3 Things Everyone Should Do to Sparkle at Work

your-sparkle-chartMy number one criterion when hiring someone is not to look at their business or educational background, but to look for the sparkle in their eyes. The same applies when meeting new people. In French there is a beautiful expression ‘Les yeux qui pétillent’. To grow and to be happy, we need to find sparkle at home and at work. Without it, we are just living a life. Nothing more, nothing less.

Find your purpose and you will find your sparkle. So how do we make you, as an individual and as part of a group, find their sparkle? If they have lost their sparkle, why is this?

We create a sparkle chart for individuals and consolidate common themes as a group, especially if performing while transforming is demanding so much of people that they are getting buried under to-dos and must-dos.

There are four steps:

  • Step 1: what are my roadblocks? In order to scale or sparkle, we need to make sure we address the current roadblocks. We ask people in group or as individuals to table the current roadblocks in their job and write them on Post-its. Then we divide them into groups of things in our control and those out of our control. The ones we don’t control will be driven by what I would call an influence strategy, meaning we can give feedback or influence people who do have control. On each roadblock we write owners and timelines to address them. This is the outside circle.
  • Step 2: how do I scale? The second thing we need is to find scale in our current job and organisation. We have finite time at work, we have finite resources, so how do we scale? What are the things we can do, such as leveraging an ecosystem, determining programmatic approaches or partners, changing meeting rhythms, engaging with start-ups, leveraging events, or selling/ telling our story to others to get support and momentum? How can strengths become even stronger? And what will we do differently to scale? And what are the best practices? Who are the role models? This is the second circle.
  • Step 3: what is my sparkle? What will make us sparkle at the end of the year? What are the things that will make us proud? What is the thing that will make us shine and say, ‘I feel really energised’? We can ask each individual and do this as a group. This is the third circle.
  • Step 4: are there any patterns? The last step is to see if there are patterns and see where we can group ideas, outcomes and people together. Some might just be relevant for individuals or specific teams, some might be relevant for your whole organisation.

The benefits of this process are huge and have deep impact. By creating the sparkle chart with our colleagues, we not only help ourselves, but it’s also a kind of therapy session. If we do this in groups, people feel relieved that they have been able to talk about their roadblocks. They feel appreciated because others have heard what is inhibiting their performance and what would help them scale and sparkle. Everyone understands each other better.

This whole exercise can also be done around a specific subject or theme.

We can also start at a company level with all managers. As an outcome we can define three to six predominant things that become cross-divisional projects. Specific things will remain with us and the manager.

Put the sparkle chart as part of your dialogue and discussion with individuals and make sure that you keep it top of mind when doing reviews or connecting with managers or employees.

One of the key roles of a manager is to make people succeed by removing roadblocks. What is it that keeps them awake at night because they can’t find a solution? How can we help them scale? How can we help them sparkle? If they sparkle, we all sparkle, and that will release a lot of energy.

I wish you all a sparkling 2017!

Thank you for reading my post.

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 Olivier Van Duüren

As international Public Speaker, Trend Sensemaker, Executive Whisperer and Author I help businesses to take the pain out of their personal and business transformation, leaving them with a regained sense of spark.