How to Manage Someone Who Can’t Handle Ambiguity – Harvard Business Review

Coaching bivalent people (a person who splits the world into friends and enemies) isn’t easy, whether you’re a professional coach or a manager trying to help them learn to interpret the world around them in a more productive way.    This article discuses how you can begin by helping them acknowledge that they don’t understand as much as they think they do about their own inner thoughts, beliefs, desires, and intentions.  The article also discusses how it is extremely difficult to interpret other people’s desires and motives accurately unless you have some understanding of your own.

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Why Leaders Are Easier to Coach than Followers – Harvard Business Review

Followers receive very little fanfare. In a culture obsessed with leaders, we think of a follower’s role as submitting, taking direction, and dutifully executing the leader’s will.
Recent research from PsychTests, however, reveals that followers may not be as compliant as we assume. In a study that measured individuals’ openness to coaching, PsychTests discovered that people who identify as followers are actually less open to coaching than people who identify as either leaders or adapters (those who are comfortable leading or following depending on the circumstances).

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Your Coaching Is Only as Good as Your Follow-Up Skills – Harvard Business Review

No matter how successful a coaching session feels while it’s underway, if it doesn’t lead to change after it’s over, it hasn’t been effective. Unfortunately, too many managers don’t adequately follow through and thereby squander the important time they’ve invested in coaching.  This article provides a list of tips and questions to help you track the progress of everyone you’re coaching and make the process more effective.

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Learn to Become a Less Autocratic Manager – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses coaching and how leaders need to recognise that the key to success is not adhering to hierarchy or position power, but mastering a complex set of seemingly contradictory organizational dynamics—autonomy and shared decision-making, individuality and teamwork.

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The Difference Between Coaching Rookies and Veterans – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses how coachees require very different coaching depending on where they are in their career – new to the profession,  a ‘star’ at the peak of their career, or a seasoned player who is struggling to get back on track.

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Millennials Want to Be Coached at Work – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses how young people (millennials) crave and respond to a good, positive coach, who can make all the difference in their success.  In a global survey conducted in 2014 in partnership with Oxford Economics, 1,400 Millennials told us they want more feedback from their managers.

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Get Your Employees to Make Better Suggestions – Harvard Business Review

Leaders often have a hard time getting their employees to speak up honestly about what’s really going on in their organisations. Employees willfully choose to self-censor out of a fear of negative repercussions to their career or social standing. This article discusses how the research suggests that when employees do choose to speak up a host of positive things can happen, including higher employee engagement and job satisfaction, greater learning, enhanced innovation and creativity, fewer accidents and safer workplaces, and even better unit financial performance.

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7 Ways to Capture Someone’s Attention – Harvard Business Review

Your long-term success depends on winning the attention of others. If your boss doesn’t notice your work, how will you get a promotion? If your team doesn’t listen to you, how can you lead effectively? And if you can’t capture the attention of clients, how does your business or career survive?

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The ABC Technique: Overcoming Pessimistic Thinking – MindTools

Optimists have been proven to be happier, healthier, more productive and more successful than pessimists. The good news is that optimism is a skill – you can learn how to be more optimistic. In this article, we’ll show you how to use the ABC Technique to develop a more optimistic outlook.

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Beware the Mid-Career Slump: Bouncing Back From a Career Plateau – MindTools

People in the middle of their career can experience a drop in their levels of motivation and enthusiasm, and they might struggle to find their work as exciting as they did when their career began.

In this article, we’ll look at what you can do to get out of this sort of mid-career slump.

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Development innovation: fad, silo or catalyst? – Development, Impact and You

This is the first of a two part blog post that discusses the challenges of implementing innovation in to the development sector – from keeping expectations realistic to managing the innovation process and assessing impact and value.

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Is Innovation More About People or Process? – Harvard Business Review

What’s more critical to producing a breakthrough innovation – finding creative people or finding creative ideas? This is a question Pixar head Ed Catmull has asked a great many people, and he says they tend to be pretty much split on it 50/50.

