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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View report

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.

View article

The Google Way of Attacking Problems – Harvard Business Review

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

View article

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.

View article

 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.

View article

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?

View article

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.

View article

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.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call the Trust Library Service on 01942 822508

View article

 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?

View article

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.

 View article

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.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call the Trust Library Service on 01942 822508

View article

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.

View article

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.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call the Trust Library Service on 01942 822508

View article

 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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

This resource requires an OpenAthens account you can register here from an NHS connected computer (you can email us to request one) or call the Trust Library Service on 01942 822508

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.”

View article

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.

View article

 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

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article