Management Blog

Apprenticeship Learner of the Year 2017

Congratulations to our Management Apprenticeship Learner of the Year Katherine Broadhurst from Broomfield Alexander. Great effort to complete her ILM Level 5 in Management in 12 months!

For more information click here

6 rookie mistakes made by internal communicators

By Sarah Perry, CEO of SnapComms There’s a lot of pressure to get internal communications (IC) right. Even more so these days, when “too much information” is choking employees’ inboxes. Whether you’re a newcomer to IC, or a seasoned pro, it’s imperative to avoid these six common fails when communicating with your teams:

1. Too many sign-offs

AKA “covering your backside.” It’s tempting to ask for everyone’s approval before issuing an all-staff message (it seems the larger the organization, the bigger the problem). Don’t do this!

Everyone you ask will have an opinion—and not all will be helpful. If you try to incorporate all the suggestions, you run the risk of watering down your original message, to the point where it becomes disjointed, dull, and worst of all—ignored! If you don’t apply all the recommended changes, get ready for a spiral of time-sucking e-mails to explain why.

So be selective who you ask for editorial feedback and approval. Of course, seek your executive’s sign off, but limit approval and proofreading to just several trusted individuals.

2. Scared to say “No”

In a large organization, it can be tough to keep a disciplined approach to communications—especially when bombarded by different departments demanding their all-staff messages must be top of the pile.

Remember you have a unique position: you’re the only one with an all-purpose passport across all communications for the company and it’s your duty to ensure messages are planned for and scheduled for best effect.

Think of your IC as the company newsroom, and you’re Chief Editor. Cull content that’s low in priority or significance (in newsroom speak, this is known as “drop the dead donkey”).  Don’t be shy to push back on Fiona in Finance or Tim in IT if there’s a better time, place, or channel for their all-staff message.

3. Sabotage IC with old-fashioned formats

Not only are you the curator of internal content, you’re the conductor too. So think carefully about which channels will get employee attention, are right for today’s more visual learners, and are fit for purpose. 

For example, nonessential, nonurgent content such as staff announcements, fundraising initiatives, and social activities sit well together in a monthly newsletter. This kind of content bundling then leaves breathing space for urgent, essential communications—such as an IT outage notification or a cyber-security alert—to get the mental real estate they deserve.

Remember, today’s employees deserve more than e-mail, and it’s your responsibility to keep up-to-date on new tools which achieve message penetration. Ignoring new technologies could ultimately risk sabotaging your own efforts.

4. Stay on brand, but have fun

OK, some IC topics can be—let’s just say—a bit dry. (Anyone who’s ever had to write a few pithy words about company dress code policy or the importance of personal hygiene in the workplace will surely agree!)  But every time you reach out, it’s a moment to engage with employees and personify your company’s brand values.

Add flair and personality to your IC and use friendly, easy-to-understand language—not corporate speak (check out this list of worst office jargon phrases staff love to hate). Work with your marketing team and take inspiration from their eye-catching campaigns. Access their resources: they may well have a graphic designer keen to create a humorous animated character, perfect for communicating your hand-hygiene message!

5. Forget not everyone is desk-bound

Mobility is one of the greatest developments in today’s workplace. But it’s also presented some of the biggest challenges for IC professionals, particularly those not prepared to adapt.

With the help of your IT team, explore the benefits of cloud-based internal communication platforms. These enable employees to view your IC content regardless of whether they’re working from home, in transit, or anywhere else for that matter (so long as they have network connectivity).

Go for secure, mobile-responsive solutions as these will display content to suit device (i.e., smartphone, tablet, or desktop).

6. Failing to measure

These days, every department is expected to report on the impact of their efforts, and IC is no different. Measurement is critical. With specialist employee communication software, go one step further than simply providing metrics on who’s clicked what.

Unmissable, interactive, direct-to-screen tools such as scrolling desktop tickers, news desktop alerts, employee quizzes, or surveys provide a genuine breakthrough in IC tracking. (Another reason for the ongoing demise of e-mail is the inability to track who reads what.) Impress your bosses by providing extraordinary insights on message visibility, recurrence statistics, cut-through, attitudinal shifts, employee engagement, and more.

It is no accident that companies that are poor communicators are three times more likely to have no formal measurement of communication effectiveness compared with highly effective communicators. So, how do you measure up?

Sarah Perry is CEO of SnapComms, an award-winning company that develops employee communications software that bypasses e-mail to put important messages in front of employees on any device, anywhere. It has more than 1.3 million paid enterprise users in more than 45 countries.

