coaching, Management

Be SMART with the goals

Is it about your New Year’s resolutions, or raising your kids, or teaching kids, or setting goals for your employees – if you want them/yourself to succeed, you need to set the SMART goals. Not just any. Never heard of? No worries, just keep reading and I will try to guide you.

Learning objective: by the end of reading this article you will be able to define the goals for you and other people, using the SMART approach.

Continue reading
Standard
Excel

How to create barcode in Excel without VBA

Browsing through one of the online forums I noticed someone asking “How to create barcodes in Excel?”. Among many answers he got, the most popular were:

  • install additional font(s)
  • use conditional formatting
  • use VBA
  • use Word mailing functions to get data from Excel and generate barcodes in Word

I digged a bit into all of them and learned a few things here and there, but still was asking myself: is it possible to create barcodes in Excel without VBA, without installing fonts, without passing through other apps (eg. Word)?

And the answer is: YES, we can create barcodes directly in Excel, using only built-in features, but that requires some preparation.

Here is how.

Continue reading

Standard
training&coaching

Guide – communication and trust

How is your team doing these days? Do they trust each other? Do they understand their needs?

Do you remember that movie with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor… What was that… Oh yes, “See No Evil, Hear No Evil“? (Btw. Kevin Spacey was also there). Without knowing each other, with some limitations, they had to solve their problem(s). So here comes the Guide activity (of course depending on your mood feel free to call it by the movie title) and its variations.

Continue reading

Standard
training&coaching

The tallest tower – collaboration

The tallest tower + modifications

This activity is well know: split participants into groups of 4-5, give them 1m of scotch tape, some pages from newspapers, scissors. Task: build the tallest tower.
Variations:
+ they should be able to move the tower at least by [X] m. (you decide) after it’s built, you can provide some paper clips if you want
+ make teams of 4, each 2 pairs should have their left+right hand tied together (2 people connected by 1 left and 1 right hand, so it looks like they have 2 free hands and 1 common); now they really need to collaborate (skills: team building, working with limitations and collaboration)
+ as above – make teams of 4 but now tie hands only of 1 pair in each team; blindfold the other pair in each team (now in each team you have: 1 connected pair, 2 blindfolded people); the connected pair will use scissors and also needs to instruct blindfolded guys; this version is nice, funny and also difficult as team needs to make sure, that blindfolded people are not just standing and waiting for the other pair to do everything (skills: team building, communication, working with limitations, collaboration).

Standard