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3 Improv Exercises That Can Change the Way Your Team Works – Harvard Business Review

What can leaders learn from improv comedians?
1. Embrace the ensemble
2. Take responsible risk
3. Follow the follower

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When Not to Treat a Colleague as You’d Want to Be Treated – Harvard Business Review

Roger was a young rising star. He had always been successful, and prided himself on his brains, speed, and ability to deliver impressive results. His company had just appointed him to take over a troubled country operation in Latin America. He did a brilliant job turning things around financially. But he then got completely stymied by a group of angry employees who started a covert revolution in the ranks — and almost succeeded in getting him fired.

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How to Help Your Team Bounce Back from Failure – Harvard Business Review

No one likes to fail. And while we all know the importance of learning from mistakes, both individuals and teams can struggle to bounce back from big blunders. Whether it was a project that didn’t meet its targets or an important deadline that you all missed, what can you do to help your employees recover? How can you help them see the experience as an opportunity for growth instead of the kiss of death?

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When an Employee Quits and You Didn’t See It Coming – Harvard Business Review

It’s Friday afternoon and one of your employees asks for a private meeting. Before you even close the door, she tells you she’s found another job and is leaving the company. Once you get over the shock, how should you respond? How do you cover her responsibilities? And how do you make sure that the rest of your team isn’t overburdened when she leaves?

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Cancelling One-on-One Meetings Destroys Your Productivity – Harvard Business Review

When faced with an onslaught of regular meetings, many managers fall into the trap of believing that they’re too busy to keep their one-on-one meetings with their direct reports, figuring that these sit-downs are not as important as all the other items they have on their agenda.  This article discusses how removing meetings from your calendar isn’t always the best way to take back your time.

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Working in a Highly Political Organization: Thriving in a Toxic Workplace – MindTools

Everyone has an agenda in the workplace. Whether people are aiming for a promotion, attempting to win a big project, trying to impress their boss, or looking to move departments, their actions often have an underlying purpose.
These different motivations can lead to healthy, professional networking and communication, but they may also cause power struggles, competition and alliance-making that upset everyone within a team.
This article discusses how you can identify this type of “office politics,” and we’ll explore ways to avoid its negative influence.

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When your aspirations and systems are in conflict, your systems will win – An Obsession With Transformation

There are many types of systems in organizations; these include people and performance systems (e.g. recruitment, performance management), management systems (e.g. financial reporting, customer data), and business systems (e.g. resource demand forecasting).

This article highlights how people and performance systems  influence behaviour in our organizations the most and how conflict between the systems can result in competition and conflict, not collaboration.

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How Smart CEOs Use Social Tools to Their Advantage – Harvard Business Review

Advances in digital technology and their use in organizations carry huge promise to empower people at all levels.  But without an organization-wide understanding of what’s good for the business and what’s not, these powerful tools can be dangerous.  This article discusses  how CEOs effectively employ digital media inside their organisations to create the kind of alignment and shared purpose they need.

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What Kind of Leader Do You Want to Be? – Harvard Business Review

It’s the question missing from so much of leadership development: “What kind of leader do you want to be?”  Many have thought about their leadership footprint at some point, but few have defined it clearly enough to guide their behavior and evaluate their “success.” Of those who have, fewer give it regular consideration – letting it guide their daily decisions – or share it with others, to get feedback and be held accountable.

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If Your Boss Thinks You’re Awesome, You Will Become More Awesome – Harvard Business Review

If your boss thinks you’re awesome, will that make you more awesome?  This question came to us recently, when we were working with the top three levels of management in a multinational.  When asked to rate their direct reports on 360 evaluations, some managers consistently rated everyone higher, and others consistently lower, than the average. We wondered if this was a result of bias, and what effect it had on the people who worked for them.

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How to Really Listen to Your Employees – Harvard Business Review

Let’s face it: strong leaders tend to be characterized by their strong opinions, decisive action, and take-no-prisoners attitude. These are important traits, but it’s equally important for managers to stand down and listen up. Yet many leaders struggle to do this, in part because they’ve become more accustomed to speaking than listening. So, how can you develop this muscle? What are the barriers to good listening and how do you overcome them?

