Management Blog

Ten Things to Do to Raise Your Optimism

1. Collect qualifications

2. Read

3. Commit a gratuitous act of kindness every day

4. Reduce the number of stressors in your life

5. Spend time with people who share your sense of humour

6. Dispose of some assets to release cash for spending

7. Contact close family and friends

8. Improve your appearance for instance through exercise

9. Send funny cards to people for birthdays, when ill, congratulations

10. Keep a file of funny stories or jokes

For more information on personal development programmes, including leadership then visit our website.

Funny Letter of Recommendation

LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION


1     Trevor Adams, my assistant programmer, can always be found
2     hard at work in his cubicle. Trevor works independently, without
3     wasting company time talking to colleagues. Trevor never
4     thinks twice about assisting fellow employees, and he always
5     finishes given assignments on time. Often he takes extended
6     measures to complete his work, sometimes skipping coffee
7     breaks. Trevor is a dedicated individual who has absolutely no
8     vanity in spite of his high accomplishments and profound
9     knowledge in his field. I firmly believe that Trevor can be
10   classed as a high-calibre employee, the type that cannot be
11   dispensed with. Consequently, I truly recommend that Trevor be
12   promoted to executive management, and a proposal will be
13   executed as soon as possible.


Addendum
The idiot was standing over my shoulder while I wrote this report.
Kindly re-read only the odd numbered lines.

For more information on management training visit Call of the Wild's website

 

Top Tips For Managing Your Mood

  1. Explore what you are feeling before you try to think

2. Emotions can motivate, de-motivate or obstruct thinking

3. Hopes enhance performance. Anxiety and fear diminish it.

4. Optimistic self-suggestion increases success

5. Persistent low mood impairs thinking and health

6. Obstacles to feeling good can be reduced

7. The pursuit of body-based pleasure, laughter, involvement, staisfaction and sex (BLISS) will beenfit the speed and accuracy of your thinking.

For more information visit our website

Related Themes

Positive Thinking

Caoching The Basics

1	Focus on the person you are coaching The role of a coach is enabling someone to identify and achieve objectives, and to do so through self belief whilst maintaining responsibility for actions and results.
2	Guide, do not tell You are there to guide, facilitate and motivate through change, and ensure that people you coach remain responsible throughout. It may seem easier and quicker to tell them what to do, and there are times when this is necessary. However, put time aside to coach people or teams until they discover and commit to how they will achieve their goals.
3	Don't give the answers  The skills, attributes and attitudes required for successful coaching are different from those needed in leading and managing.  Coaching is all about getting the person you coach to do the thinking and come up with answers.
4	Practice the right skills  In order to prepare for the role of coach, develop these skills:  active listening  good questioning techniques  letting the people look through their lens at the world and not yours  knowing when to challenge to encourage people to make change where necessary  ability to stop offering answers The last is fundamental to being an effective coach, and probably the most difficult skill to practise.
5	Maintain the right attitudes As a coach the attitudes you portray should include:  a positive outlook  a high energy to keep up the motivation of your client  a high level of interest  a never ending desire to enable your client to succeed in their language  having only one agenda – that of the person being coached
6	Their needs, not yours Be … nonjudgmental  a good listener  consistently honest with integrity  professional, ethical and confidential at all times  a good communicator
7	Learn the GROW model  GROW is an acronym for Goals, Reality, Options and Will. As the acronym suggests, it is a four-stage framework that enables the coach to provide a structure to a coaching session, without getting in the way of the client’s agenda.
8	Remember that both of you have to work The coach and the person you coach are partners. That means reviewing what is going well as well as what is not going so well, and being prepared to do whatever it takes to improve on the not-so-good areas.
9	Start from where the person is, now Take the person you’re coaching as he or she is. Adult members of staff are already in the middle of their lives, and come with particular views, attitudes, commitments, potential and concerns - all of which go to make up the individual person.
10	Not immediate but long term The aim of coaching is that people being coached are able to produce more successful and effective performance repeatedly over a longer period of time. Coaching is not about short term motivation. For more information on caoching visit our website corporate training events with Call of the Wild   Related Themes Behaviour & personality Personal leadership

Increasing Importance of Staff Assessment Centres

Management and staff assessment and development centres offer a robust method of selecting and developing new or potential managers and staff within an organisation. The aim of such centres is to present the selected individuals with an environment that reflects the reality of the roles they have applied for and therefore should provide the individuals with a wide range of opportunities to demonstrate the competencies required.

This was reinforced again last week with a programme we ran. It could clearly be seen that an assessment before employing people would have proved extremely valuable, especially when times are difficult with training budgets being squeezed.

