How to avoid failing your new recruits
It’s interesting how many friends and clients complain about how bad their induction process for new recruits is. It seems their organisations invest a lot of time, money and effort into selecting and hiring the right person. However, they forget that the way they treat their new starter has a […]
Does the “perfect strategy” exist?
In the work we do, we see lots of time and effort put into creating strategies. Sometimes it can look like the quest to create a perfect strategy is more important than its delivery. Endless research, reporting back, refining, realigning, re-researching, testing, re-refining … the story goes on.
Here we want to […]
Threat, Hope or Law?
Changing successful organisations can be tough.
In our experience, there are only three reasons why organisations initiate change:
A threat means they may no longer be able to operate in the way they are now. Maybe a competitor is stealing their market share or an alternative product or service is better than theirs.
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Innovation in mature organisations
A recent blog by change expert John Kotter highlights an inevitability that many managers and leaders face… how to drive innovation in mature organisations.
Every organisation, no matter how brilliant its products or services, starts, grows, becomes mature and eventually declines and dies… every single one. The elixir of life evades organisations as much […]
Sheep-dips
Is it true that management development doesn’t have to be boring? “Sheep-dip” training, mandatory “top-ups”, corporate refreshers, executive development programmes, regulatory compliance workshops… we’ve probably all experienced a variant of at least one of these at some point. It’s great that organisations are investing in training and developing their managers and leaders, but does […]
Making the “right” type of decision
One of the dilemmas leaders have to come to terms with is choosing the right decision-making strategy. Getting it wrong can be expensive in many ways. For example, precious time is wasted trying to consult when a quick decision is needed. Conversely, hasty, unilateral decision-making when large scale buy-in […]
Do we really hate work?
A recent article in the New York Times controversially titled “Why you hate work” highlighted the results of a recent study carried out by US Employee Engagement consultancy “The Energy Project” and Harvard Business Review. In the study, carried out in late 2013, more than 12,000 mostly management level employees across […]
An age of information overload
We live in age of information overload. Every day I hear my clients talking about the amount of emails they have to wade through before they can do their “real work”. This is particularly prevalent in larger organisations where everyone is surrounded by information on noticeboards and intranets and in […]
A mission statement can be a great tool for reminding your employees about why your organisation exists and why anyone should bother to get out of bed every day to turn up to work there.
However, “Purpose, Mission, vision, values, guiding principles” are some of the most overused and ill understood words in the modern […]
