer tasks?
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What Is Emotional Intelligence & How To Use It To Improve Performance At Work

Introduction

We all have a ‘toolkit’ to draw on as we seek to be the best we can be at work. In recent years a person’s emotional intelligence helps to increase our efficiency and productivity. It underpins the ‘how’ we do things in terms of the approach.

In this post we’ll provide more detail around emotional intelligence and provide specific examples of how we can use it to improve performance.

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional Intelligence refers to a person’s capacity to be aware of their emotions. It also allows a person to handle their interpersonal relationships fairly and sensibly.

A lot of research has taken place on the topic of emotional intelligence and therefore a number of ways it has been described. According to Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist who helped to popularise emotional intelligence, there are four key domains to it:

Self-Awareness: This can be defined as having the ability to recognize one’s own emotions. Also their strengths, weaknesses, values and drivers and understanding their impact on others.

Self-Management: Also known as discipline. This involves controlling or redirecting our disruptive emotions. It also controls our adapting to change circumstances in order to keep relationships moving forward.

Empathy: Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand how they may feel or react.

Social Skills/Relationship Management: Those who do well in the social skills element of emotional intelligence are great communicators. They are as open to delivering, or hearing, bad news as they would be when the news is more positive.

You can watch a short video of Daniel Goleman describing the four domains of emotional intelligence.

How to use EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TO INCREASE EFFECTIVENESS AT WORK?

If we’re self- aware we know in advance how any actions are likely to affect our emotions and those of our colleagues. This helps us to take a better, more rounded, approach when it comes to our work and, ultimately increase our productivity.

An example of this might be that if we have awareness of how the emotions that working with ambiguity create behaviours in ourselves. These have a negative impact on colleagues, therefore we can take steps to remove the ambiguity, as much as possible.

Every workplace has moments where tensions are raised. Often this can cause strong emotions which can lead to behaviours which are not healthy. Being able to use self-management means we can keep a check on these behaviours and stay in control.

If you can display empathy you will be able to put yourself in someone else’s position. You will understand how this translates into maximising their productivity and ensuring wellbeing is maintained.

A good level of social skills/relationship management increases our efficiency in things like employee engagement and conflict resolution.

To summarise

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE TO INCREASE EFFECTIVENESS AT WORK is what enables us to be aware of, control and express their emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships fairly and sensibly.

Each of the four domains provide opportunities to become more effective in the use of our emotional intelligence. Statistics available show that working on this can provide success:

The source of this information is TalentSmart.

  • Emotional Intelligence is responsible for 58% of your job performance.
  • 90% of high performers have high emotional intelligence.
  • 71% of hiring managers believe emotional intelligence (EI) is more important