Leadership Development - Research Shows Call of the Wild Leading the Way

Leadership and Management Wales latest research into delivering ‘world class’ leadership and management development has delivered new insights, helping them to form their strategy for the future. The findings demonstrate that Call of the Wild's approach to leadership and management development has been innovative and "...can be a more effective way to improve higher level leadership skills."

The research, which will be published on their website soon, produces several key outcomes, including:

• ‘Experiential learning’ (learning through experience) can be more effective than solely classroom-based training, and should be embraced in Wales. This can include innovative models such as ‘leaders teaching leaders’, where business leaders share the secrets of their success, or leadership coaching.
• Organisations can increase the impact of their leadership and management development, for instance by ensuring that development plans align with organisational goals, and that there is ‘buy in’ from the top level of management and from employees throughout the organisation.

“The findings show there are exciting new approaches to enhance the impact of leadership and management development, and we are looking to take these to Welsh businesses,“ said LMW’s deputy director, Jo Riley.

Kevin Gould, Director at Call of the Wild said “it’s rewarding to find that LMW’s research endorses the approach we have taken for many years towards leadership and management development. An experiential learning approach combined with clearly defined client objectives is in our experience the most effective means of achieving positive change in the workplace.”

 Call of the Wild is one of the first organisations in Wales to achieve the quality award and become an endorsed training provider with Leadership & Management Wales (LMW) , the Centre of Excellence for leadership and management skills in Wales.

 Leadership and Management Wales was formed to support businesses in developing their leadership and management development skills, enabling them to increase efficiency and help grow the economy in Wales through raising standards amongst training providers.

Click here to read mor about experiential learning and our approach to leadership and management development

 

The Landscape of Leadership

 A recent groundbreaking study (National Ecosystems Report)  has provided a comprehensive overview of the value of the UK’s natural environment. The study looks at a new way of estimating our natural wealth and illustrates how we have undervalued our natural ecosystems. The study also emphasises the role that landscape plays in our general wellbeing and sense of place.

A recent DEFRA press release focuses on the economic value of protecting and cherishing our natural heritage.While in the past people may have thought that caring for the environment meant extra financial burdens, the UK NEA shows that there are real economic reasons for looking after nature. The NEA also shows that the benefits we get to our health, well being and from the enjoyment of nature have not always been fully appreciated or valued.

As an organisation based in the western edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park, Call of the Wild has always believed in the potential of using this majestic landscape as a vehicle for the development of leadership and management skills. By attracting business delegates from all across the UK, it not only brings economic benefits to the region, but also spreads the message that South Wales is a vibrant place to work and learn. 

Over the past 12 years we have evaluated the effect of this landscape on the learning of the clients we bring into the area. Almost universally the evidence has been that the most beneficial aspect of the experience was the environment. We believe the landscape creates a place and a space for “deep reflection’, in creating a powerful and sustainable learning experience.

Call of the Wild in collaboration with the Professional Development Centre, has further developed this “green classroom” approach and combined it with a research-led theoretical structure to create an ILM (Institute of Leadership and Management) programme for a global engineering company. This is delivered within the Western edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park and will bring over 200 delegates from across the UK into the area.

This programme has resulted in an evolving set of crafted interventions which places the delegate at the heart of his or her learning.

The area offers a diverse and rich source of natural experiences and metaphors, which the delegates are encouraged to contextualise within their personal experience of leadership.

Some of the interventions we are using and developing include:

• A Leadership Walk, a facilitated walk encouraging the delegates to reinvigorate their relationship with the environment by really taking notice of what’s around them and then applying this to their workplace.
• A reflective exercise in a deep mine offering a new way of placing learning and meaning into a work environment.
• A guided run of exercises based around the theme of water making reference to both explicit and implicit metaphors such as reflections, sustainability and ecosystems

The real point is that the imagery and metaphor resulting from immersion in this inspirational landscape begins to create new ways of thinking and looking at the issues surrounding Leadership. This new leaning is therefore more likely to be taken back into the workplace and applied.

The ILM structure also provides a rigorous framework on which to base this environmental approach to development, adding a layer of theory to the more esoteric aspects of this approach.
We believe that there is huge potential to utilise this landscape in a sympathetic and sensitive manner, adding real economic value to the area by capitalising on the proven benefits of this approach.

For more information visit the Call of the Wild leadership website

Talent and Winners - How Much Does Talent Count?

Research report by Peter Doskoch in Psychology Today indicates that:

... a mere 25 percent of the differences between individuals in job performance ... can be attributed to IQ (personality factors, creativity and luck are said to contribute to the other 75 percent.)

