Management Blog

Manage Your Time - Top Tips

Effective Time Management

Here are some top tips on how to manage your time effectively.

1. Take Control

2. When you say no stick to it

3. Maintain focus in meetings

4. Make the most of dead time

5. Match task to mood

6. Spend time with people who are difficult ot get hold of

7. Imagine your diary is clear

8. Groom People

The "Mind Gym: Wake Your Mind Up" is published by Time Warner

Business Coaching and Chelsea's Fernando Torres

Pre-season training starts this week and Chelsea will hope their new signing settles in quickly because he could make a massive difference to their season. Ivan Ortega has joined from Liverpool as a personal  trainer to work with Fernando Torres, Chelsea's star striker. The Spaniards know each other from their time at Anfield

 Other premiership clubs will be watching with interest as if Ortega can work his magic on Torres then every top player will want a personal trainer. Clubs had no more than two or three coaches about a decade ago when Sam Allardyce enjoyed success at Bolton by rehabilitating faded players with the help of a large backroom staff.  So why wouldn’t Chelsea spend say £50,000 on Ortega in wages on someone who can potentially help a £50million asset produce results? It’s protecting their investment.

 If individual coaching is the future for football it got me thinking about how this same principle should work for senior executives. Surely it makes financial sense for companies to invest in the coaching of their senior executives.  As with Torres,  these individuals are the most important and expensive assets an organisation may have. By bringing in a personal business coach the performance the senior executives can be improved and ultimately the bottom line. Some companies already adopt this approach but as with football should it be that individual coaching should be the norm for senior executives. Such an approach can only help improve results and give fresh impetus to individuals who have been in post for some years.

For more information on our introduction to coaching in the workplace training course visit the Call of the Wild website

Management as a Profession

In our opinion management and leadership should be treated  as a  profession such as  a lawyer, Doctor, surveyor etc. You don't just become a Doctor overnight, you are trained and equipped with the necessary knowledge, techniques and tools to do the job effectively.

You wouldn't just ask someone to jump into a train for instance without any training and say off you go then! So why do we do this with our new managers and leaders. Just because they are competent at their current job doesn't mean they will have the skill sets, knowledge or behaviours required to become a good leader when promoted to such a position.

 The reason that some managers are outperforming other managers is because they have learned what to do and what not to do. They have applied these key lessons until they have mastered them. Without the necessary training and development new appointees may not have the time to develop such skills .

This is why we believe that of fundamental importance when you are looking to promote someone into a leadership role is to put in place a leadership development programme suited to their level of responsibility.

 

For more information on leadership development programmes visit our website.

Successful Coaching - Top 10 Tips

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.

Taken from our Online  Development Academy website.

For more information on our training course entitled Introduction to Coaching in the Workplace visit the Call of the Wild website.

 

 

Essential Management Skills - Recruitment

Of all the management practices and skills, recruitment is the single most important. The other skills will work if and only if the right people have been recruited. Jack Welch said

"that nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field"

Indeed Dan DiMicco, CEO of Nucor Steel goes as far as to say:

    "Hire the right people, give them the resources and tools to do the job, and then get the hell out of their way. "

If you recruit the right people, then everything else is fairly plain sailing. If you recruit the wrong people, then everything becomes really hard. Recruiting the wrong people will damage a large company and destroy a smaller company. A manager's job is to get things done (willingly) through people. The essence of the managerial job is to inspire, teach, develop and ultimately to delegate to people of ever-increasing knowledge, skill and confidence. However, this depends upon having the right people on board first.

What we are recognising, through the concept of tough love is that 'niceness' is not the end point - that people can be challenged, exhorted, tested, extended and pushed a bit harder. Accepting low standards, 'for fear of upsetting someone', is not acceptable. As Stuart-Kotze says:

    "The behaviour centres on getting people to take responsibility for themselves, to challenge themselves, to take risks and stretch themselves, and to grow and develop. "

Again, the right people can and will do this – given that they respect the organisation – while the wrong people will not.

Who Are the Right People?

This is less about skills and knowledge and more about values, beliefs and commitment. Lencioni's fable of the evil HR manager is a case in point and Drucker was always (and properly) chary of experts who, he thought, rarely resisted the temptation to 'polish stones.'

You can only truly delegate to people who share your values and beliefs and, in Lencioni’s fable, the HR manager clearly did not. Jack Welch has said that new hires must have three things - integrity, intelligence, and maturity.

As we say in the glossary of Theory Y:

    ... for most people work is as natural as play … people have capacity for self-control … motivation also arises from the higher order needs such as self-esteem and achievement and … people, if properly managed, will be more than willing to take on responsibility.

Is this true? Douglas McGregor came to believe that it was only true for some people. The objective of recruitment must to be find these ‘some.’

    "I thought I could avoid being a 'boss'. ........... I could not have been more wrong. It took a couple of years, but I finally began to realise that a leader cannot avoid the exercise of authority any more than he can avoid responsibility for what happens to his organization. Moreover, since no important decision ever pleases everyone in the organization, he must absorb the displeasure, and sometimes severe hostility, of those who would have taken a different course. "

To the degree that the ‘right’ people are on board, to the extent that people share a common vision and hold values in common, to that degree decisions will be more easily taken and the degree of hostility will be less.

