Category: Blogs

XpertLearning participated for the 4^th time in the annual Dubai Festival City Dragon Boat Festival on Friday. This hugely popular event celebrated its 6^th year, and once again XpertLearning took part in style. We were a team of 20, made up of Xperts, their clients, family and friends, all dressed in our green and blue team colors and full of enthusiasm. Continue reading “XpertLearning and the Dragon Boat 2013”

This year’s GlobalEnglish Kickoff meeting was held at the end of January in Phuket, Thailand where around 200 members of the GlobalEnglish team flew in from around the world to participate in the annual meeting. Continue reading “Triumph in Thailand as XpertLearning Takes Home GlobalEnglish ‘Partner of The Year’ Award”

The 2013 Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon broke all records this year. With the wonderful backdrop of the Burj Khalifa and the temperature cooler and with fog in the air this year for the run the XpertLearning participants took to the road. Continue reading “Still Running, Still Learning Marathon 2013”

In all, twenty-four companies were named winners at the glamorous awards ceremony organized by CPI and presented by ADCB, with du as the exclusive telecom partner. Continue reading “XpertLearning Winner at the SME Advisor Stars in Business Award 2012”

It was some lonely out of the way converted barn in the middle of Wales, in the middle of winter. The barn was also barely converted. My company’s CEO had felt that the best way to fuse the staff into a team was to drop us in a field, miles away from intended destination and with the aid of a map, compass and each other, we would find our way triumphantly there. We were told in advance that we may argue and fight, but we would see how if we all worked together, as one, we could battle the elements and reach our goal. We did bond as a team on that cold November evening, as we trudged back to the drafty, cold barn, wet and muddy. We bonded and agreed that we hated the CEO and that there must be a better way of making a living than this.

For me this was my first experience of someone’s idea of a Team Building weekend. I have been on many more since. Some worse, some a little better, but not much. One was organized by a Human Resource Director/Drill Sergeant, who felt that a good physical test in the great outdoors would be good for bonding. It was good for a broken leg (not mine), a mild heart attack (also not mine) and a bee sting (yes that one was me).

Team Building for many people is an Oxymoron, like Government Initiative or Happily Married. I am of course joking about the last one. Especially, if my wife is going to read this. As she always tells me we are very happily married. I however digress. The one thing I discovered on that night in a cold field in Wales, and that I have found on every subsequent ill-conceived weekend away since, is you simply cannot make teams of people this way. The facts are simple, when you bring everyone back from the woods, after they have been learning to pitch tents and build campfires, nothing at work really changes, and it shouldn’t be a surprise.

So what can you do? Well it’s a big subject. It’s gotten to be way more complex also since many of us are working with virtual teams, different time zones as well as geographies and some companies have a complicated matrix structure. Cultural differences also play a very big part in the dynamics of teams. So let’s concentrate on one aspect – A virtual team spread over 10 countries. When you do bring everyone together, perhaps once or twice a year, what do you normally concentrate on? Well I know from experience that this tends to be some presentations or discussions on numbers, or a new initiative followed by some drinks in the evening. How about gearing the time together to ensure that those conference calls and WebEx sessions are more productive in the coming 12 months. Rather than spending this valuable time together largely doing what could be done on those conference calls, how about you spend a little time talking about the idea of the team.

Get everyone to give the team a score out of 10. Add them up and find the median. So if the team scores 6, ask them all to write down some of areas that will bring that score up to 8. Throw these up on a flip chart there will likely be areas of agreement. In one such meeting I held, it was agreed that we all receive simply too many emails. People were getting bogged down reading mails. In many cases they did not really apply to them, but only discovered this after reading them of course. We had a consensus to have a good think before sending mails. To use the phone when it was more appropriate. We followed up and month on month and we kept track. The mails got better in terms of size and number and there was less confusion in general. I even know of one company who now has a rule that no emails are to be sent on a Friday. If you want to talk pick up the phone or organize your communication for another time. It was one simple aspect of thinking as a team that paid off.

