How to survive a dysfunctional and toxic workplace

You’ve joined your new team, excited to make a fresh start and prove yourself. You’ve read all about the company ethos and there were some nice words on how it values excellence. In particular though, they highlighted they prioritized results, which you expected meant you could demonstrate your worth through your work ethic. Whilst there were some minor warning signs such as lack of consistency on your exact role, you didn’t want to make a fuss about it at the time.

Unfortunately you weren’t aware of what awaited you when you started. Weird and awkward communication styles in the office, rumours of team members not getting along and a boss who you should never disturb. But you’ve signed the contract and rely upon this job for an income, so it would be hard to abandon ship right now.

All of these experiences seem completely at odds with what you’ve heard a workplace should be like, particularly when every other article on LinkedIn is about how important it is to collaborate and speak up.

Sadly, a lot of people don’t realise they are caught up in a dysfunctional workplace until its too late, and are already pushed out the door due to breaking some unwritten rules. If you think you might be in a dysfunctional workplace, here are some ideas to get you through:

Do what you need to to get by – you don’t need to be a martyr.

Unless you don’t really need this job and have a retirement savings account filled with spare $$$, you’ll probably need a job to pay rent. So the dramatic storming into the bosses office, giving him a piece of your mind and leaving in a blaze of glory is probably not a good option.

So understand what you have to lose, and accept that the situation isn’t ideal. Do what you need to to keep your job, and keep your head down to the weird politics happening around you. It is not for you to change a problematic office environment as the newest person, so don’t feel you have to. Indeed this is where many of us can get caught out – we are told how important it is to speak our mind and push for change, not realising many workplaces do not appreciate someone pointing out their faults. So keep your head down if you need to. Your own survival is your main priority.

Understand the terms of your employment

If you’re currently wondering why your working dynamics are so weird, you’re probably not feeling too secure in your current job. In a volatile environment, people disappearing overnight tends to be a fairly common occurrence. So it is important to verify what clauses are in your contract and what exactly you have signed up for.

If you’re unlucky, your employer may have stuck a very unreasonable (and at times legally dubious) clause about ending the contract prematurely. It’s important you understand that this, particularly if you feel anything fishy is going on. A particular note of caution if you’re currently on probation, as this is the easiest point you can be offloaded. So double check any internal policies for how things are meant to be done (if they indeed exist), and if appropriate, consider getting Trade Union membership in case the worst case-scenario happens.

Be careful who you open up to

This is not meant to sound like a spy thriller, however if you’re noticing that people tend to speak to each other in quiet voices, and go silent when certain people walk into the room, you’ve probably got a toxic atmosphere. And if you’re currently feeling stressed by your situation, it’s natural to want to open up.

Unfortunately, opening up to that friendly-looking colleague or your manager can easily come back to bite you. It is surprising how common place it is for managers to relay conversations to their seniors, so what you thought was an anonymous suggestion suddenly becomes seen as a named criticism from you.

If you’re in this situation, it’s even more important that you don’t compound the situation by vocalising your discontent with your manager. You may be tempted to speak to someone else in the team about how your manager is not being particularly open or fair. However, the person who you have said this to is more likely to close ranks against you than help, simply as they have more investment in their relationship with your manager then you. This is an easy way to get brandished a trouble-maker which is an extremely hard title to come back from, particularly when in the world of work your manager is likely to have all power over you and your employment.

Find your escape route

If you’ve kept your head down, you hopefully have passed your probation and have found a corner of the office where you can do what you need to to get to the end of the working day. You may have even found a way of making it more comfortable for yourself.

Either way, this is not a place you’re going to thrive, and you are better off finding a better environment where you can genuinely enjoy being in work (which is genuinely possible, I promise!). It can be quite easy to settle after a while and resign ourselves, however if you take the plunge and find a way out, you’ll most likely be much more happy for it. So don’t lose that ray of hope of finding a better working environment, and keep searching to find it.

For anyone currently in a toxic environment, you do have my sympathies and I hope you manage to make it out alive!

Your biggest productivity hack? Give yourself a break

If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably just come back into work a bit bleary-eyed after a long weekend with the bank holiday. It’s a nice novelty, considering as a country we have one of the lowest amount of public holidays in the world. This is particularly the case if you’re in England and Wales, where we don’t have a public holiday for either St Andrews or St Patrick Days which are the case in Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively.