Extract taken from our Online Development Academy.

Training is Essential For Leaders and Managers

Just been catching up on my reading as I'm a week behind with the Sunday papers. I came across this article by Ruth Spellman, Chief Executive of the Chartered Management Institute, in last Sunday's edition of the Times.

I concur with  the her message that training is essential if bosses are to avoid getting out of their depth. "No one is born a good manager....You need to learn that art if you want to get on. Most people have experienced some pretty poor examples..." of management training she says "...but done right, it can make a real difference." Spellman's main aim is to convince managers that what they do is a profession in its own right and should be treated as such.

She explains that "people who do see  as managers - rather than, say,accountants with management responsibilities - will be more likely to recognise that they need to develop as managers." part of that development means understanding more than just your own specialism. "You cannot have a business that is run by people who just have  single function training," she said. " As you get nearer to the top of an a your whole job is managing people. It is about managing the performance of other people who are responsible for the bottom line, not being directly responsible yourself...."

For a copy of Ruth Spellman's book "managers and leaders Who Can: How You Survive and Succeed in the New Economy" click here for the Sunday Times Bookshop

Management & Business Quiz

This is great idea from Business Balls, a quiz based on management and business knowledge. How many can you get correct?

1. What psychological methodology does NLP stand for? 
2. David McLelland's motivational theory identified three principal motivational needs which he said each of us possesses to varying degrees, and which characterise our motivational behaviour; what are these three motivational needs?
3. Which organisation produces the UK's ABC1C2 (etc) Social Grade Classifications Statistics? 
4. What does the selling acronym AIDA stand for? 
5. Who developed the 'Equity Theory' of job motivation in the 1960's?
6. What does the financial abbreviation P&L stand for?
7. Who developed the ten stages of corporate life cycle, starting with Courtship and Infancy and ending in Bureaucracy and Death? 
8. The Ansoff matrix correlates what two aspects of business development from the 'new' and 'existing' perspectives? 
9. In selling and communications, what do 'open questions' generally achieve?
10. Albert Mehrabian researched and published a now widely referenced set of statistics for the effectiveness of spoken communications; what three types of communication did he identify and what percentages for each did he attach to each type in terms of the percentage of meaning (or understanding) that each communication type conveyed from person to person in his study?
11. In business accounts and financial reporting, expenses which change according to scale of performance or usage or demand are known as what? 
12. What is the name of Ingham and Luft's model and theory which deals with hidden and open areas of knowledge about a person? 
13. The '360 degree' appraisal method collects feedback from whom, about whom?
14. What are the four levels of learning evaluation defined in Donald Kirkpatrick's model?
15. What is the correct ascending order of these human needs according to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Esteem, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Self-Actualisation, Biological and Physiological?
16. What part of our brains typically handles process-type functions, according to brain theorists such as Katherine Benziger? 
17. What does the accounting acronym FIFO mean?
18. One of the most effective and efficient forms of marketing is abbreviated to the initials WOM; what is it?
19. Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains divides learning development into three main aspects: Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor; what might these three aspects of personal development more commonly be called? 
20. Who wrote the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?
21. The 'Big Five' personality dimensions, by which modern day psychologists believe every person's personality and behaviour tendencies can be measured are commonly abbreviated to the OCEAN acronym; what does OCEAN stand for? 
22. What are the four metaphorical terms used to describe products/services in Boston Matrix model according to market share and market maturity?
23. The financial ratio which divides a company's 'liquid assets' by 'current liabilities' is known by what popular term?
24. What three important things should be confirmed and understood before conducting a brainstorming ideas session? 
25. What European Country is one of the best for leadership development programmes?

Example from Business balls

 

Answers

1. Neuro-Linguistic Programming

2. Achievement (n-ach), the need to achieve things; Authority/Power (n-pow), the need to have impact, influence and authority; and Affiliation (n-affil), the need for relationships, interaction and acceptance among other people (or words to similar effect as these definitions)

3. NRS Ltd (National Readership Survey)

4. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

5. J Stacey Adams

6. Profit and Loss (Profit and Loss Account)

7. Dr Ichak Adizes

8. Products and Markets

9. Open questions gather information, improve understanding, and build rapport by encouraging the other person to talk and explain things, including how they feel about things.

10. Mehrabian's research stated that: 7% of meaning conveyed is in the words that are spoken; 38% of meaning conveyed is in the way that the words are said (paralinguistic); and 55% of meaning conveyed is in facial expression.

11. Variable Costs

12. The Johari Window

13. A '360 Degree' feedback appraisal collects the views from people who work with the appraisee, about the appraisee, including subordinates, peers, upline managers; effectively anyone who comes into contact with the appraisee and who is happy to provide constructive feedback about the appraisee's strengths and areas for improvement

14. 1. Enjoyment; 2. Transfer of learning; 3. Application of learning; 4. Effect of application (or words to the same effect as these four definitions)

15. Biological and Physiological Needs (basic life needs - shelter, food, drink, sleep, etc); Safety Needs (security, protection, law, etc); Belongingness and Love Needs (family, affection, relationships, etc); Esteem Needs (achievement, status, responsibility, reputation, etc); Self-Actualisation (personal growth, self-fulfilment, etc)

16. Left Basal (left rear)

17. First In First Out (a convention for writing down the balance sheet value of assets of the same type - oldest are written-off first)

18. Word Of Mouth

19. Knowledge, Attitude, Skills

20. Dr Stephen Covey

21. Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion/introversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.

