“An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and direction unless acted upon by an outside force” – Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion.
Motion or rest? How do you and your team start the day?
When you come in to work in the morning, and your team arrive at basically the same time, have you noticed that the pace that is set at the start of the day basically carries on for maybe the whole morning, or even the whole day?
If it’s mainly laid back, or the discussions are about last night’s TV or something similar, it can be very difficult to change the pace, unless some outside force (crises, an emergency, customer complaints, etc) makes it change.
There are obvious times of the day when the pace tends to slow (breaks, lunch, end of day) but as manager, you can set the pace right at the start, and keep the pace at what you want it to be throughout the day.
Your pacing of the day’s activities can have an interesting effect on the amount and quality of work that is output. Decide what pace you would like the team to work at, and set that pace. You might want to speed up the pace during the day. You can do this by being quicker in what you do, speak quicker, get things done quicker, etc. Then you might want to slow things down, to allow everyone to cool down a bit.
Your team will subconsciously follow your message and work at that pace.
Try it out. See what impact it has on the results you get at certain times of the day. For client meetings, you might want to have a serious demeanour, but for brainstorming sessions, you might want to speed everything up and get the creative juices flowing.
Decide on the pace you want, dependant on the results you want, and see how you can control the results your team achieves.
Many thanks
Mark Williams
Head of Training
MTD Training | Image courtesy by Digital Art of FreeDigitalPhotos.Net
Updated on: 10 August, 2012
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