So whilst the break hopefully has allowed us all to reset, this is probably something we wouldn’t have done if it were any other week. We usually appreciate the feeling of having some time off, so this is a good moment to reflect: what if we could tap into bringing ourselves out of our work routines more often?

With the current pandemic, it sometimes can be hard to get away from everything going on in the world of work, and the news is often pretty bleak. Naturally this may be ebbing away from your motivation, and doing tasks just feels harder. For me it certainly doesn’t help that I don’t even know what day of the week it is! Unfortunately, I’m equally guilty of trying to solve this ‘issue’ by pushing myself to grind through our motivational-low. But do more reminders, alerts and notifications telling you what to do really solve the underlying problem?

So perhaps a new way of looking at it: if you are feeling demotivated, this is your body and mind trying to tell you something. Rather than treating this as a negative, take this that your own self is telling you that you need a break. And from experience – ignoring it won’t make it go away, it will rather compound it and make it worse.

So if you’re finding your hitting a brick wall, rather than trying to do more, try doing nothing. Turn off your laptop. Shut down Social Media. Disconnect yourself. Move away from the grind. This will help you gain some perspective, and a chance to recharge your batteries.

If you’re constantly grinding through anything day-in-day-out without a chance to pause, the meaning behind why we are doing these daily tasks falls away. We get more focused upon delivery as opposed to why we were doing the task in the first place. So try and take a moment away from work. Considering how long we go without a real break, this is likely to solve some of those motivational lows, and give you new perspective on what you are doing and why it is important.

Hopefully this bank holiday was a good chance to disconnect, but next time don’t feel obliged to have to wait till the next one (25th December!!) to have a break.

Four uncomfortable truths about starting your career

Many of us have a very difficult time making sense of our careers and the wider job market. Often this starts with applying to hundreds of jobs, getting a handful of interviews to finally landing that role, which quickly turns out to be a dead-end. Why are our experiences of the workplace so much worse than what we expect?

Here are four realities about your career that you were never told.

University education is only an entry ticket to apply to white-collar jobs.

Unless you have a clear route such as training to be a doctor, university degrees are pretty much seen as solely an entry requirement to apply. Many of us when applying for jobs aimed for the most elite universities with the most prestigious subjects, hoping our specializations or thesis will give us an extra edge. In reality, 95% of the time this will make little difference to your future; what and where you studied doesn’t really matter much for recruiters. As of 2017 42% of the workforce in the UK is a graduate, so it is no longer seen as valuable as it did for previous generations, instead it has become the new criterion to sift people out who don’t have one.

Some firms are now even removing the requirement of needing a University degree to apply for their talent entry schemes, as they recognize that this is such an arbitrary requirement that all it serves to do is reduce social mobility. Whilst this is a positive move more broadly, it does short-change many of us who were told that university would give us a leg-up in the job market.

Doing extra-curricular activities help, but less than you would hope

We were encouraged to get involved with our university societies and organisations with the oft-used phrase of it being ‘great on our CV’. This is only partially true – and few even use CVs for job applications anymore.

Extra-curricular activities are a great way to find what you enjoy and understand what your strengths are outside of formal studies. This can certainly help guide you to new experiences and what you ultimately want to do. It is indeed possible to use this evidence in job applications and interviews as well. Nonetheless, most organisations mostly have little interest in how good you were in leading your university knitting committee if it is not directly relevant to the data admin job you are applying for.

Whilst we hope that Employers will look at us as three-dimensional humans with thoughts and feelings, due to the sheer amount of people applying, this is often boiled down to whoever ticks the (subjective) box best. Which brings me to my next point..

Job applications are often a game of Russian roulette, and interviews are about practice, not actually about your talent.

Most of us broadly got an idea that job interviews would be coming down the track. If anything, younger generations are likely far more experienced with interviews in relative terms – I balked when I was tutoring a sixteen year old who spoke about preparing for her multiple interviews at different colleges (who of us knew how to interview at sixteen!!).

What we weren’t told though was that job applications would become a horrible process of sending individualized cover letters or statements to hundreds of companies each looking at slightly different things, nor that the assessment process would include completely arbitrary verbal and non-verbal assessments, group assessments and additional interviews. We certainly weren’t told that 95% of companies will not even bother to acknowledge or reply to us.