In view of the current state of the economy we undertsand that it is more important than ever to develop  and recruit the right people to ensure they provide a return on your investment in them at the earliest opportunity. Call of the Wild have therefore now developed a programme to assist clients with recruitment and development of new and existing staff. The aim is to reduce costs for the client through the selection of individuals with approprite skill sets and behaviours best suited to the needs of the job. This avoids costly probabtion periods during which it is discovered that the individuals are not appropriate for the position.

A well-designed assessment or development centre starts with a list of competencies required within a specific role and breaks these down into observable and measurable behaviours. A programme can then be developed which utilises a variety of inputs, allowing individuals to be fairly assessed against a set criteria by trained observers.

 For an assessment centre to be fair it is essential that a number of different inputs be built in allowing delegates a number of opportunities to demonstrate or develop the required behaviours. A typical assessment centre programme may include the following inputs;

• Interviews
• Behavioural profiling
• Experiential learning tasks
• Role Playing
• Presentations
• Data Analysis
• Group Discussions

 At Call of the Wild Experiential learning lies at the heart of our programmes. Carefully selected team tasks are utilised, allowing observers to assess the behaviours of each participant in a real (not realistic) situation. Facilitated review of each task allows further exploration of management style, behaviours, decision making, team working , problem solving and  and adds depth to the assessment of each individual.

For more information visit our website on team building, development, leadership and personal development including apprentice key skills, recruitment assessment, and graduate training

360 Degree Feedback - What is It?

In 360 degree feedback a person, usually a manager, receives feedback from his or her boss, a number of peers or co-workers and  team members.

 The results are variously summarised but usually and most importantly include variance analysis of any differences between the person’s self-view and the views of others. HR consulting firm William M. Mercer has said that in 2000 65% of US firms used 360 feedback to some degree.

The UK CIPD says that for 360 success questions asked must be short, clear and directly relevant to the person’s job and that respondents must be credible to the person receiving the feedback. More respondents make feedback more credible and thus provide more impact. However, the use of respondents who are not credible to the recipient confuses the feedback and dilutes its impact.

Their research shows that everybody gets some critical feedback and it this critical feedback that provides the greatest motivation to change – for as long as the respondents are credible and their views are of value to the recipient. Mild praise raises self-esteem, but produces no change, except to encourage existing behaviour.

When poorly implemented, 360 feedback is seen as coercive and intimidating and has no beneficial effects.

Professor Jai Ghorpade, of San Diego State University, writing in the US Academy of Management Executive, said that 360 "has serious problems relating to privacy, validity and effectiveness." He reported that out of more than 600 feedback studies, one-third found improvements in performance, one-third reported decreases in performance and the rest reported no impact at all.

Professor John Sullivan, of San Francisco State University, found no data that 360 feedback actually improves productivity or is in any way superior to ordinary performance appraisal He said, “It sounds good, but there is no proof it works."

 

For more information team building, development, leadership and management training visit our website

Psychometric Assessment and Behaviours

One of the classic goals of psychometric assessment has been to predict performance based upon psychological characteristics. Two major categories of psychometric instruments are tests of intelligence and personality, both of which have a long history of predicting behavioural outcomes.

Intelligence tests, for example, were originally used to identify learning disability among school children while personality tests were geared primarily toward the prediction of dysfunctional behaviour. Following their broader adoption during the two world wars, these techniques gained prominence as tools for assessing performance ability and facilitating job placement.

While psychometric testing and performance prediction have evolved considerably over the past 100 years, their value is often underappreciated. This article highlights a lesson from this broad field – that research on performance prediction has taught us the importance of (a) choosing the right people and (b) using the right tools to do so.

The right people and Price’s Law

Most people would agree that in a competitive environment, the most qualified individual should be chosen for a given position. However, there are many obstacles to the real-world implementation of this meritocratic ideal. One such obstacle is the fact that people tend to underestimate the massive performance and productivity differences that exist between individuals.

A powerful illustration of this is codified in ‘Price’s Law’ which describes the unequal distribution of productivity in any creative domain. According to this formula:

the square root of the number of people working in field produce 50 percent of the total output.

For example, if there were 100 scientists working on a problem, the 10 most productive would produce the same amount of material as the remaining 90.

This concentration of creative work becomes even more pronounced at the highest ends of the productivity distribution. The most prolific individuals within a domain generate disproportionately larger shares of the total output.

Although Price’s Law was originally used to describe the unequal distribution of creative output, its message extends to non-creative work as well. Meta-analytic