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Meet Paul
Paul is an expert at showing corporate teams how to be more unified and more collaborative. His proven team building program is guaranteed to bust through the silos as he shows your team how to be as unified as the players in a great orchestra.
A-list corporations have been using Paul’s team building program for almost two decades, his audiences include Microsoft, RBC, Goodyear, ING, Heineken, FedEx, PwC and P&G.
How to stop competition from ruining collaboration.
Imagine going to a music concert and, during the performance, each instrument section (or individual player) tried to outshine the others.
It would be awful to watch and probably even worse to listen to. That’s because you expect this group of people to be working together to reach their outcome - not trying to outshine each other.
Yet this is what happens in many work places.
There is competition between departments and between people inside departments. Often, the dark side of competition also creeps in - withholding information, internal politics, and sabotaging other people’s efforts.
How can organizations make use of the spirit of competition but try to keep out the destructive parts? If only there was a way.
Ah, but there is.
How to be more resilient to change!
If you were like me, as a kid, you faced change head on and did so pretty often.
Every year, you’d get a new teacher, were put in a new class or sent to various lessons, played on new sports teams. In summer, you’d go to camps with new kids and group leaders.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever remember being asked, “Hey Paul, would you like to do this or that?” I just remember ending up in a lot of new situations. It just happened and I had to deal.
We may not have realized it but, as kids, change was around every corner and yes, sometimes it was scary. But you know what? We dealt and I don’t ever remember complaining about “change”.
We had resilience.
So now that we’re all grown up, where did our resilience go, and more importantly – how can we get it back?
When you work with people who drive you nuts.
You know who I’m talking about: they clip their nails at their desk, they air out their smelly feet right next to you, they lick the lid of their Tupperware container in a lunch meeting, they seem to know nothing about personal buffer zones.
Like me I am sure you have been to more than one dinner party where you’ve heard people complaining about a colleague who simply drives them nuts.
It’s a problem that comes back time and time again because people are people and gosh darn it we’re sensitive creatures… well except for “those guys”, right?
Sometimes, we can’t put our finger on why someone really irritates us. Sometimes, we could make a list a mile long.
Does our tendency to find some people around us very irritating make us bad people? No, it makes us very human. The question is, what we can do about it?
How I learned to lead by being at the back of the band
When I was kid, I never aspired to be the leader. I was quite happy to not to be the kid who got to choose all the players for the pick-up soccer game at recess.
I’m not sure why. Maybe I was shy, maybe it’s because I wore glasses that could have been props in Revenge of the Nerds, or I didn’t fit into my view of what I thought a leader should look like: muscular, square-jawed, cape, tights and a cool utility belt.
I never liked sitting in the front row or raising my hand first for something. I always liked to assess the situation before diving in. This strategy worked very well for me. Very well, that is, until I became a drummer.
Once I started, I was addicted to how great it felt - the power, the physicality - but what I didn’t expect from drumming is what it would teach me about leadership.