In reality, getting through this is as much a game of luck and persistence than any real skill. this is partly due to the sheer amount of people applying to each job meaning the bar has been set unreasonably high, and employers have no incentive to do anything other than quick-and-easy selection (e.g. statement scanners looking for the correct buzzwords). I’ve seen first hand how this has played havoc on people’s confidence, sense of self-worth and wider mental well being.

More prestigious firms have recognised this issue, and have reacted by setting a long-drawn out process to try and make it fairer. Unfortunately, these processes then turn into a game of passing each cookie-cutter assessment round, where the task is to give the best answer to what they are looking for. It is no wonder there is a whole industry of prepping graduates for interviews with prestigious firms, often at exorbitant prices.

The age of working hard and staying loyal in a job/firm and progressing slowly up is dead.

We understand that people move around jobs more, and that it’s okay to move from company to rival company. Nonetheless, we still are left with the impression that hard work will allow us further opportunities to prove ourselves, and eventually move up in the workplace. Now that we’ve finally got our foot in the door, try to work hard and impress our employer as much as possible, taking any task we can find to demonstrate our value.

Unfortunately, this enthusiasm quickly dissipates when we realise that the person next to us does half as much work for twice as much salary (and that person isn’t going anywhere anytime soon!). We figure out that we are quickly expected to do the additional tasks we volunteered for without any recognition or reward. Worse yet, if we’re unlucky some colleagues may feel threatened by our additional efforts and ambitions, preferring to keep their peaceful ecosystem of mediocrity. You quickly find yourself isolated and being left unhappy.

Your employer will likely be ambivalent to your sense of feeling fulfilled from your job, as well as whether you are really achieving what you want to.

Why am I telling you this? Because the sooner you come to terms with these facts, the sooner you can look to take your future into your own hands. The next step for you is to work out how to be truly valued and fulfilled in the world without relying on your employer.

You can find all the rest of my articles at https://tahmidchowdhury.co.uk/blog/. Sign up to my mailing list if you would like to receive them on a weekly basis to ensure you don’t miss them!

Why Change Management projects fail

If you’ve been in a fairly large organisation you probably have come across a strategy for revolutionising your workplace via the brand new ‘transformation’ or ‘evolution’ programme. These projects promise big in pushing your organisation into the new technological future with faultless systems to be delivered within a few years.

If you’ve been around a while, you’ve probably already seen several of these come and go, and likely your scepticism has grown with each one! These grand promises are often only partially met, and as priorities change the promises are quietly swept under the carpet, only for a new programme to take its place a little while later.

So why is it that change management projects have such a mixed rate of success?

  • A lack of genuine senior support, nor this being built into the organisation’s priorities

The first question of whether a change management project will succeed is how seriously the organisation itself takes it. Is this something that your CEO has personally staked their reputation upon delivering, or rather is it something that has been farmed off to a small team in HR to implement? If it’s the latter, it’s going to be quite an uphill battle!

Even if this has been publicly stated as a priority by your head honcho, it’s critical that the wider senior management understand and agree to this as a priority. How successful this is is dependent upon how good your organisation’s senior management is, and how well they buy into the wider organisational objectives themselves. If it’s common knowledge that the Director of Finance is dead against any modernisation of the 1990’s fax machines, you’re probably not going to move to integrated cloud-based computing solutions by next year.

  • Lack of everyone else’s buy-in. The wider workforce is apathetic, cynical, or has never even heard of it

This is an issue that I’ve seen lots, much to my frustration. With an understanding that senior buy-in is so crucial, leads spend nearly all their time getting agreement amongst their seniors. Through sheer hard work, they agree a great set of principles and set this out in a nice, pretty document.

One problem – no one in the organisation has ever heard of this, nor even knew this was important. Picture the scene: you walk into the office one morning and suddenly are told the business has set its ambition is to be the market leader in innovation within three years. You sneer, pointing out that it’s hard to be particularly innovative when the printer has been broken for three weeks. You have a quick flick-through the document before putting it into a drawer, never to be read again.

