Thought Leadership that Makes you Think...

What do Great Managers Do - Part 2?

performance Oct 23, 2018
In this series on what Great Managers do I’m providing insights, tips and tools that you can use to improve your management effectiveness. Even if you’re not a manager, through these posts you can learn to evaluate how well you’re being managed. If you think it’s time to get a new manager then check out our Career Services here
 
In an earlier post, I featured the first thing that Great Managers do: they hire for Talent, not just experience and qualifications. You can learn more about how they do this here.

Key # 2 - Setting Key Performance Expectations

Once you’ve hired talented people it’s critically important that they know what is expected of them. However, be careful with what conventional wisdom suggests:
 
Conventional Wisdom
 
Set expectations by defining the right steps
 
What Great Managers do
 
When setting expectations they define the right outcomes not the right steps
 
The simple distinction here...
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3 Ingredients for Better Employee Engagement

engagement productivity Oct 15, 2018
 

Learning Moments

In this Learning Moments video Gerry Murray explains 3 key ingredients for better employee engagement and how you can measure Engagement before recruiting a new employee
 
Our Talent Analytics Tools have been designed with ease of use in mind. Therefore, any manager with a little bit of training can learn how to use them in their decision making and interactions with their people. 
 
If you want to know more about our Engagement Analytics, how to use them, where and when to use them and much more we’ve put together a short FREE introductory course so you can explore these for yourself in your own time. 
 
 
As always, we’d love to hear from you to answer any questions or give you a FREE Demonstration of our Tools. 
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How do you hire the best person for a role each and every time?

recruitment Jul 13, 2018
In this post I’m going to outline how to consistently hire the best person for any role. 

Warning: this process can save you a lot of time and money!

Why is this important? 

Because traditional approaches such as asking for CVs and Cover Letters and then manually screening these and carrying out interviews is only at best 20% reliable. It’s largely a risky guessing game in disguise! 
 
And, it’s hugely time consuming! 
 
In the past few months I’ve also heard so much about how current recruitment processes aren’t working, from panel interviews that display Unconscious Bias to putting the wrong person in the wrong job so they end up failing or at best suffering, with many reputations ruined along the way. The list of woes goes on and on… 
 
Despite the introduction of sexy web-based tools, the underlying processes being used by many organisations are deeply flawed and are contributing to and exacerbating the...
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What do Great Managers Do - Part 1?

recruitment Jul 13, 2018

“Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers.” - Gallup

Over 1 million people took part in this ground-breaking Gallup research. Managers are the catalyst for engagement and performance in an organisation. People don’t leave organisations - they leave their boss!

So, what do great managers actually do? 

In this post I’ll focus on the first key activity. To make it easy to understand I’ll present the “conventional wisdom” approach and then the distinction that great managers make. Then I’ll provide some tips/tools for how to enhance your approach. If you’re not a manager but being managed then what I reveal here will give you a yardstick for judging your managers. 

Key #1. They Select the Right People

“Often, organisations approach selecting frontline supervisors, team leads or first-time managers with less strategy than rolling dice in Las...

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How can you be yourself at work?

development Apr 02, 2018

“Be yourself - everyone else is taken” - Oscar Wilde

Actually, the straight answer to this question is that you can’t be yourself at work unless your organisation creates at least the following 5 conditions: 

1. Personal Development drives Organisational Development

Organisational folks prefer the term professional development to personal development. However, this is flawed thinking and labelling. People can undergo professional development programmes that often produce better technical skills but many of the problems in organisations come from Interpersonal factors that require personal development skills.   

When personality and work preference factors clash no amount of professional ability will resolve these. People need to be on a continuous path of self improvement. To be on that path, you need to have the self-awareness to know where you are and to where you can go in terms of your potential. 

You also need to have quality feedback so you...

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Does it sometimes feel like you're doing 2 jobs?

development Mar 18, 2018

“In most organisations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for - namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them.” - An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organisation (Kegan & Lahey, 2016)

A profound statement! 

Why is this so? 

Because, many people simply don’t feel safe enough to be themselves at work. There is a latent vulnerability that is at stake. It’s not ok to “fail”. We must get top marks, etc… This topic comes up time and time again at public events, in TED talks and other online forums. For decades, authors have suggested you just look at what people can achieve outside of work through their hobbies, community service, etc… for evidence that organisations only get a part of an employee when at work. 

And, personally I think that there may be nothing wrong with this. Most of us would prefer to...

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