Management Blog

Call of the Wild Training Become An Institute of Leadership and Management Accredited Centre

Call of the Wild are pleased to announce that they have become an accredited training center with the Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM). Following a rigorous inspection, the ILM Business Manager, she was satisfied that we not only met all the necessary criteria for quality, procedures and resourcing but surpassed many.

Kevin Gould, Director of Learning and Development said “This is fantastic news for Call of the Wild. Our clients have always been delighted with the quality and relevance to the workplace of our programmes. However this accreditation further reinforces the quality and resources that Call of the Wild can offer our clients. This  adds to our existing portfolio of programmes and allows us offer bespoke accredited ILM courses for our clients.”

Why It’s Important to Understand the Difference between Learning, Training, Education and Development

Why is it important to understand the difference in terminology between training, education, development and learning? Well its for a number of very important reasons. As we know knowledge is locked up with the employees of a Company and it is this factor which determines how successful a business is. If as a manager you don’t understand this point then the performance of the Company will be jeopardised.

So why is it important to understand the exact definition of these terms. Well its because they are used in an inexact way which is often interchangeable. People do not use them in an exact way or in accordance with their literal definitions. This will cause problems when you come to develop your employees as if you can’t match your training, learning or development objectives with the right programme not only will you be wasting valuable time but also wasting money and undermining your credibility in the eyes of your employees. How often have we come across the serial moaner who comes out with "oh no not another training course to waste my time." You need buy in on the part of staff not barriers in order to maximise the return from your investment.

Call of the Wild Ltd place great emphasis on this issue when we initially meet with clients. It is important to understand what the objectives are and what will be the best programme to meet these objectives using our blended learning approach. We seek to clarify for the clients what the actual terminology means and what form of delivery is required so that they can get best value out of the programme.

Welsh Small Business of the Year

   The finalists in the Welsh Small Welsh Company of the Year category can been unveiled today. They are Cardiff-based property development company, Loosemore Homes, Machynlleth-based renewable energy company Dulas and Neath-based corporate training and development venture Call of the Wild.

All three impressed the judges with their focus on growth and innovation in their particular fields.

The award is one of nine categories in the Western Mail Business Awards for Wales 2008, which will be staged at a ceremony at Cardiff International Arena on May 23 and presented by television presenter Bill Turnbull. Other categories in the awards, in association with the University of Glamorgan’s Business School, include Welsh Company of the Year Business Achiever.

NAME: CALL OF THE WILD

Location: Neath

Sector: Organisation, team and individual performance development. Key employee and management training.

Number of employees: 25

Annual turnover / profits: £950,000 turnover.

What does the company do?

Facilitate positive behavioural change for high performance in the workplace providing a return on investment. Leadership, team development, corporate events and management training for organisations, teams and key employees. With a less chalk and talk philosophy we offer blended learning including ILM accredited courses, online, experiential and action learning.

What are your aspirations for the business in the next five years?

For Call of the Wild to be one of the pre-eminent management training and people development companies in the UK becoming synonymous with improving performance through positive behavioural change in the workplace. This would be achieved through organic growth and acquisition.

What percentage of your business is conducted in Wales?

90%

Do the owners of the business have an exit strategy or aspirations to float the company?

Flotation is not within our 10 year business plan. We have no formal exit strategy in place but consider that grooming from within would be the desired way forward.

Do you believe small businesses in Wales receive adequate public sector support?

We believe that small businesses can access a considerable amount of support from specialists in the public sector. Certainly over the last few years things have improved with the public sector offering support that business need rather than what they think business need.

Welsh Small Business of the Year 2008 (Finalists)

Call of the Wild are pleased to annouce that we have reached the final of the Welsh Small Business of the Year Awards 2008.  The field has been narrowed down from the top 50 Welsh Companies to the three finalists. The award ceremony for this prestigious award will take place on 23rd May 2008 at the Cardiff International Arena.

We are delighted to get to the final given the quality and size of the Companies we ere competing againts in this competitive category. It is recognition that we our services are of a high quality and our cusotmers fully endorese and appreciate the value we add to their development programmes in the fields of leadership, team building and development together with management training.

Traits of Modern leaders

Here's an Excellent 30 minute BBC Radio 4 Discussion about Modern Leadership - (first broadcast 2 Sept 2006). The discussion highlights the need for effective modern leaders to have emotional strength and sensitivity, far beyond traditional ideas of more limited autocratic leadership styles.