Doskoch reports:

Louis Terman, the legendary psychologist who followed a group of gifted boys from childhood to middle age, reported that "persistence in the accomplishment of ends" was one of the factors that distinguished the most successful men from the least successful.

And in the most-cited paper in the giftedness literature, University of Connecticut psychologist Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, argued that "task commitment"—perseverance, endurance and hard work - is one of the three essential components of giftedness (along with ability and creativity).

Renzulli says the evidence that these nonintellectual factors are critical to giftedness is "nothing short of overwhelming."

Grit - what they mean by it

So if pure IQ accounts for only 25%, what is this grit, which along with luck, accounts for the remaining 75% of success? Duckworth and  Seligman describe it as "the determination to accomplish an ambitious, long-term goal despite the inevitable obstacles." Its component parts appear to be:

• Persistence
• Passion
• Ambition
• Self-discipline
• Optimism

Persistence - sticking at it, perseverance, working hard

... experts often speak of the "10-year rule"—that it takes at least a decade of hard work or practice to become highly successful in most endeavors, from managing a hardware store to writing sitcoms—and the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is almost always an essential ingredient in major achievements. The good news: Perhaps even more than talent, grit can be cultivated and strengthened.

Passion - single-minded, having one's imagination captured by something

Although extremely persistent people are usually passionate about their work, that doesn't mean that the passion always comes first. Perseverance, notes Duckworth, can itself foster passion. Often the most fascinating aspects of a topic (particularly a highly complex one) become apparent only after deep immersion, to a level "where you understand it and are enlivened by it."

Ambition - setting long term goals, knowing where you want to go

Truly gritty people ... tend to set especially challenging long-term goals; one of Duckworth's recent students confidently stated that he planned to become a U.S. Senator.

Self-discipline - not wasting time or energy, not giving in to whims

... whereas perseverance implies the ability to keep doing something, self-discipline primarily implies the ability to refrain from doing something—to stop drinking, goofing off or straying from one's diet. It doesn't embrace the ambition and zest needed to tackle a challenging goal. "Self-discipline is probably necessary for grit," Duckworth says, "but it's not sufficient."

Optimism - not getting despondent, a positive frame of mind, belief in the future

... a trait that Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis finds is extremely common among high achievers. "It helps them hang in there in times when they have to overcome all of these obstacles," he observes. "They just really believe in the end that they're going to win, and until they do, they're just going to keep on pushing, keep on making the phone calls, writing the letters, whatever they have to do."

Extract taken from our Development Academy website.

Top Tips on Leadership - Motivating Others

How to Motivate Your Staff

You can’t be a leader without followers so you have to understand how to motivate people to buy into your agenda. Motivation is what makes employees act in certain ways so how can you achieve this? Understanding people’s motives – their reasons for doing something is the key to becoming a good leader.

 One of the main theories relating to motivation is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  People have needs. A need is a lack of something- something we want. This produces the drive and desire which motivates us to satisfy that need. Satisfying this need, or getting the thing we want or lack is the goal.

Maslow’s theory of motivation is called the “hierarchy of needs”. Maslow believes that people have five main needs in the following order of importance:-

• Physiological Needs –

i)        the need to eat

ii)      the need to drink

iii)    the need to work

iv)    the need to sleep

v)      the need to reproduce

• Safety Needs –

i)             the need for shelter

ii)            the need to fell secure

• Belonging Needs –

i)             the need to feel part of a group

ii)            the need for acceptance

• Self-Esteem Needs –

i)             the need to feel good about themselves

ii)            the need to be recognised for their achievement

• Self-Realisation Needs –

i)             the need for personal fulfilment

ii)            the need to grow and develop

Maslow believes that people would not move on down this list to be motivated by the next set of needs until the previous set(s) had been satisfied. There are other theories in a similar vein to Maslow. Another theory by Alderfer categorised these needs into three categories:-

• existence needs
• relatedness needs
• growth needs

Leaders and managers need to have this level of understanding if they are to be in a position to motivate their staff. However to be a good leader and manager you need to recognise that people are different. To display the traits of a good leader you need to recognise that some people come to work to earn money (existence needs) and have no desire either to get on with others (relatedness needs), or earn promotion (growth needs). Others work to meet people and have a personal challenge and sense of achievement ( relatedness needs). Others work to gain experience to get promotion (growth needs). For others it maybe a combination of these.

26 Jul 2012

This is a group with us today on a team development programme. The client, from London, can be seen here being given a task to prepare their own dinner.