You need to keep talking about teams. You don’t have to spend forever on it, but how about once a month dedicating a meeting to tracking proposed improvements through feedback? It’s a few minutes each month that could save you a fortune in all kinds of ways. It’s got to be better than dragging your employees out to a cold Welsh field in the dead of winter and telling them to be a team, and they might not hate you quite so much!

This morning the official distribution of the goods donated by Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates and the Emirates Company took place at the SOS Village N’Djamena Tchad.Twenty seven boxes with clothing,toys,bags,blankets were handed out to the Village’s children. Continue reading “Donation by Kempinski and Emirates company”

The sad death of Stephen Covey this week set off in me a change of thoughts that started with me thinking about the shelves of books I have at home. Among them are a fairly impressive number of what only can be termed Self Help books, Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” included. These are the books that were purchased during a period in my life I liked to call the “Be Smarter Project”. Or as my wife used to call it, the “BS Project”. The shelves are not arranged in any particular order, but if you want to find them just simply look for those books that don’t have the appearance of a broken or creased spine, well-thumbed pages, or rings of tea stains from over filled mugs. Unlike the Jeremy Clarkson books, Stephen King novels, or Keith Richards’s autobiography. They sit there as pristine and untouched as they day they were bought. They did for a while sit beside my bed, gathering dust, where I had placed them with every intention of fulfilling the Be Smarter project every night before I slept. After a while, the books were moved, I assume by my wife, after she clearly felt that the project, like the books needed to be shelved. There they have remained, untouched over time, much like my rowing machine, dumbbells and cycling helmet. All packed away neatly, an embarrassing, testament to good intentions, but nothing more than intentions. I had every intention of filling my brain with the knowledge of men like Covey. Putting into practice the kinds of ideas and maxims for life that they so eloquently laid out in their books, whilst sculpting a body to be like an Olympic 100m athlete.

So why did all these good intentions come to nothing? I was in my mid 20s. Building what I was hoping was going to be a career, saving for and furnishing a home, bringing up children and trying to be married, successfully like the way my parents are still. At the same time, I had all these great ideas about being the best I could in the world of business.

Like so many of us who are involved in HR and Learning, I spent all my time planning and trying to work on developing others and never felt that I was sharpening my own saw, as the late Mr. Covey talks about. I always use to hear that analogy that plumbers always have leaky taps at home because they spend all their time fixing everyone else’s problems and never seem to get around to their own. I was determined this was not going to be the same for this learning and development manager. There were simply just a whole load of more important things for me to try and achieve.

Will power is not, I have found, however an infinite resource. If you set too many tasks or yourself, and at the wrong time, all that will happen is you simply don’t give any of them the right kind of time and attention. Today, I love the works of men like Covey, Peters and Goldsmith, but I simply don’t take them home with me in volumes any more. I have more time at home now than I did before. I don’t have to be as concerned about all the things was before, in the same quantities, but for me it’s about finding the right time and place. I listen in the car to the audio books, or watch the videos, read the books over a sandwich at work. I also ensure that there is a learning opportunity dropped into every meeting we have. The sharing of knowledge doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and as good as much of these authors ideas are, they are really meant to be discussed and put into perspective. It’s only when that happens do they jump off the page and starts to have a life and real meaning.

I have also found that the best self-help books are the ones that talk about the things we all know are the right things to do, but don’t make the reader feel like a lesser human being for not applying these concepts. Lofty ambitions I have found can and do alienate.

Will Power is not, as I mentioned infinite, but love can be, and if you can through this kind of sharing make people who work with you and for you love what they do rather than fear the consequences, then you won’t need to rely on the will of your workforce.

– William Spindloe

On May 27th, 2012, XpertLearning were invited by the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) to exhibit and be a part of their Knowledge Fair. Continue reading “RTA Accept XpertLearning at their Knowledge Fair”