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To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions – HBR Blog

This article discusses how leaders must recognize that it’s essential to work at enhancing their ability to direct their attention and minimize unhelpful distractions, and one of the most important steps in this process is managing emotions.

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An Exercise to Get Your Team Thinking Differently About the Future – Harvard Business Review

Thinking about the future is hard, mainly because we are glued to the present. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, observed that decision makers get stuck in a memory loop and can only predict the future as a reflection of the past. He labels this dynamic the “narrative fallacy” – you see the future as merely a slight variation on yesterday’s news. A way around this fallacy, we’ve found, is a speed-dating version of scenario planning, one that takes hours rather than months.

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How Doctors (or Anyone) Can Craft a More Persuasive Message – Harvard Business Review

There are lots of reasons why well-crafted messages fail to persuade, but one of the most common is because the communicator focuses too much on constructing the content of the message rather than choosing the right messenger. The distinction between the messenger and the message is an important one. In today’s information-overloaded world, in which we’re exposed to lots of conflicting messages, people will often act more on the basis of who is communicating the message rather than the actual message itself.

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Team-Building Exercises – Creativity: Strengthening Creative Thinking in Your Team – MindTools

This article looks at five team-building activities you can use to strengthen your team members’ creative thinking and collaboration skills.

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Five lessons on bringing people together – Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services

These are our five top lessons on bringing people together. We believe that the first step in making a change is collaborating, and hope that folk can learn from our experiences of working with lots of different groups.

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Don’t Ask for New Ideas If You’re Not Ready to Act on Them – HBR Blog

This article focuses on what happens when you ask people to participate in an innovation effort, and then get flooded with too many suggestions?

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Manage Your Team’s Attention – Harvard Business Review

What’s your scarcest resource at work?  Most people answer, without hesitation, that it’s time. It certainly is finite, but I would argue that time isn’t actually your scarcest resource. After all, everyone has the same amount of time, and yet individual differences in productivity can be enormous. A better answer might be your attention— your personal capacity to attend to the right things for the right amount of time.

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How to Conduct an Effective Job Interview – Harvard Business Review

The virtual stack of resumes in your inbox is winnowed and certain candidates have passed the phone screen. Next step: in-person interviews. How should you use the relatively brief time to get to know — and assess — a near stranger? How many people at your firm should be involved? How can you tell if a candidate will be a good fit? And finally, should you really ask questions like: “What’s your greatest weakness?”

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What Everyone Should Know About Managing Up – Harvard Business Review

Having a healthy, positive relationship with your boss makes your work life much easier — it’s also good for your job satisfaction and your career. But some managers don’t make it easy. Bad bosses are the stuff of legend. And too many managers are overextended, overwhelmed, or downright incompetent — a topic that HBR has covered extensively over the years. Even if your boss has some serious shortcomings, it’s in your best interest, and it’s your responsibility, to make the relationship work.

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Being Experienced Doesn’t Automatically Make You a Great Mentor – Harvard Business Review

Coaching and mentoring is more popular than ever — and for good reason. As individuals progress in their jobs and careers, they’re constantly challenged to build their skills and act outside their comfort zones. Timid executives are called upon to learn to deliver motivational speeches; conflict-avoidant managers need to learn to deliver bad news; and mild-mannered job seekers need to pitch and promote themselves at networking events.

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Case Study: Can a Work-at-Home Policy Hurt Morale? – Harvard Business Review

Case study on the impact of working from home on the whole workforce.

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A Working from Home Experiment Shows High Performers Like It Better – Harvard Business Review

Marissa Mayer’s move to ban working from home at Yahoo in 2013 caused a media firestorm over the costs and benefits of this rapidly growing practice. People lined up to defend both sides of the argument: Do work-from-home (WFH) policies encourage employees to “shirk from home” or are they an essential way to make our modern work lives actually work?

