We work with a lot of managers, literally thousands of them over the years from all walks of organisational life. One of the big things we always find ourselves addressing is the tendency to succumb to the gravitational pull of activity. The stuff that keeps managers buried in the day to day operations and therefore failing to get some height and lead their teams.
In this age of increasingly mobile ways of working, it’s becoming highly important to have a distinct personal brand. The reason for this is simple, being away from the team workplace means you are less visible, especially if this is your main mode of working.
Being able to increase your level of influence in almost any situation puts you in a position of advantage. What most people don’t realise is that influence in business seldom occurs in a single instance, it’s in the many interactions that bring about the outcome.
The word ‘communication’ has a mysterious quality in the training room - you can use it to answer almost any question and you’ll nearly always be right! The problem with that of course, is that it’s just so vague, bordering on worthless because, where comms are concerned we have to get specific.
Whether it’s #brexit nervousness or a general downturn, we’ve recently been invited to deliver negotiation skills programmes for a number of clients. Are we seeing organisations preparing for the a potential downturn by making sure their staff are well equipped to deal with it? Negotiating in a tough market is of course a blessing and a curse, it just depends on your perspective; buyer or sales professional.
Getting recruitment selection correct is such an important thing. It’s a costly and time consuming game even before you’ve made any job offer. Add to that the potential of recruiting the wrong person and the significance of getting it wrong escalates rapidly.
Having to be a manager of geographically dispersed teams has been a common challenge for many of us for quite some time. However, these challenges have been heightened further in recent years as workers and organisations continue to new ways of working, such as flexible, virtual and remote arrangements.
Here are three areas that can make a significant difference to the way in which your performance management system is perceived within your organisation. 1. People don’t truly get the vision (and it’s not their fault) Buy-in from competent people in the business is critical to the successful implementation of any organisational strategy yet John Kotter's Harvard research suggests that organisations under-communicate the vision by a factor of at least 10 and sometimes up to 1000.
On the 16th October our own Bob Bannister will be taking the podium to address an audience at the 2018 World of Learning Exhibition at the UK's NEC on the topic of 'Enabling your workforce for remote learning'. He writes... Research indicates that trust is one of the most easily damaged elements for a team who have switched from traditional working space, to remote / virtual ways of working.
For my whole career I have been under the impression that managers must be the ones responsible for motivating their staff. It stands to reason that if you can demotivate your people by doing the wrong things, you can therefore motivate them by doing the the right things.
