Tag Archive: blogging

Happy Birthday to Us!

3

That’s right, as of March 28th Whiteboard Consulting is 3 years old!

Both Nicole and I are breathing a sigh of relief that we made it out of the Terrible Two’s, which, though not truly “terrible,” did provide us with our fair share of lessons.

Three Things We Learned in Our Third Year

  1. We thought we would be doing all Process Improvement, all the time. We were wrong. Instead, we have been doing more and more training and facilitation as the months have gone by. Why is this? Two reasons: first, most organizations don’t know that they need process improvement. They don’t come to us, hat in hand, and say, “Please Ruth & Nicole, will you fix our processes?” Instead, they express concern over a symptom, or ask for information on how to improve a specific aspect of their business. This almost always leads to some kind of facilitated work and/or training, and sometimes also to true process improvement work. The second reason is that, without intending to boast, we are excellent trainers, and word gets around.
  2. Network. All the Time. In the first half of 2014 we were extremely busy, and spent little to no time networking and generating new business. It seemed natural for the work to come to us, so imagine our surprise when the pipeline dried up in late summer and it took several months to get it moving again.
  3. Do what you love. We love to train and write. Our courses for both the general public and our private sector clients, as well as the courses we teach for the Government of Ontario, are received with wonderful feedback, and our blogs are being picked up by the Huffington Post more and more frequently. (Look for them in Forbes soon if all goes well.) We really enjoy process improvement work, and when teaching and writing are thrown in, we are very happy campers.

In Our Fourth Year We Are…

  • the Queens of networking and business development, taking Whiteboard into a year of growth.
  • following Sean Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution and taking a page out of our own book too – this means we are focused on the activities that act as lead measures and will drive our ultimate goal of revenue generation. We have weekly accountability meetings and have laser-focus on the activities we need to achieve to be successful.
  • finding ways to say yes. If clients ask us to do work that conflicts with something else in the schedule, we figure out a way to make it happen. If that means Nicole does one event and I do another, so be it. Hard for us to let go of each other’s apron strings, but that’s what it means when you’re a toddler instead of a two-year-old.
  • training. A lot. Our next two public courses are:
    1. Lean Six Sigma for Service Delivery, a 3-day course in May in Toronto. (Click here)
    2. Performance Measurement 101, a 2-day course in April and May in Toronto. (Click here)

Thank you for your engagement, your comments, your “Likes,” “Shares,” “Favourites,” and “Retweets.”  We look forward to even more of those in the coming year!

Until next week,

Ruth.

3 Steps to Keeping your 2015 New Year’s Resolution

Happy 2015! Hope you all had a restful and enjoyable season.  Now comes January.  The month of overflowing gyms, vegan cleanses (hey I’m on one too….I don’t judge), new organizational goals,and new ways of doing things.

Ruth and I have those annoying type-A and process based personalities that are ripe for habits and accountability.  Look at our blog for example, we’ve been consistently blogging every Friday for almost 4 years. Every Friday no matter what. Literally EVERY Friday. Every single one. Wait…wasn’t our last post a really long time ago? Well…..okay the last couple of months has been a little off. Why? We’ve been busy, but no busier than usual and not “crazy busy” (my pet peeve when people say this).  So what happened?

habitWe lost our trigger….

Of course we had reminders to do the blog! Little miss task list Ruth has us on quite the regimen! We have a recurring appointment in iCal that alternates between “Ruth Blog” and “Nicole Blog”. It was error proof! But occasionally we switched blogging dates. Sometimes the calendar had two different versions and I wasn’t sure if it was my blog day, or Ruth’s. One day one of us just forgot to do it, and then it happened again….and again.

We stopped doing the task….

This is just the actual act of writing the blog.  When we were in the “habit” of blogging it meant me knowing it was my blog week, thinking of potential topics, and making a mental note of what might be interesting that week.  Just the sheer act of getting prepared and starting to write it started a habit.  But as soon as I missed a blog or two, the task just kind of disappeared.

We stopped tracking….

When we were in the habit, one of us would usually ask the other : “Oh have you posted the blog yet?” or “Oh, its Friday, did we forget to post the blog?”, or “Can I help you with the blog this week?”. It was our way of keeping each other accountable (in a kind and curious way of course).  What happened instead was we said to one another: “Oh don’t worry about it, we’ll do it next week!, or “Oh you’ve been sick that’s okay.”, “Or, it’s the holidays, who has time to read our little blog”.  We were making it okay to not keep our habit! Excuses. Excuses. Excuses.

aristotle-quote-habitWhat about MY new habits?

So if you’ve made some new year’s resolutions like reducing your email inbox from 10,000 to 100, or meeting with your team members more regularly, or *gasp* implementing a new process -you need to make it a habit.  Use T3!

1. Trigger: Set a calendar reminder, use Siri,  put a post-it note on your monitor. Whatever works. Do it.  Do it in multiple ways.

2. Task: Do the task.  Do it the first time. Do it the second time.  Do it even if you get behind schedule do it anyways. Even if it is late or seems futile. Do it.

3. Tracking: Find someone to keep you accountable. Ask them to follow up with you.  Ask them to be your accountability partner.  Make a chart in your office that everyone can see. Find someone/something to cheer you on when you did it and call you out when you didn’t do it.

Let us know how these help you keep a habit on your new years goals!  Keep us posted on Twitter @whiteboardcons!

Until Next Time,

Nicole