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Values-based recruitment – Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services

This is the case for integrating values into the recruitment process in care. We worked closely with one provider to test out values exercises and develop a pre-interview questionnaire. We discuss why a values-based approach to recruitment may be more helpful than hiring based on experience and skill.

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Easy business planning tools – Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services

These simple business planning tools can be used to flesh out ideas and to present them to others. This is a very brief sample of some tools which can be used to begin the process of change.

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Match Your Productivity Approach to the Way You Work – Harvard Business Review We need to personalize productivity—to employ work strategies that align with our own cognitive styles and to plan and allocate effort in a way that suits our strengths and preferences.

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Related item: Assess your productivity style – Harvard Business Review

4 Ways to Make Conference Calls Less Terrible – Harvard Business Review The good news is that companies can make their meetings more relevant and productive by making a few simple adjustments — even though many of them go against some familiar office habits. 1. Stop striving for inclusiveness. 2. Start using video. 3. But don’t abandon the physical conference room just yet. 4. Understand technology use versus abuse.

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Accomplish More by Committing to Less – Harvard Business Review Believing that more is always more is a dangerous assumption.  There’s a cost to complexity. Every time you commit to something new, you not only commit to doing the work itself, but also remembering to do the work, dealing with the administrative overhead, and to getting it all done in the time constraints involved.

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The 11 levers of Organizational Alignment – An Obsession With Transformation

Transformation is not a matter of intention. It is a matter of alignment.  Organizational alignment is achieved through 11 levers.

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When Not to Celebrate Failure – Harvard Business Review

Most of us would accept that failure is just an inevitable part of success.  There are times, however, when failure is not a good thing, such as when you need to meet a customer deadline or achieve a competitive level of quality. Unfortunately, many managers don’t distinguish between when failure can be a valuable catalyst for learning and when it can be truly harmful, leaving employees unsure about when to take risks and experiment, and when to play it safe. For managers and employees, the key to getting this right is understanding whether the organization is in execution mode or innovation mode.

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Increasing Your Visibility: Raising Your Profile at Work – Mind Tools

People who get noticed get the best assignments, while those who keep their heads down miss out, despite their hard work. So how can you increase your visibility at work, without bragging or stealing the spotlight from your colleagues? We’ll look at some useful strategies in this article.

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What Frugal Innovators Do – Harvard Business Review

Frugal innovation is more than a strategy. It denotes a new frame of mind: one that sees resource constraints not as a liability but as an opportunity — and one that favors agility over efficiency. Frugal organizations don’t seek to wow customers with technically sophisticated products, but instead strive to create good-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value to customers at the lowest cost.

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Two Words That Kill Innovation – Harvard Business Review.

Managing by the numbers, using business analytics and leveraging Big Data are all considered to be unalloyed goods, indicative of enlightened management. Without question, data and analytics have their roles and their benefits. But they have a really important dark side too, and when managers don’t see that dark side, they accidentally kill innovation.

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Leadership Vacancies In The NHS: What Can Be Done About Them? – The King’s Fund

There is a growing awareness that NHS provider organisations are experiencing a high number of vacancies at senior levels, are reliant on interims and are experiencing a greater ‘churn’ of senior leaders. This situation could have a negative impact on staff morale and engagement, on costs and on performance. The King’s Fund, in collaboration with the HSJ Future of NHS Leadership Inquiry, undertook a freedom of information request to obtain an accurate picture of board-level vacancies, supplementing the data gathered with in-depth interviews and a literature review. This report details the level of vacancies and their impact and suggests reasons for this.

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How Your State of Mind Affects Your Performance – Harvard Business Review

Two years ago our organization launched a long-term global research initiative to provide quantitative data on the topic. We selected 18 states of mind and surveyed leaders around the world on how often they experience each one, the impact of each on their effectiveness and performance, and what they do to manage their states of mind. To date, we have surveyed and interviewed over 740 leaders.

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The Google Way of Attacking Problems – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses four assumptions that underpin the Google culture of attacking problems, not people.