Any programme needs to have support from wider staff to be effective. To do that, an ongoing dialogue is needed throughout the creation process. Better yet, explain why a programme is needed, and speak to staff about what they want to see in such a strategy. If you can demonstrate you have listened to staff concern’s, the chances it’ll be taken seriously multiply ten-fold.

  • Your change management programme has grand, visionary goals without real actions to get there

You’ve worked hard, got agreement from seniors and balanced these with the requests of your staff, great! Staff are excited to read the new document to build a better workplace environment over the next two years. However, once they read it they are disappointed to only see grand visionary statements, and little genuine action to make progress towards these goals. Despite wanting to support the initiative, there is no real mechanism to do so. As work picks up and excitement drops, the programme is put on the backburner, with the result of little change.

Any change is an ongoing process, so the release of a new strategy really is a beginning rather than an ending. As such, this should be the point where communication should be standardised, and ongoing conversation should be taking place with the organisation. If the ‘delivery’ of the change management now is pawned off to that HR team, it’s really doomed to fail.

You can find all the rest of my articles at https://tahmidchowdhury.co.uk/blog/. Sign up to my mailing list if you would like to receive them on a weekly basis to ensure you don’t miss them!

Unfulfilled by your early career? Ask yourself four questions

You’re working your first or second job. Broadly, it’s okay. The salary is lower than you hoped, particularly considering the amount you pay on rent. The tasks have some purpose, though they are fairly monotonous and not quite making the most of your abilities or education. Progression opportunities are unclear. You are frustrated but don’t want to complain too much because you know plenty of other people who are trying desperately to catch their first break.

Does this sound familiar?

For many of us starting our careers, we have often had to overcome the grueling process of multiple job applications and assessments for months on end. Now that we have our ‘in’, we hope that through hard work and effort we can rise through the ranks and gain ever-greater responsibility. Unfortunately, the world of work is much more murky than we expect, and we quickly become disillusioned at the lack of opportunity. We then look for our next job, hoping for some improvement and greater responsibility. We find a similar role at slightly-better pay, and slightly-better responsibility. Unfortunately, this does not solve the underlying issue. Over time you resign yourself to understanding this as the world of work.

If this is something similar to what you are currently experiencing, Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • Were the expectations you had on the working world real?

Before starting our first job, we did a day or two of work experience and looked at the cool offices and think how exciting and fun this stuff must be. Before graduating, we red job adverts talking about jobs that are ‘dynamic’, ‘exciting’, with accompanying descriptions of glorious colleagues who you bond with over ping-pong tables and after-work socials.

We saw our parents, working in one job and slowly moving up the organisation through loyalty. We also studied, and studied to further honours than our parents and grandparents. We are often told that we will be the next Prime Minister or CEO. This does not consider that 42% of the working age population is a graduate in the UK.

All these experiences shape our expectations of work. In reality, the world of work is often an ongoing execution of tasks, week in, week out. At times it can be fun, but mostly it is rigid, boring and far less exciting than any job adviser will ever tell you. Whilst we expect that the world of work is meritocratic, it is often anything but. office politics, weird working cultures and dubious practices can be a real shock to the system, particularly when we work twice as hard as the person who gets that promotion.

The expectations that we had of the world of work were extremely different to the reality. It’s okay to be shocked by this. Give yourself time to reassess.

  • What do you enjoy?

We start our job, wanting to impress. We take on whatever task we can to demonstrate our worth, no matter how menial. We hope that by showing our ability to deliver we will be given more responsibility. In reality, we soon become known as ‘printer-guy’ and look enviously at our more experienced colleague who has learnt to keep their head down when any new ‘opportunity’ comes up. We slowly learn to follow their lead.

Have you stopped to ask yourself what you actually enjoy? Perhaps there was that day the person in HR was sick so you had to handle the records. As it turned out you liked it much more than you expected. However, they returned a week later so in your job you’ll probably not get that opportunity again. Have you spent time exploring why you enjoyed it, and what this could mean for you and your career?

Give yourself time to genuinely reflect on the things you have enjoyed within work, even if it was different from what you expected before starting. For me, before starting my job the idea of HR sounded very boring, in the end I’ve gotten further involved and passionate about Diversity and Inclusion as I understood the importance of it to an organisation.

Remember, finding a job that you enjoy matters. For your own success and happiness.