Philosophy is the platform on which great leadership is built. Get the philosophy right, and the foundation is strong. Ignore the philosophy and all that follows here will be built on sand. Different leaders have different ideas about leadership.

Article by Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze on leadership behaviours - Cont'd

The Transformational Leadership Style Inventory (TLSI)

Building on my work with Rick Roskin, further research indicated that managers have three basic ways in which they go about their work:

• An orientation to Action – taking initiative, focusing on results, focusing on personal achievements.
• An orientation to People – investing in people, delegating responsibility, coaching and supporting.
• An orientation to System – implementing and improving systems and processes, integrating and coordinating things, and taking a strategic view.

In addition, it started to become clear to me that the terms “leader” and “manager” were being used interchangeably but that there was a real difference between managing people and leading them.

At that juncture I came across a book by John Kotter at Harvard in which he made the case for a sharp distinction between management and leadership and argued that an appropriate balance between the two was critical for organisational success. Kotter confirmed I was on the right track. I then spent a lot of time working out how to differentiate between leadership behaviours and what I called “stewardship” (management) behaviours.

But I also knew from long observation and experience that there was a third set of behaviours about which nobody wanted to talk. These were things that people did which consumed great amounts of their time and energy but which had no positive outcomes. If anything, the behaviours had negative outcomes. In the TLSI I called them “energy loss behaviours".

Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze Leadership Behavioural Theories

Hersey & Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Theory

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard came up to Toronto in the early seventies to attend one of Bill Reddin’s 3-D seminars. They were both junior academics teaching in Michigan or thereabouts. They loved what they saw and took Reddin’s model and introduced what they called a “maturity curve". (They got this idea from Fred Fiedler’s work on what he called the least-preferred co-worker.) Their proposition was that, rather than go through a mildly complex process of analysing a set of situational demands, all you had to do was assess the degree to which subordinates were able and willing to do what they were required to do. If they were both unwilling and unable the manager needed to tell them what to do; if they were unable but willing the manager had to do a selling job on them, etc. Reddin saw this as a direct theft of his model and there was a long file of correspondence threatening various things, none of which ever came to anything.

Hersey and Blanchard’s model is still widely used. It is simple to apply and easy to understand. Ken Blanchard is a very nice chap and is very bright and creative. (You may recall that he wrote The One Minute Manager and an old publishing colleague of mine just told me that Ken sent him an autographed copy of the 7 millionth copy as thanks for his help in publishing his books!)

There really wasn’t a breakthrough with Hersey and Blanchard, but they did bring the idea of the importance of the situation to the attention of practitioners and consultants in leadership.

Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze Behavioural Theories

Read on to find out what happens with the next installment of Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze's situational leadership principles

Fiedler’s Contingency Model

So the focus switched to determining how different situations affected leadership style, and a great academic, Fred Fiedler, developed the first comprehensive contingency model for leadership. Strangely enough he called it the Fiedler Contingency Model. We won’t go into the model here because it is difficult to apply in the everyday world of business. Suffice it to say that Fiedler was the person who brought the concept of situation into the main stream of leadership thinking.

Reddin's 3-D model

Bill Reddin made the breakthrough to the next level of practical leadership theories. He developed the first relatively simple method of measuring what he called “situational demands” – i.e. the things that dictate how a manager must operate to be most effective.

Reddin’s model was based on the two basic dimensions of leadership identified by the Ohio State studies. He called them Task-orientation and Relationships-orientation. However he introduced what he called a third dimension – Effectiveness. Effectiveness was what resulted when one used the right style of leadership for the particular situation.

Reddin, like Blake, identified four major leadership styles on the high effectiveness plane and four corresponding styles on the low effectiveness plane, effectiveness being where the leadership style matched the demands of the situation. So a manager who demonstrated a high level of task-orientation and low relationships orientation (equivalent to Blake’s 9,1) where it was the style that was required was called a Benevolent Autocrat while a manager who applied that style of behaviour where the situation did not call for it was labelled an Autocrat.

The real theoretical breakthrough with Reddin’s 3-D model was the idea that one could assess the situation and identify what behaviour was most appropriate. (Effective Situational Diagnosis, W. J. Reddin and R. Stuart-Kotze, MEL, London, 1972.)

Read the next installment in a few days.

Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze Behavioural Theories

Behavioural Theories

World War II provided a huge stimulus for studies into leadership, particularly in the United States. Experience with a large number of people in leadership roles in the armed forces showed that some of them were highly effective and some were ineffective. Given that most of these people had undergone a relatively similar selection process, the question was what made some of them better leaders than others. One example was bomber commanders, some of whom managed to fly hundreds of sorties, drop their bombs on target and on time and return to base on schedule, while others got lost, got shot down, dropped their bombs on the wrong target and failed to get home. Why were some commanders better at the job than others?

About $500,000 was spent in the early 1950s by the US Department of Defence to investigate this phenomenon. The result was what are known as the Ohio State Studies. Vast amounts of data were collected, analysed and subjected to various statistical techniques. The resulting conclusion was that two variables accounted for about two thirds of what leaders did. The Ohio State researchers called these two things initiating structure (essentially a focus on task, organising things and getting them completed) and consideration (essentially a focus on people and relationships).

Out of this came the first big commercial leadership style model, the Managerial Grid (Blake and Mouton.) Blake talked about styles in terms of numbers on the grid – i.e. where a person’s behaviour fitted on the two scales: their degree of concern for people and their degree of concern for production. Essentially he was saying that these two scales are independent of one another. That is, your score on one does not affect your score on the other.

Article by Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze

This is an article written by Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze - The Leadership Theory guru.

This is a somewhat personal note. In some sense it is a reminiscence of my life in the field of leadership and of some of the interesting people I have been fortunate to have met, known and be friends with. It will give you the context of my Momentum Radar model – how it was developed and where it sits in the world of leadership models and diagnostics. It all began when I met Bill Reddin in 1967 and began working with him a couple of years later. He was my great mentor and friend and he got me started on my lifelong interest in leadership.

In this note I have stuck to talking about leadership models that are applicable and practical and have omitted any of the more academic stuff like Vroom and Yetton’s Leader Participation Model, Path-Goal theory and some of the more esoteric things written about leadership. That reflects my bias. I am only interested in things that can be made to work easily and simply and that address observable behaviour. (However if you are interested in some of the more academic approaches but don’t want a heavy treatment you can look at Management, Robbins and Stuart-Kotze, Prentice Hall, any edition – it’s currently in its 7th.)Early leadership theoriesDiscussions about management style have been going on since antiquity. Confucius, in about 500 BC, travelled around China trying to persuade the various feudal kings that he had the formula for effective leadership. His view was that one simply had to be benevolent, humane, just and moderate and all would work well. About 200 years later the first Emperor of China, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, made his opinion about this formula pretty clear by having 460 Confucian monks buried alive or buried up to their necks and decapitated.

The Trait Approach

Early twentieth century writing and thinking on leadership was based on what one might call "The Great Man Theory." The idea was that if one studied the lives of great leaders one should be able to identify the qualities that differentiated them from ordinary people. This resulted in long lists of characteristics like energy, intelligence, articulacy, assertiveness, determination, focus, etc, etc. The underlying assumption was that leaders were born, not made.People with nothing better to do still try to argue this issue despite the fact that we know that leadership, like pretty well all behaviour, is learned. There are still large numbers of people, many occupational psychologists among them, who claim that there are a number of specific traits which define effective leaders. Unfortunately for them, extensive and definitive research by R. M. Stogdill in 1948, extended and revisited 25 years later, proved without any doubt that there is no set of traits that universally defines effective leadership. Instead Stogdill concluded:

“the qualities, characteristics, and skills required in a leader are determined to a large extent by the demands of the situation in which he is to function as a leader.”

(Apparently, Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership listed over 4,000 studies of leadership. His conclusion was that "the endless accumulation of empirical data has not produced an integrated understanding of leadership." ed.)

Remember the word situation as we go through the sequence of major management/leadership models since then

Call of the Wild Move Closer to Obtaining The Investors In People Standard

Call of the Wild have commenced our work towards obtaining the prestigious Investors In People Standard. Investors in People Standard is a business improvement tool designed to advance an organisation's performance through its people. Developed in 1990 by a partnership of leading businesses and national organisations, the Standard helps organisations to improve performance and realise objectives through the management and development of their people

Call of the Wild, being one the foremost training companies in the UK already provide innovative solutions for Companies to develop their people. Our mission statement contains at its heart our objective of  delivering business improvement through the continuing professional development of our own staff.

Kevin Gould, Director of Learning and Development, said “We want to formalise our existing training culture and demonstrate a continued commitment towards developing ourselves and others. When we can achieve this Standard it will reinforce to our clients that we are a progressive Company fully committed to delivering business improvement through people development.”

The Company aim to have the Standard awarded by June 2008.