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What to Do When Your Boss Doesn’t Like You – Harvard Business Review

Your relationship with your boss is a significant predictor of your experience at work. Good relationships increase the likelihood that you’ll get interesting assignments, meaningful feedback, and recognition for your contributions. Bad relationships mean, well, just the opposite. This article discusses steps you can take to change things for the better.

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 Align Your Time Management with Your Goals – Harvard Business Review

At the end of a busy day, sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the time went. The following excerpt from the book Getting Work Done provides a simple process for you to prioritize your work and understand how you’re actually using your time.

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How to Improve Your Business Writing – Harvard Business Review

You probably write on the job all the time: proposals to clients, memos to senior executives, a constant flow of emails to colleagues. But how can you ensure that your writing is as clear and effective as possible? How do you make your communications stand out?

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Why Middle Managers Are So Unhappy – Harvard Business Review

Who are the unhappiest among your workers? And what’s driving them crazy? They may not be who you think they are. They aren’t who we would have thought.

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Leading Your Team into the Unknown – Harvard Business Review

Like any corporate operation, innovation requires effective leadership. But it’s a different kind than the core business calls for, involving skills and tactics many executives have yet to master. The authors’ study of companies that consistently launch novel offerings and enter new markets reveals the process that successful innovation leaders follow.

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 The Hard Data on Being a Nice Boss – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses the age-old question: Is it better to be a “nice” leader to get your staff to like you? Or to be tough as nails to inspire respect and hard work?

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Improving care: what can leaders do?  Kings Fund Blog

 In organisations like hospitals, many of the answers are found among staff rather than in the executive offices and boardrooms, says Chris Ham.

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Making dumb groups smarter – Harvard Business Review

If most members of a group make errors, others may make them simply to avoid seeming disagreeable or foolish. All too often, groups fail to achieve the storied wisdom of crowds. This article discusses tehe behavioral research that has begun to identify precisely where they go wrong and the authors offer some simple suggestions for improvement.

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Change efforts fail because we think we are objective – An Obsession With Transformation Blog

Change failure statistics suggest that many of our leaders have not experienced successful change in the last decade. As a result, they do not have a ‘lid’ or are using a ‘lid’ that no longer serves them.

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NHS leaders and major service change – British Journal of Healthcare Management

Discusses the challenge of delivering change that improves  sustainability, clinical outcomes and service becomes an increasingly difficult one for NHS leaders.

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 The Small Personal Risks That Actually Change Behavior – Harvard Business Review

We often think of leadership in big, active ways: ambitious visions, well-articulated strategies, convincing speeches, compelling conversations.

Those things can be useful tools for a powerful leader. But they are not the essence of leadership. The essence of leadership is having the courage to show up differently than the people around you.

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Half of Employees Don’t Feel Respected by Their Bosses – Harvard Business Review

When it comes to garnering commitment and engagement from employees, there is one thing that leaders need to demonstrate: Respect. That’s what we saw in a study of nearly 20,000 employees around the world(conducted with HBR and Tony Schwartz). In fact, no other leader behavior had a bigger effect on employees across the outcomes measured.

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How to Disagree with Your Boss – Harvard Business Review

Clearly there’s a lot that bosses should do to invite greater candor. But I’ve been surprised over the years to find that even in the most stultifying cultures, there are usually a handful of people who know how to speak truth to power. We’ve studied the tactics of this interesting group and found that there are ways to disagree effectively.

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Managing Yourself – Harvard Business Review

More and more employees are telecommuting, virtual teams (those made up of people in different physical locations)  are on the rise. Geographic separation can make it challenging for dispersed teammates to communicate and collaborate, but evidence suggests that if virtual work groups are well managed, they can outperform teams with common office space. This article discusses four elements that consultants at Ferrazzi Greenlight believe are crucial for success.

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The 7 Laws of Regenerative Enterprises – Harvard Business Review

Managing baffles us with its complexity. Leaders looking to improve managing do not know where to start, much less where to finish. So even though the gales of creative destruction continually threaten their enterprises, they do not necessarily see radically revising their managing as the obvious solution. But that’s exactly what their enterprises need.

