Be bold

This week we had our first quarterly webinar for the year where we announced our theme for this year which is to ‘Be Bold’.  

Since then I have joined the Belgium kick off remotely, where I had the opportunity to hear the many ways that the team have set out to tackle the year with the rally cry to ‘be bold’ echoing in all that they committed to do.  

I was on a call with a colleague in Germany yesterday who gave me an important lesson in how the English language can come across to a non-native speaker. When I announced the new theme, some of the German colleagues thought I was asking everyone to ‘Be Bald’.  

It sounds pretty similar if English isn’t your mother tongue, but has very different meanings. They looked up the meaning of being bald and were puzzled. Why was I asking them to have to have shaved heads?  

They quickly realised I meant something very different and, whilst we had a few moments of amusement together yesterday, it was a good reminder in the importance of always remembering we are a multi-cultural company and so clarity is really important.  

I had the opportunity to challenge myself this week when I set a deadline for a piece of work I was committing to. I asked myself was I being bold enough. What if I tackled the challenge in a different way? Would I get a better outcome or get the job done sooner and so get the benefits of it sooner?  

I am not suggesting that we have to challenge ourselves in all that we think and do but I am personally taking the opportunity to do this at least once a day on the bigger, most important things I am tackling in a day. Of course the sooner in the year we start doing this, achieving more faster, the bigger the outcome on the year’s success there will be.  

We also got to hear some fantastic client success stories on our webinar as Rhona shared the many ways colleagues around the world had been bold last year and stepped outside of their comfort zone to introduce a new service line to a client or to open up a new opportunity in another country. I was inspired by the ways our colleagues had achieved so much by being bold.

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