  • What do you really want to be doing?

Remember your conversation with your school or university job adviser? Back then, you perhaps dreamed of lofty jobs at the top of organisations,. Naturally your priorities have shifted since then, and the realities of the workplace are now pressing heavily upon you. Nonetheless, when was the last time you revisited what you truly wanted to do?

Remember that you are gathering really key data for yourself about the world of work which you did not have before. Having worked in a job, you may realise you don’t actually particularly like it, or more likely you may have found a new area of interest that you never heard of before.

Remember to regularly revisit what you want to be doing, and it is okay if this changes. In fact it probably will.Adapting your aims and ambitions to the reality of the workplace is the only way it can be realistic, and it is often what more and more people end up doing. For some, this means slightly tweaking their specialisation (e.g. moving from sales to marketing), for others it could be as grand as realising they much prefer helping people and running workshops, so they end up leaving their office job to become a yoga teacher. For the latter person, this certainly was not part of their conversation with their career counselor at school, however they are now much happier than in their office job

  • What is actually most important to you?

We hold degrees at great expense, along with continuous messaging about ‘making a difference in the world’. Naturally, we expect our careers to be a crucial aspect to our lives. We presume we need to move to the big city, leave behind friends and family and put up with lower living standards to make it happen. Perhaps this leads us to take up a tiring job with a long commute, and we are often tired to meet with friends after work. We haven’t been to the gym in weeks.

Our lives are one big opportunity-cost. By pouring your effort particularly into your career, you are reducing your chance to put your energy into other things you enjoy. Some are willing to make the large sacrifice of career above all else. But for many, there are things that are more important than the job. Your task is to figure out what really is your priority in life. It is for you to figure this out, and no one can decide this for you.

You are not going to get everything you want in life, so it is better to put your efforts into the things that are most important for you, and live without the things that are less important.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I hope this article helps you.

Top Books for self-development

I previously wrote about how books can be a great way to learn as a cost-effective and time-saving measure. This got me thinking of what books I would recommend. So without further ado, here is my list:

  1. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perserverence by Angela Duckworth

This book is excellent for better understanding what it takes to ‘make it’, setting out that one of the real key criterion for success is not being the smartest, but being the most committed. If you can continue with your goal when the chips are down, you are more likely to be successful (compared to your contemporaries who give up when the ‘going gets tough’). I would recommend this book for anyone, but especially those just starting out in their careers to help get to where they want to be.

2. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates us by Daniel Pink

As a recent first-time manager, this book was an absolute gold-mine to better understand how to motivate my employees. However, it was also a great way to learn about myself and my own motivations. Pink sets out the importance of internal or intrinsic motivators, which in reality are far more valuable than external motivators (e.g. rewards, punishment). As part of these internal motivators, Pink sets out that people strive for three things especially: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

3. Quiet: The Power of introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Speaking by Susan Cain

As an introvert myself (one that enjoys the company of people, until I get tired!) this book is revelatory in highlighting the importance of skills that introverts bring to the table. In a world where often leaders are assumed to need to be extroverted to be ‘charismatic’, this book dispels that myth by highlighting that actually a large amount of senior leaders are actually introverts who adapt. This is a great book if you are someone who is seen as a ‘bit quiet’ or naturally more reflective in nature, as it brings to the fore your true worth in the modern world.

There are other influential books such as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ by Daniel Goleman which bring revolutionary concepts into the modern world on thinking and intelligence. A word of note though that these two books are more dense so will require more time investment than the others I’ve listed above.

You can find all the rest of my articles at https://tahmidchowdhury.co.uk/blog/. Sign up to my mailing list if you would like to receive them on a weekly basis to ensure you don’t miss them!