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Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning Model: Increasing Revenue by “Going Niche” – Mind Tools

Looks at the Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) Model, an approach that you can use to identify your most valuable market segments, and then sell to these successfully with carefully targeted products and marketing.

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What Maslow’s Hierarchy Won’t Tell You About Motivation

At some point in their careers, most leaders have either consciously — or, more likely, unwittingly — based (or justified) their approach to motivation on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  Improvements in workplace conditions and safety should be applauded as the right thing to do. Seeing that people have enough food and water to meet their biological needs is the humane thing to do. Getting people off the streets into healthy environments is the decent thing to do. But the truth is, individuals can experience higher-level motivation anytime and anywhere.

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How to Communicate Organizational Uncertainty: Sending the Right Message to Reduce Stress – Mindtools

Do you want the good news or the bad news? First, the bad. People dislike uncertainty, so, in these times of accelerated change, it can be hard to know how to keep them informed. But one thing seems certain – “no news” is definitely not “good news.”

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The Reconfiguration Of Clinical Services: What Is The Evidence? – The King’s Fund

Aims to help those planning and implementing major clinical service reconfigurations ensure that change is as evidence-based as possible. It investigates the five key drivers – quality, workforce, cost, access and technology – across 13 clinical service areas, and summarises the research evidence and professional guidance available in each.

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 What High Performers Want at Work – Harvard Business Review

A high performer can deliver 400% more productivity than the average performer.  Despite this, when most managers look at workforce statistics, all employees tend to be lumped together into a category so broadly defined that it becomes difficult to take meaningful decisions

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The GRPI Model: Increasing Team Effectiveness – Mind Tools

Team conflict and ineffectiveness often have the same root causes: unclear goals, misunderstood roles, undefined processes, and poor relationships.  By taking time to clarify and address each of these areas, you can help a new team get off to a strong start, and you can quickly address problems that crop up along the way. In this article, we look at the GRPI Model, a simple framework that helps you do this.

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Evaluating Health And Wellbeing Interventions For Healthcare Staff: Key Findings – NHS Employers

This guidance encourages NHS organisations to improve the evaluation of their internal health and wellbeing programmes. Findings from the research show that financial pressure on the NHS will make it increasingly difficult for NHS boards to justify their own staff health and wellbeing programmes – unless more evidence and rigor is developed to assess their value.

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Team-Building Exercises: Problem Solving and Decision Making, Fun Ways to Turn Problems Into Opportunities – Mindtools

In this article, we’ll look at three team-building exercises that you can use to improve problem solving and decision making in a new or established team.

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Giving Feedback: Keeping Team Member Performance High, and Well-Integrated – Mindtools

Giving feedback effectively is a skill. And like all skills, it takes practice to build your confidence and improve. The following is a collection of “feedback giving” tips that you can start putting into practice today.

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Regulation 5: Fit And Proper Persons: Directors And Regulation 20: Duty Of Candour – Guidance For NHS Bodies – Care Quality Commission

New fundamental standards for all care providers will come into force in April 2015. However, two regulations for NHS bodies that form part of these came into force on 27 November 2014. The fit and proper persons requirement outlines what providers should do to make clear that directors are responsible for the overall quality and safety of care. The duty of candour explains what they should do to make sure they are open and honest with people when something goes wrong with their care and treatment.

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A List of Goals Is Not a Strategy – Harvard Business Review

Discusses how you really create strategy, rather than end up with a hodgepodge list of goals.

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The POSITIVE Model of Coaching: Getting People Excited About Their Goals – Mindtools

How can you guide your team members so that they develop goals they’ll be genuinely interested in for the long term? And how can you help them create strong networks of people who will give them support?
One way to do this is with the POSITIVE model of coaching – an eight-step framework that you can use to develop highly motivating goals with your people.

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To Motivate Employees, Help Them Do Their Jobs Better – Harvard Business Review Blog

Forward-thinking companies pay a great deal of attention to employee engagement. But should they? Over the past decades, scientific research has provided compelling evidence for the idea that engaged employees perform better, are less likely to leave or burn out, and more likely to display organizational citizenship. Employee engagement has also been found to correlate positively with business level performance and other measures of organizational effectiveness.

