Work, Upgraded

Progress updates matter, but they cause a lot of sludge. Listen in to hear about some alternatives: question-based updates and Hill Charts.

Links:

If you're calculating the cost of your meetings like Shopify, you better also be thinking about the ROI and the root causes.

Links:

The benefits of nuturing the talent you have in your team, rather than replanting talent in a new hire or consultant.

Follow us on

Increase your strategic acumen through attention to signal, not just attention to detail.

Links:

Does your strategy raise more questions than it answers? It might be a mystery box strategy. Listen in on how to avoid mystery box strategies and define a clear strategy your team can actually act on.

Join the conversation:

Today’s article is a little different! I recorded a video for LinkedIn this week attempting to define Agile without comparing it to waterfall. In today's episode of the podcast, I share the audio from that video.

Links:

Today we discuss Blair Enns' Innoficiency Principle and how we can stop failing fast and fail better.

Links:

This week I'm discussing a common theme from the 9 barriers to innovation at professional services firms: utilisation and the PSF business model.

Links in this week's episode:

Today we're joined by guest host, ChatGPT, to discuss innovation in professional services firms. Does it matter? How do we do it? Do we all need cross-functional teams and digital products? Find out ChatGPT's thoughts on this and more.

Learn more about creative problem solving and innovation in professional services firms:

In our pursuit of high autonomy teams, have we lost the art of managing dependencies?

If you've ever helped prepare a strategy before, you've probably had a consultant use the "vision, values and mission" structure to define it. However, VVM on their own are not a strategy. This week on Work Upgraded we explore what strategy is and what role VVM plays in your strategic leadership toolkit.

Resources mentioned:

The retrospective aka "retro" aka after action review aka many other names is one of the most powerful routines you can have to create a high performing team. Listen to this week's episode to find out why.

As a leader, it can be tempting to keep hiring for a certain personality and skillset that you find produces high quality work. But this can unwittingly lead us into 5 traps that prevent us building a truly high performing team.

Listen in to understand these 5 traps and what to focus on instead.

Have you ever tried to retro-fit other organisation's approach to business agility? Painful right? This week we talk to Ways of Working specialist, Nicolas Brown, about how business agility will impact the future of work, and how to get it right for your organisation.

Follow Nick -

In this bumper episode with career coach Terry B McDougall, we cover some of the self-leadership essentials including:

• Having boundaries at work
• Leading your team to success and happiness
• The high integrity approach to politics

Find out more from Terry here:

Inspired by Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, this week I am discussing the dangers of substituting innovation for good strategy and what to do instead.

Speaker coach Lisa Evans joins us to discuss how we can upgrade our public speaking. We cover the prevalence of public speaking in the workplace, what will happen to presenting in the future of work and practical tips for to nail your next presentation, even if it's a virtual presentation.

If you want to learn more from Lisa, you can find her at:

Does innovation always have to be a complete overhaul of everything you know? I don't believe so, and neither does John Saunders. Today on Work Upgraded I'm joined by John Saunders, executive coach and author of The Optimizer. We discuss the power of incremental change to transform your team, and how to get started with incremental change at your organisation.

You can find more from John:

This week on Work Upgraded we briefly cover off on what the "iron triangle" of project management is and why we should use time budgets on everything from our to do list to our multi-million dollar projects.

Tweet @WizardTeamLabs to tell me which item on your to-do list needs to have a time budget applied.

And follow Wizard Innovation Labs on all your favourite platforms:

This week we are joined by Kris Grant, CEO of ASPL Group, discussing practical ways to apply neuroscience in leadership.

Does big data really help us make better decisions in business? Is the endless pursuit of more data worth it?

Join us on Work Upgraded to discuss this, and how we can extract more knowledge from data, without having to gather more data.

Freelancing and contractors will be a big part of the future of work. On this episode, I interview Indiana "Indy" Gregg about how to create an exceptional team that includes freelancers and contractors.

Indy is the founder of Wedo, a global platform making freelancing even easier. And Indy has also built a team of high performing freelancers to build the platform, so she knows her stuff! Listen in to Indy's insights on how to include freelancers in your team.

Find out more about Wedo at:

Today we're exploring the trending topic of systems thinking and 5 ways you can start using it at work today.

Work Upgraded gets an upgrade as we welcome our first guest, Lynn Yap, author of The Altruistic Capitalist. Lauren and Lynn talk about how being purpose-driven as an organisation is essential to thriving in the future of work.

You can find Lynn at:

This episodes explores the most important lever leaders can use to create and sustain high performing teams: identity.

Mentioned in this episode:

Today we're exploring how we can introduce more fun into work while still getting stuff done.

Links for things mentioned in today's episode:

Today we talk about the missing dimension from the Eisenhower Matrix.

Links:

What can we learn about motivation at work from an anit-litter campaign and the world of digital marketing? Listen in to find out.

Links:

Today we explore how we can apply product thinking, even if we aren't digital product builders.

Links from today's episode: