The Marriage Development Company - Blog

Red Roses, Champagne, Chocolates, and ... Great Conversation!

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:02:21 GMT

When we think of what to gift our spouse for Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to consider treating them to a special bouquet of roses, or a nice bottle of champagne, or that indulgent box of chocolates. All are symbolic of our love and appreciation and are lovely gifts to be received.

This Valentine’s Day, in addition to considering what special something would be appreciated by your spouse - remember to include the gift of great conversation! Too often now, our lives are so busy that we don’t get a chance to have meaningful conversations that help to keep us involved in eachothers’ lives and working together as a great team at home.

At home, between work, kids, activities, etc, we tend to have little snippets of conversations here and there and then wonder why there may be misunderstandings at times. As a comparison, this would be like trying to run your work team with just now and then random “at the watercooler” conversations, rather than the focus on proper communication through updates, meetings, proposals, or off-site strategy days, among others. Taking the time to keep eachother up to date on the little as well as the bigger things in life at home is critical, but too often lost in our daily “busyness”.

This Valentine’s Day, while you’re enjoying your chocolates together or sipping your champagne, take the time to talk about the things that are important in your lives. Often, these important items are not necessarily urgent, and so we never seem to have the time for them. For example, do you both have a common view of what your top priorities for the year ahead are?

Follow this simple exercise:
Independently, each write down what you believe your Top 5 priorities (numbered 1 to 5) for 2013 are. Once you share them, you may discover that your lists are very similar or perhaps very different! Use the opportunity to catalyze some great constructive conversation - listening and understanding why there may be differing views, and reinforcing areas of common priority. Then go on to create a list of your joint Top 5 that you are both committed to and will work together or support eachother on. It is important to be choiceful and select no more than 5. Realistically, this is all that you can do proper justice to in a single year. Make sure that you also write these down and repeat them until you both commit them to memory!

This is a great way to prioritize where you focus your resources (time, energy, and money) in the year ahead and ensuring that you are working together as a team on your priorities. A simple, but very effective way to ensure that both of your daily actions support your key goals for the year ahead and that you are working synergistically rather than counter-productively - as great teams do!

Here’s to a Happy Valentine’s Day with lots of great conversation!

Marriage, Personal Finances, & Parenting. What do these have in common?

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:47:47 GMT

I've been replaying in my mind an insightful comment from one of the participants at my February workshop (thanks Fiona!) Her question was why was it that the 3 most important things in life - marriage, personal finances, and parenting we were never "taught" how to do?

Interesting question and one which I've since played back to a few people who all seem to agree that the general approach is to either "bumble along" or to "wing it"! Clearly there must be a better way to really excel in these important areas of our life!

Amazing, but since then, I have come across 2 people in my network who have parenting businesses - Erin Kurt at Erinparenting.com and Kerri Summers at TheParentCompany.co.uk and another one is planning on starting one up. I also have a university friend, Bruce Sellery, who has written a book and has a personal finances business - moolala.ca Why smart people do dumb things with their money.

Finally, I've also been so encouraged by all the positive feedback and support I've received thus far. Here's to upskilling in areas of our life that mean so much to us!

Know your Strengths. Be a better team together.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 12:16:14 GMT

Today's post is about strengths. Everyone has them. Not everyone recognises what they are and leverages them as much as they could. One of the great things about leveraging your strengths is that you're going with the current - doing what you do really well and loving doing it.

At work, we're used to forming new teams - people come, people go, new managers come, new projects are initiated, etc. We have approaches to build teams and strengthen them to achieve great results. Often, there is an immediate deliverable, and so you need to get to know your team members fast and figure out how to best work together. Sometimes that works well, and sometimes not so well...

One of the tools that I have found really effective in getting teams to gel is a tool called StrengthsFinders (http://strengths.gallup.com/default.aspx). The beauty of it is that it focuses on individual's strengths so it's engaging and has a feel-good factor. It generates great, positive and productive conversations as team members compare their strength areas where they are similar, and areas where they are unique. It is insightful in helping team-members understand why they may react differently to different situations or stimulus. And...it creates a databank of skills to then dip into when a particular challenge arises.

My husband and I used this at home early in our marriage, and found it to be insightful and helpful in better understanding each other and how we approach life by leveraging and respecting each of our respective skills. He is a "Learner" and so loves to read, tour the internet, and learn from others various things that I would consider trivial but for him it is the enjoyment and satisfaction of learning which inevitably eventually proves useful! I am "Self-assured" and so naturally don't tend to look to others for input on decisions as my tendency is to have confidence in my decisions. We both have strengths in "Responsibility" - we take them seriously and don't slack off often!

At home, just as (or even more so than) at work - building a team with your partner is incredibly important. Your partner is the one that you will (hopefully) have for life and be the key person that you will share life's journey with. At work, we recognise that we may need to put some effort into this through team building exercises or events - but at home, we tend to assume that this will happen on it's own.

To conduct your own StrengthsFinder - you'll need to purchase 2 codes (or books - you can get them on Amazon) so that each of you can conduct the online assessment and then have fun comparing results and talking through the implications! Enjoy!

Be Together. Work Together. Grow Together.

TheMarriageDevCo Channel goes live!

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:40:08 GMT

Our Intro video is now live - check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2GEKmfq4k

Hope this will help to give a better flavour of what we are about. It's a journey of education to position ourselves as contemporary, smart-thinking, and proactive!

The first reaction when I introduce The Marriage Development Company is typically to associate us with marriage counselling/therapy ... Hope to carve out a niche for us that is more proactive and encourages smart people to start applying smart thinking to their marriages!

Stay with us on this journey!

Can Business Strategy and Marriage Mix?

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:56:45 GMT

An intriguing question that usually raises eyebrows and generates a "tell me more..." reaction. The reality is that we haven't often mixed the corporate stuff with our home lives and certainly not our marriage - but why haven't we?

For so many of us who work for corporations or are part of the business world, some ways of working are deeply engrained and almost second habit in our working lives. Take for example planning - Annual Planning or Strategic Planning. This is the bread-and-butter basics of explicitly agreeing where you are today, where you want to get to, and how you are going to get there. Yet how often do you hear of a couple pulling together to do their annual plan at home? Or their strategic plan? Not very often.

In fact, in a study commissioned by The Marriage Development Company, only 9% of couples claimed that they regularly conduct annual and/or strategic planning at home. Not that surprising, but it does beg the question of why not? Imagine trying to have an effective and efficient team at work without having a plan to map out overall goals and the role of individual's activities in helping to achieve these goals.

My observation is that many couples feel so busy and overwhelmed with their day-to-day activities that they haven't had or taken the time to think about the bigger picture and where they are heading. Many instinctively know that they should have a better idea of where they are going, or may even sense that they may not really be aligned with their partner on what their key priorities are for the 1, 5, or 10 years ahead, but they don't seem to get around to having the conversations to work it through. In contrast, at work we often have the benefit of structured processes that force this discipline - eg. an annual and strategic planning cycle to agree budgets, etc. At home, unless we create this discipline, there will always be urgent or other "stuff" that takes up our time and the planning falls to the wayside.

I often reference Dr. Stephen Covey (author The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and his 2x2 matrix of activities allocated along the axes of Urgent-Not Urgent and Important-Not Important as an illustration of how Important but not Urgent activities (like planning) will only be addressed if we consciously set aside time for them. This is especially relevant for couples where the chances that two busy people will have spare time simultaneously and spontaneously agree to use it for planning is not that likely! It's like trying to plan your business through a series of random conversations as you pass in the hallway or meet at the water cooler, rather than setting aside quality time through robust meetings and conversations.

Through our workshops, it's been satisfying to see how much benefit couples are reaping from introducing a (simplified) annual and strategic planning process into their ways of working at home.

It makes the plan explicit and creates a common "language" - rather than 2 different "assumed" plans in each partner's head.
It helps communication - the very nature of it being explicit helps to identify points of agreement and differences that encourages robust and productive conversations.
It encourages the discipline of thinking a bit further out - rather than dealing tactically with actions on a daily or weekly basis. This helps to create a common road map and sets a joint direction.
It helps prioritization, enabling couples to jointly choose where to spend their scarce time and money.
It becomes part of a virtuous cycle where year on year couples can take stock, learn from the past year, and agree their plans going forwards.

So it would seem that couples are finding that marriage and business strategy can mix and indeed mix well!

Only 34% of couples claim they communicate "Very Well". And less than 10% have a regular annual or strategic planning process.

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:42:25 GMT

Well, some more facts from our survey that provide an interesting baseline on communication and planning.

We asked the question "How well do you think you and your spouse communicate, in general?" and 34% of respondents (married males and females in London) claimed they communicated "Very well". When you consider that communication is often cited as one of the key reasons why marriages (and coincidentally small businesses too!) fail - finding ways for the other 66% to communicate better can only help on the home front!

The other area that where we see a gap in our approach to business and home life is in our approach to planning. In response to the question "To what extent do you and your spouse have an explicit annual and/or strategic planning process? (Including writing down home priorities and activities for the year(s) ahead and reviewing/discussing them regularly)" only 9% of respondents claimed "Always". While this rigour is the norm in most businesses, we have a ways to go on the home front! Often it may seem difficult to take time out of our busy days to plan - but separating planning from execution is key. It ensures that you each are able to input and debate at the right time to develop the best plan to work together on!

The Marriage Development Company Launches a Fresh New Approach to Managing Home Life

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:08:37 GMT

Happy New Year and hope that it is a happy one for all.
We're starting to spread the word on our 2012 workshops after successfully qualifying the workshops last year and the great feedback from the beta session. Today, we are pleased to have issued the following Press Release along with an introductory 50% off workshops for registrations before 31st January 2012:

The Marriage Development Company Launches a Fresh New Approach to Managing Home Life

The Marriage Development Company announces its new 2012 workshops aimed at reapplying business strategy to home life. It aims to develop a new category of proactive training targeted at couples that are in stable relationships helping them to work smarter together.

“Our observation is that many couples could benefit from some of the approaches used in the business world to improve communication, planning, and decision-making at home," said Lisa Chin-A-Young, Co-Founder. " Often, couples are so busy in their day-to-day, that they don’t take the time to proactively develop a joint strategic plan of where they are going, or to even explicitly chart out their priorities for the year ahead. This leads to misunderstandings and working at cross-purposes, that over time may drive a wedge in the relationship. We’ve taken best practices from business and reapplied them so that they make a lot of sense to use in our home life.”

Training modules have been developed using best practice from global corporations, strategy firms, and academia tailored with the practical realities of personal relationships and successfully beta tested prior to its launch. Workshops are targeted at couples in stable relationships or newly-weds that are interested in smart ways to work together.
...

To Download Full Press Release:

6_jan_2012.pdf
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49% say they have "Definitely Grown Together"

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:55:08 GMT

So, coming from the business world, I'm used to asking "where's the data?"... I was curious to baseline how many couples felt that they actually have grown together over the course of their marriage. So we surveyed 150 married men & women in London. The results are now in, and 49% claim to have "Definitely grown together", with women slightly more positive than men.
24% claimed to have "Somewhat grown together", 15% have "Stayed about the same", 6% have "somewhat grown apart", and 7% have "definitely grown apart".

49% doesn't sound too bad... but it's not great either considering you've chosen to spend the rest of your life with your partner. You'd hope that anything that you dedicate that much time, effort, and love towards could yield great results. Awareness is probably half of the challenge... recognising what your current status is and then choosing to "Work Together"!

More interesting insights from the survey to come!

Welcome!

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:44:23 GMT

Be Together. Work Together. Grow Together.

That's what The Marriage Development Company is about and that's what we believe marriage is about. Welcome to our blog where, as time goes on, I'll be sharing business strategy and frameworks that we have found make sense to reapply to home life.

It was great to see how last Saturday's Beta workshop held here in London really lived up to our strapline. There was such a positive and productive atmosphere throughout the workshop as participants worked and talked through their goals, values, key priorities/plan for the year ahead, and important decisions to be made, amongst others. I was pleased to see how the broad range of participants found the materials relevant and helpful - from the couple married just 18 months ago to those married 15+ years. And how the concept and approach of reapplying business frameworks was insightful to all and caused them to look at their approach to managing their day-to-day and long term in a more proactive and explicit light. Nice to see that we succeeded in striking the right balance between a professional environment that made the session productive, but also a fun and enjoyable workshop for couples and solo partners alike. I am thrilled that the participants gained so much from it, that feedback was resoundingly positive, and that all rated the workshop a 9 or 10/10!