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Tactics for Asking Good Follow-Up Questions – Harvard Business Review Blog

Whether you are looking to hire someone, decide whether to trust someone, or enter a business partnership, the better you are at judging people, the better off you will be. Unfortunately, most people are just plain bad at reading others. Several decades of research among psychologists has indicated all sorts of blind spots, biases, and judgment errors we make in assessing people. Much of that research has focused on the mental processes we use to interpret what we see or hear. But errors also occur way before that – the problem can begin with the questions we ask to understand people in the first place.

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What Makes Someone an Engaging Leader – Harvard Business Review Blog

This article looks at a certain set of characteristics that have been found in leaders at all levels in enterprises where both financial performance and employee engagement levels are soaring.

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Signs That You’re a Micromanager – Harvard Business Review Blog

Absolutely no one likes to be micromanaged. It’s frustrating, demoralizing, and demotivating. Yet, some managers can’t seem to help themselves. Dealing with a controlling boss who doesn’t trust you is tough, but what if you’re the one doing the micromanaging?

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Dealing With Manipulative People: Standing Your Ground – Mindtools

This article, looks at manipulation in detail, and discusses how to identify and deal with manipulative people.

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How to Spend the Last 10 Minutes of Your Day – Harvard Business Review Blog

We often dismiss a little morning fatigue as an inconvenience, but here’s the reality. Missing sleep worsens your mood, weakens your memory, and harms your decision-making all day long. It scatters your focus, prevents you from thinking flexibly, and makes you more susceptible to anxiety.  When we arrive at work sleepy, everything feels harder and takes longer. According to one study, we are no more effective working sleep-deprived than we are when we’re legally drunk. So, how do you get to bed earlier and get more sleep? Here are a few suggestions, based on goal-setting research.

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An Exercise to Become a More Powerful Listener – Harvard Business Review Blog

 This article argues that the key to employee engagement is listening, with tips on how you can improve your listening skills.

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How not to cut healthcare costs – Harvard Business Review.

Health care providers in much of the world are trying to respond to the tremendous pressure to reduce costs–but evidence suggests that many of their attempts are counterproductive, raising costs and sometimes decreasing the quality of care.  The authors of this article describe five common mistakes.

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Managing Yourself: Where to Look for Insight – Harvard Business Review article

This article outlines seven “ insight channels” that would-be innovators in any function or role can use.

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5 Examples of Great Health Care Management – Harvard Business Review Blog

Discusses five examples of great innovations in health care management.

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Awaken the giant within – Health Service Journal Article

There are many qualities that are required to make a great clinical leader. They get noticed, are trusted and have the potential to become influential, writes Simon Potts.

Awaken the giant within – (HSJ Article request full text from the Trust Library Services  or call 01942 822508)

The focused leader – Harvard Business Review

Argues that the key to employee engagement is listening, with tips on how you can improve your listening skills.

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Unique benefits of physician leadership – an American perspective

This paper aims to present the argument that effective physician leadership is needed to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery in the USA and around the world.  This paper is based on an in-depth literature review, interviews with physician leaders and a study of the competencies required for physicians to successfully lead healthcare organizations.

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Learning Is the Most Celebrated Neglected Activity in the Workplace – Harvard Business Review Blog

 Considers how you actually learn to be a leader and the need for constant learning whilst delivering.

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Managing in a results-only work environment – Mind Tools

Explores cultures where teams are measured by output and results over the time spent in the office. It also considers the challenges created by managing this environment and where it is not appropriate.

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Managing knowledge workers: getting the most from them – Mind Tools

 Considers the controversial term ‘knowledge worker’, relationship between the role and technology and how to help manage knowledge and make the knowledge works efforts more visible.

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Managing in a Results-Only Work Environment: Measuring Output, not Presence – Mindtools

This article looks at what a results-only work environment (ROWE) is, when it’s appropriate to use one, and how you can overcome some of the common management challenges that this innovative working arrangement presents.

