It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas....

Which means that Christmas is now the magic deadline. 'Can you get it to me by Christmas', 'We need to be done with it before the Christmas break', and so on. Which is crazy, because it feels like our kids are finally settled into the school year, and we're already collecting money for the teacher's end of year gift?! Where has the year gone? But yet, the speed of time hasn't changed. We have the same 168 hours in a week that we had last year. Our perception of time is what we make of it. Which is why time, as my dear friend Suzanne said recently, 'is a furphy'. Spot on Suz. Crunch Time is linked to time, it has a relationship with time, and the context is a point in time. But it's not about time. It's about people. And business relationships. Because the real problem is people.

However, there is good news: people are also the solution. So when we think about how to deliver to deadline, how to get time with the decision maker to resolve a problem, how to have an impact within our organisation, it's about 3 things:

1. how do we get access to people,

2. how do we show up, and

3. how do interact with them.

So we can address the bigger question: How can we create impactful relationships, and have quality conversations to create transformational outcomes at work? It starts with you. Are you ready to invest in creating impactful relationships with the people around you? To give as good as you get, and get out what you put in? Like anything, you need to do the work. Everyone needs to do the work, no matter how naturally good they are at connecting with people. Because most of us sit on one end of a spectrum - we are great at interacting on a personal level with our work colleagues, or we are really professional, task focused and outcome driven, possibly at the expense of everything and everyone else. People at both ends of the spectrum will deliver success to a point, but consider this: if we're too personal, we risk not having the impact we want to have (kind of like falling into the dreaded 'friend zone' when we had a crush on someone) and if we're too professional, we lose the benefit of nuance and tangental conversations...conversations that lead to the most incredible outcomes. So most of us need to do work to get to the point in between. Take a personal approach to professional relationships. This is where cut-through, collaboration and change occur.