Tips to create an inclusive workplace culture – part two

Following on from yesterday’s blog, here are my remaining tips to create an inclusive workplace culture:

  1. Where appropriate, be naturally curious about other people’s backgrounds and take an interest in what other people do outside of work. This does not mean going out and putting people on the spot about race, disability or sexuality – e.g. many LGBT+ may feel uncomfortable being asked about their background and personal circumstances. Ensure that any questions are respectful and done in a positive spirit, respecting your colleague’s response.
  2. If you are not sure on how to refer to someone, ask them how they would like to be referred to. There are many ways individuals can identify themselves, and it is worth remembering that ‘BAME’, ‘LGBT+’, ‘disabled’ etc. is a very wide umbrella – with many not being fond of the term ‘BAME’ or ‘LGBT+’: often people may prefer to be referred to as ‘Black’, ‘Queer’ ‘Asian’, ‘neurodiverse’ etc. As there is no size fits all, the best way to do this is to ask, though ensure you do so in a sensitive manner without putting employees on the spot. 
  3. Ensure you are following the basics of line management: scheduling regular one-to-one conversations, Performance Development Meetings and allotting sufficient time where possible. Ensure you are being fair and consistent in the amount of time and attention you give to your different staff – whilst this sounds obvious, in a study, research demonstrated only 20% of women BAME respondents below senior management stated they received help from their line managers. In stark contrast, 75% of white women stated their continued growth was due to having a supervisor, champion, mentor or coach. 
  4. Encourage team members to become Reverse Mentors, and for your seniors to sign up to be reverse mentored. If you feel comfortable to do so, gently remind your seniors to fulfil any objectives they have relating to Diversity and Inclusion or wellbeing.
  5. Sign up to your organisation’s staff networks (sometimes referred to as Employee Resource Groups). Join as many network’s as you’d like, even if you do not come from the characteristic of the group in question! It is important that the networks gain a wide membership to ensure their reach is across the organisation so don’t feel afraid to join! If you don’t have a staff network, why not create one?

Hope these are useful!

Tips to create an inclusive workplace culture

An inclusive culture is where all people can feel comfortable to discuss issues outside of the work context should they choose to. In my department, I previously worked with Staff Networks and HR to come up with a set of ‘top tips’ to help foster an inclusive workplace culture, here are some of the highlights:

  1. Set out a team code of conduct which demonstrates a common level of respect for all individuals, no matter their background.
  2. Role model positive behaviour and openness to discussions about backgrounds – it makes conversations much easier if leaders and managers are open about their own background before asking about it from their employees; moreover, it can help disarm the more threatening elements of questions (‘where are you from’?)
  3. Create safe spaces to discuss backgrounds and open up the conversations. For example, some teams hold lunch’n’learns where individuals can talk about their backgrounds in an open, curious and non-judgemental manner.
  4. Create an environment where employees with disabilities and long term health conditions feel able to come forward and discuss their disability, and any reasonable adjustments that they might need. Avoid making assumptions about their condition and ask them to explain how they experience it and what support, or reasonable adjustments they need.
  5. Ensure that conversations and social activities are inclusive as far as reasonably possible. E.g. holding ‘breakfasts’ as well as the usual pub gathering to capture parents. Ensure you include everyone as much as possible in work related discussions and avoid ‘water-cooler’ decision making.
  6. Create clear mechanisms to deal with discrimination, and/or Bullying and Harassment within your team. Ensure that such mechanisms are used properly and aren’t simply viewed as a ‘tick-box’ exercise. This can be through effective use of countersigning mechanisms or an anonymous ‘agony aunt’ style point of contact to raise issues within the team.

How do you foster a warm, inclusive workplace environment within your team?

How to get ahead of your peers? Read!

Have you been looking for the next course, Forbes article or nugget of info to improve yourself and get that extra 5 percent out of yourself at your job? You’re probably not the only one, and learning and development is being valued now more than ever within organisations. However, an easy way to improve yourself substantially is to read. And when I say read, I mean read books!

Books are fantastic avenues for information and guidance when you are facing a problem. Now I realise that sounds quite obvious, but in the modern day we often talk about ‘not having time’ to read books because they are quite lengthy. The idea of reading may harbour images of having to gruel your way through a 600 page academic text book and send shivers down your spine. (For me it reminds me of my history undergrad reading Annales history where they wrote about everything that happened, including detailing the adjacent trees…!)

Fortunately, lots of excellent, valuable and easy-to-read books are available at a click of a button. Better yet, they can be an extremely cost-effective way of learning, and in the long run will save you time by teaching you before you make those mistakes! Plenty of books written by subject matter experts such as in psychology and business now realise that the key to their book sales is not to build more jargon and awkward unintelligible theoretical concepts, but rather make it reader-friendly and useful for the general-interest reader.

When looking at your personal development you may have eyed up some great sounding courses, only to note the eye-watering costs that are four and even five digit figures, particularly from renowned figures. However, those figures often release their own books which detail the same information (and often more!) which can be accessed for £10-20. Granted, workshops are a great experience and there are things you will gain from them that you won’t get from a book, but often the main crux or learning point will be the same. And often, the workshop will point you towards the book as additional learning anyway.

Better yet, in the era of e-books and self publishing it is easier than ever to find a book that can greatly help you with issues you are facing. For example, are you a new manager? There are hundreds of great, short e-books that give you a fantastic crash-course on good management and bad management (that’s how I certainly learnt my chops!) More recently, I’ve wanted to learn a bit about website design and digital marketing. Rather than spending countless hours or so in trial and error to figure this out, I bought a few easy to read e-books to quickly understand the main things I needed to. Whilst the £20 or so was a bit of an investment, the accumulative knowledge I gained probably saved me 50+hours of time!

So what are you going to go read? It would be great to know about some of the books you have read that have helped drive forward your career!

What Makes a Good Public Speaker? My top tips

Public speaking is regularly highlighted as a key skill in the modern workplace. However, many people naturally find the whole prospect scary: what if you embarrass yourself in front of everyone including your boss in the front row!?

Throughout my university years I spent a long time practising public speaking through Model United Nations debates. This really helped with my own public speaking as it allowed me to practice and understand my own style. I remember when I first started, nervous to speak in front of a handful of people (I must confess I resorted to fairly cookie-cutter jokes with mediocre results!), though in the last few years I’ve been more than happy to crack jokes in front of a crowd of more than 1000. So how do you get from being worried to speak in front of a few to being the charming whizz at your all staff meeting?

Follow the basics

There are some basics that any good public speaker does need to adhere to no matter what their style. Rhythm is important, speaking fast can mean people can’t follow, speaking too slow can make people lose interest. Think about what the audience is interested in hearing and build your content from there. Also, keep an eye on the time, you’re probably not the only one speaking and going twenty minutes over is usually not looked upon too fondly! This may feel like quite a few things to keep in mind, but remember that you do all these things when you chat with anyone outside of a public-speaking context!

Public Speaking is a skill, and like any skill you will get better with practice

No one was born able to ride a bicycle perfectly, and likewise no one learnt to speak publicly instantly either. Public speaking is a skill, and like most skills you only get good at them if you practice. So take the opportunity to practice where you can, even by starting small. Here are some simple ways you can practice speaking before jumping into the real thing:

 • Practice in front of a mirror, or in front of close friends

 • Imitate standing at the front of a room with your notes the day before and visualise how you will be speaking to the audience in front of you

 • Start small, e.g. presenting at your mini team meeting or huddle.

 • Attend public speaking workshops to practice

Starting small can allow you to improve bit by bit. Remember, those people giving Ted Talks weren’t magically born with the gift of public speaking, rather they got their by practice.  

Bring your own personality and style into what you do, rather than looking for a template to imitate.

Whilst there are many useful tips that can be learnt by watching others, remember it’s you speaking not them. in a world where expressing yourself and your own individuality is being valued more than ever, you will get limited value emulating the first video you find of a tall guy with glasses and a neutral accent if that doesn’t really fit your description.

Instead, look at what your strengths are when speaking more broadly – are you quick on your feet and good at moving around the conversation or are you more thoughtful and deliberate when you speak? Use these strengths and build on them. To me, public speaking is about taking what you normally do, and refine it for a crowd. It is not about suddenly speaking the Queen’s English and waving your hands around because that’s what other people do. Understand your own way of speaking and make small tweaks. Don’t start from scratch.

Public speaking as a chance to express yourself and give your opinion

The idea that the spotlight is on you can be daunting. Instead, think of this being the chance for you to express yourself, and give your own opinion on the matter. In my mind, public speaking is responding to ‘what do you think?’, so take the opportunity to give your thoughts!

People don’t remember so much as what you said, rather they remember how you made them feel. This is your opportunity to give your own point of view based upon your own feeling and emotions, and by doing so making your audience feel something: are you looking to inspire, excite, sadden, shock? Emotions are more memorable than a long list of bullet points.  

These are my top tips, do you agree with them?