22. Dog, Cash Cow, Problem Child and Star (or Rising Star)

23. Acid Test (or 'Quick Ratio')

24. The purpose or aim of the exercise; a time limit; the fact that all ideas are welcome and to be respected (ie., sometimes the craziest-sounding ideas are the best ones).

25. Wales (One of my own questions as you may have guessed)

The Difference Between Leadership and Management

The Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications are popular with companies who wish to train their staff to recognised standards of excellence in leadership and management. The training courses are very work based, which means that what is learned can always be taken directly back to the work place and applied there. However, leadership and management is not the same thing. So, what exactly is the difference between leadership and management?

Put simply, a leader at the business level is one who leads, usually in a new direction. The inference is also that it is a successful direction and those led are by and large the better for it. A manager in executive management, by contrast, is someone who is in control and is directing a group of people according to rules, regulations, values and general principles that have been well established and accepted. The two disciplines are complementary to each other, in that both the leader and the manager is a person in control of a given group. However, while their roles generally differ to a large extent, they can overlap in places at times.

The general aim of the Institute of Leadership and Management is improving leadership and management in business. Higher level qualifications are designed to support those ready for the necessary training courses, and can improve management capability and help to create future leaders, thereby enhancing the careers of all those involved.

It would follow, therefore, that the training for the Institute of Leadership and Management qualification programmes needs to take into account the essential difference between leadership and management skills. It's the difference between empowering and being empowered; between a character based individual and a skills based one; the difference between removing performance barriers and staying within segmented areas of responsibility. Managers need leaders, and leadership needs management; the two are tied in a never-ending business waltz that works well when the balance is right.

It is only right that there is a qualification that links leadership and management. The two go hand in hand, and attempts to separate them will most likely cause more trouble than it is worth. Planning, organisation and coordination coupled with inspiration, innovation and motivation is already a winning combination. The leader's questions of what and why depend to a large degree on the manager's questions of how and when, and vice versa. The two sides of any coin should be different, but they still remain an indivisible part of the same object. And so it must be with the difference between leadership and management.

For more information on Call of the Wild's Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications visit our webiste.

Management Speak Examples - What Do they Mean?

We don't want to embarrass anyone but how often have you found yourself using some of these phrases in your work environment? I know I have. These phrases seem to creep into the office like osmosis but nobody knows where they originate or half the time what they actually mean.

When you hear them used does the person using them, in your eyes go up in your estimation or do they lose credibility. Interesting question. The intention on the part of the individual is obviously the former, trying to impress but does it actually have the opposite impact.

These are some which are doing the rounds on an ILM forum on Linked In at the moment.

Management Speak

1. Blue sky thinking

2. Lets take this off-line

3. I think we can park that over there for now

4.Burning platform

5. Deep dives,

6. Skin in the game

7. Tyre kicking

8. Let's take this offline

9. Getting our ducks in a row

10. We don't want to frighten the horses

11. Riding a race horse

12. Wake up and smell the coffee

13. Socialise the idea

14. Run the idea up the flagpole

15. Move out of the box

16. Prepare the 'roadmap of where we are going from here

17. Doing more with less

18. Rightsizing

19. I'm giving you the heads up

20. Customer centric

21. Lets drill down to the detail

22. Get in the tent

23. Throw under the bus

24.Kicking the beehive.

When you hear anyone saying these in the future will you be able to stop yourself from smiling?

For more information on personal development visit the Call of the Wild website

 

Importance of E-Learning - Free Trial Login to Our Development Academy

What is It? E-Learning for a Real Return on Investment and Embedded Learning.

Call of the Wild’s web enabled online development academy is our exciting new facility designed to both enhance our face to face development services and also to act as an invaluable learning resource which our clients can use throughout their managerial career.

It provides practical online management education that is geared towards business managers. It is most successful as a blended learning approach i.e. linked to a company’s values, behaviours, competency frameworks, performance reviews and/or off-line training initiatives
This has been stimulated by feedback from our clients. A number of recurring issues kept arising:-

1. Firstly time away from the office and its associated costs. Most training and development programmes will require time away from the office. Therefore the more this can be eliminated the better.
2. You’re all busy people with heavy workloads but with the desire to further your vocational knowledge to enable improved performance and progression. E-learning is an excellent means of achieving this difficult balance.
3. Retention of learning. Course material can be posted on the site together with pre and most importantly post course material.
4. CPD – For continued learning after the programme and throughout your career

Take a look at opur web enabled learning platform. An interactive website for learning and development. Coevrs all your CPD needs and can be linked to your own in-house training needs and competency frameworks.

Contact us know for your free login to trial it!