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Exploring new avenues to assess the sharp end of patient safety: an analysis of nationally aggregated peer review data – BMJ Quality & Safety

Many healthcare organisations (HCOs) use peer review to evaluate clinical performance, but it is unclear whether these data provide useful insights for assessing the sharp end of patient safetyeer review may be a useful tool for HCOs to assess their sharp end clinical performance, particularly safety events related to diagnostic and treatment errors.

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Read-back improves information transfer in simulated clinical crises – BMJ Quality & Safety

This article suggests that training healthcare teams to use read-back techniques could increase information transfer between team members with the potential for improved patient safety.

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Building the best team – CIPD Podcast

A podcast which discusses the role of evolving technology, the importance of communication patterns and shared values, and how all of these aspects contribute to building the best team.

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Working in a virtual team – Mind Tools

Identifies the challenges and methods that can be used for effective working in a virtual team. Includes advice on relationship building, coping with isolation and raising issues.

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Synthesis How to Keep Learning and Still Have a Life – Harvard Business Review article

The article discusses how the practice of continuing education among adult professionals may be viewed in the business community as a strategy for business growth and organizational survival. Topics include the growth mindset in the workplace, the computer program Brain Gym used to promote learning readiness, and the role of learning in business change. It also includes details on books that address creating learning environments within institutions, including “Learn or Die” by Edward D. Hess and “Rookie Smarts” by Liz Wiseman.

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The One Thing About Your Spouse’s Personality That Really Affects Your Career – Harvard Business Review Blog

Here’s something that’s obvious, but at the same time not: We’re all a lot more than we appear to be at work. We have other dimensions that are invisible to our companies, supervisors, direct reports, and most of our colleagues, and those invisible dimensions have a deep impact on our work.

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Insights from staff nurses and managers on unit-specific nursing performance dashboards: a qualitative study – BMJ Quality and Safety

This article highlights how unit-specific dashboards are being used to monitor performance and drive quality improvement efforts from the perspectives of nurses and unit managers.

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Creating spaces in intensive care for safe communication: a video-reflexive ethnographic study – BMJ Quality and Safety

The built environment in acute care settings is a new focus in patient safety research.  This article reports on an interventionist video-reflexive ethnographic (VRE) study that explored how clinicians used the built environment to achieve safe communication in an intensive care unit (ICU) in a metropolitan Sydney hospital. 

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Designing quality improvement initiatives: the action effect method, a structured approach to identifying and articulating programme theory – BMJ Quality and Safety

 This paper outlines the approach used in a research and improvement programme to support QI initiatives in identifying and articulating programme theory: the action effect method.

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Why Lean doesn’t work for everyone – BMJ Quality and Safety

Popularisation of Lean in healthcare has led to emphasis on Lean quality improvement tools in isolation, with inconsistent results. This article argues that  to successfully facilitate system transformation toward higher quality care at lower cost, Lean tools must be part of a comprehensive management system, within a supportive institutional culture, and with committed leadership.

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The problem with quality: A tale of two audits – British Journal of Healthcare Management article

This article reflects on the impact of the present day audit culture on NHS staff. By examining the facts of two very different audit processes, some of the unintended consequences of increased auditing and monitoring are illustrated; the issue of trust within the organisation seems particularly vulnerable to such processes. Various perspectives are considered, and are drawn from economic theory and organisational theory. Finally, an alternative method of improving quality within an organisation is proposed, using the paradigm of complexity theory.

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People In Control Of Their Own Health And Care: The State Of Involvement – The King’s Fund

This report examines the reasons behind lack of progress in fully involving people in their own health abd care and considers how we can advance the cause of making person-centred care the core of health and care reform.

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The Efficient Management Of Healthcare Estates And Facilities – Department of Health

This guidance is for NHS trusts, foundation trusts and other NHS organisations and contains advice on achieving efficiency savings and reducing costs in NHS estates. This building note is split into two parts. Part A outlines how efficiencies in the running of land and property can be achieved. Part B provides more detailed advice about the active management of land and buildings used for healthcare services.

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View guidance Part B