Leadership and Management Wales - Two New Courses of Ours Approved

Two New Courses of Ours Approved By ELMS for Up to 50% Grant Assistance

Are you 100% confident that you and your leaders are equipped with the skills necessary to deliver sustainable business growth during tough economic times?How would you like to receive up to 50% funding from the Welsh Government towards enhancing your  Leadership and Management skills?

Course Titles

We have now had two new courses approved by ELMS which means if you book theses courses you can benefit from up to 50% funding. The courses are:-

    * Institute of Leadership and Management Level 3 Award in first line management. Click here for more info on ILM Level 3 Award
    * Achieving and maintaining peak performance in challenging times through resilience and mental toughness. Click here for more info on our resilience and mental toughness workshop

Leadership and Management Training Grants Free Consultation

If you are interested in improving your or your organisation’s leadership and management skills in Wales  then contact us and we can put you in touch with a Human Resource Development (HRD) advisor who will work with you free of charge.

Leaders Born or Made - Can Leadership Be Learnt?

Welsh leadership specialist Professor Brian Morgan  addressed  members and guests of the Institute of Directors Wales on 1st February 2012.

The director of the Cardiff School of Management’s Creative Leadership and Enterprise Centre talked about the recent Wales Leadership Survey, which saw 55% of those questioned say that leaders were born not made.

Prof Morgan said: “Some research in this area suggests that effective leaders have certain genes in common – up to 40 per cent in fact – but this would suggest that at least 60 per cent of leadership skills need to be nurtured and developed."

I've just been rereading Umesh Ramakrishnan book  "There’s No Elevator to the Top" (ISBN: 978-1-59184-225-5) and looking again at this issue of nature versus nurture for leadership development - are we born with leadership traits or can they be learnt.

Ramakrishnan comments on trait theory in this chapter. He says "Leadership skills can be acquired, according to many executives I interviewed. Many people say you are a born leader or you are not a born leader,” Sanjiv Ahuja of Orange said, but I think there are those people who you can observe as learning to become good leaders.” These views are shared by Russ Fradin of Hewitt who said that “Anyone can aspire to – and become- CEO material, as long as they have the right tools.”

As to contuniung professional development Aetna’s Ron Williams said “The way I think about it is, if you were trying to grow your earnings fifteen percet than what are you doing to actually make yourself a better executive… In fact for most people who get to the very top there is no option but to continue learning because as Bill Nuti, CEO of NCR Corporation, put it, “the skills that got you there are not the skills that will make you successful as a leader.” This is a good point in that most individuals are technically competent at their job but will not necessarily have had the skills required to move into management.

To read more of the book review click here. If you want to learn more about developing leadership skills then visit our Leadership development page.

 

Alex Ferguson - Does Leadership Have a "Use By Date"?

As a leader one of your key roles is to ensure that your staff are engaged and motivated. Alignment of aims, purpose and values between staff, teams and organization is the most fundamental aspect of motivation. The better the alignment and personal association with organisational aims, the better the platform for motivation.

Where people find it difficult to align and associate with the organizational aims, then most motivational ideas and activities will have a reduced level of success.  Similalrly with aligning organisational aims with the personal needs of staff, as highlighted by Hertzberg and Maslow, is a fundamental objective for leaders. But can the power of a leaders motivational skills wear off over time, does a leader as a result have an expiration date or a finite shelf life? Are there only so many times a leader can use certain tactics or rousing speeches before they become repetitive and loose their impact.

You just have to look the sporting arena and particularly coaches in football and rugby. There seems to a natural cycle whereby they are given a few years to make an impact. Often what seems to happen is that they have a big impact on performance to start with but the impact waines over time as their players become accustomed to their motivational techniques. Obviously there do seem to exceptions to the rule such as the Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson. He has now been manager for 25 years. So how does he do it? If you examine his approach then some of the answers lie with the fact that he rebuilds his teams every 5 years or so. So he brings in new players who are unaccustomed to his motivational techniques. He also changes his backroom staff and assistants regularly and looks to develop people from within.

So how do you avoid becoming stale as a leader. Well it's down to the leaders themselves to keep developing their skills and knowledge. If they don't then there is a real danger that things will stagnate and performance impacted upon. Also taking a leaf about Sir Alex's book then it's not just a case of becoming an effective leader yourself but developing the people who follow you to be effective leaders as well. So it's how you perceive yourself as much as anything. One of the best ways of motivating is to create a network of leaders whom you nurture. It is they who then bring that freshness and innovation in terms of motivating and improving performance.

For more information on leadership visit our leadership development page