Executive Playground

Learning should be fun - it should stretch and challenge your senses and leave you with a sense of achievement

The Difference have developed the Executive Playground to do just that

Free Up Fridays

Time management with a difference. We look at time logs, hold coaching conversations around those logs and discover your your habits; good and not so good. We then share our hints and tips for a more creative use of your time – both efficiency and effectiveness are the outcomes and each individual gets a tailor made set of solutions.

Getting The Best From People

This is all abut understanding and tapping into motivation. Nail this and your people will willingly do what you want them to do. You’ll create a team of happy staff who look forward to work. Increase your influence and impact as a leader.

Personal Impact

Good Leadership starts with trust. In order for people to really trust you they need to feel safe, valued, and that they belong. This can often feel overwhelming for leaders faced with hard deliverables and conflicting agendas, not to mention the odd difficult personality. Focusing on the impact you want to create, the vision you are sharing and the map you want to follow allows people to buy into  shared  priorities, to feel that they want to work for you and to go that extra mile with you because you’ve made them matter. This is the key to happy and productive staff.  Read more…

Overcoming Difficult Situations

Being able to manage difficult conversations in adult way stops things from getting out of control, it helps prevent stress and perceived under performance. In essence it builds personal confidence and helps you to be a more effective leader and manager.

Using Your Strengths

When you are aware of your strengths and know how to use them effectively you appear to possess an innate power, you glide through your day with ease and confidence. Using the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) we help you to understand how you ‘show up’ in your relationships with other people, what you are naturally best at and what changes under pressure. Operating from your own strengths builds personal resilience and  enables you to lead with congruence and efficiency. Understanding the SDI scores of your team helps you to work together as a team, enables you to enhance motivation and encourage and develop people in the most appropriate way for them.

When everything is going well we will tend to operate from our strengths, but when we meet with conflict and difficulty we may find that these very strengths work against us and inflame the already difficult situation. It’s like when someone raises their voice to us…we feel a sense of pressure to respond but may not do so effectively e.g. raising our voice and backing off perhaps. By understanding ourselves and others’ styles in harmony and in conflict, we can begin to appreciate what happens and therefore alter our/their behaviour in an effective way, to meet the difficult situation in a collaborative way which is in both our interests.