Quiz: Do You Know When Coaching Works and When It Doesn’t? – Harvard Business Review

Through coaching, you can lead people effectively without telling them exactly what to do and without knowing all the answers yourself. If you don’t coach, you’ll waste time hand-holding, and you won’t learn what your team members are capable of. But not every situation calls for coaching. Take this brief quiz to see if you know when to put on your coach’s hat and when to try a different approach.

View article

Tips for Coaching Someone Remotely – Harvard Business Review

Leaders are relying more on coaching as a leadership tool, as organizations become flatter and more dependent on knowledge work. This article looks at how managers can do  some of their coaching virtually.

View article

Positive Teams Are More Productive – Harvard Business Review

A workplace characterized by positive and virtuous practices excels in a number of domains.  Positive and virtuous practices include:

• Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
• Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
• Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
• Inspiring one another at work.
• Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.

Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust & integrity.

View article

Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time – Harvard Business Review

The most widely used method to spark group creativity is brainstorming.  This article discusses how after six decades of independant scientific research there is very little evidence to suppport the idea that brainstorming produces more or better ideas than the same number of individuals working independantly.  The article also discusses how hte evidence actually indicates that brainstorming actually harms creative performance and results in a collective performance loss. 

View article

Innovate Without Diluting Your Core Idea – Harvard Business Review

This article looks at the distortion that can occur to innovative ideas as a result of ‘cummulative error’.  When implementing new customer offerings and experiences, an original idea is often inadvertently manipulated as it moves through development in a similar way to which a message becomes distorted when playing Chinese Whispers.

View article

Empathy Is Key to a Great Meeting – Harvard Business Review

We all hate meetings. They are usually a waste of time and they’re here to stay. This article discusses how it’s your responsibility as a leader to make them better. This doesn’t mean just make them shorter, more efficient, more organized. People need to enjoy them and possibly have fun.

View article

How to Run a Great Virtual Meeting – HBR Blog

The author of this blog has put together a comprehensive list of some simple do’s and don’ts to help get the most out of virtual meetings.

View blog

How to Know If There Are Too Many People in Your Meeting – Harvard Business Review

This article discusses how for a meeting to be useful, you have to have the right people — and only the right people — in the room. With too many attendees, you may have trouble focusing everyone’s time and attention and accomplishing anything; with too few, you might not have the right decision makers or information providers in the room.

View Article

You Can Have Constructive Conflict Over Email – Harvard Business Review

When email was novel 20 years ago, managers began asking us if it should be used for sensitive conversations, such as performance problems or salary negotiations. For years we said “no way.” But as work became more and more virtual, the question changed. People no longer asked, “Should I?” Instead, they demanded, “How can I?”

View article

The Future Of Commissioning – Reform

This conference brochure features essays and articles from a variety of contributors on the future of commissioning. Following the NHS Five Year Forward View, it discusses new models of care and also commissioning across health and social care.

View article

Do your training efforts drive performance?

Building organizational capabilities is a top strategic priority, but an inability to measure the impact is a growing concern among executives we surveyed.

View article

Skills are an under-utilised lever for enabling transformation – An Obsession With Transformation

This article considers approaching skills as a critical lever in the transformation agenda. This offers a new paradigm which would start with senior leaders answering the question what skills does the organization need to achieve our aspirations? The identified skills would be those that underpin performance, and any capability gaps that need to be bridged in order to accelerate to the aspiration.

View article

Making a Great First Impression – Mind Tools

Whether in your career or social life, it’s important to know how to create a good first impression. This article provides some useful tips to help you do this.

View article

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.

View article

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).

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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?

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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

View article

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.

View article

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?

View article

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?

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article

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.

View article