Congratulations! Your organisation is growing and as it grows moves along the usual orgainsational development path. You have teams, then departments, then functions. The organisation constantly evolves to meet the environment. Have you noticed competition between the function heads, department heads and team leaders? Enjoy the video!
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World Class?
What if World Class performance was as simple as taking the brakes off, to release the pent-up competitive energy of your organisation? Imagine you are in a saloon car race, winner takes all. You are on the starting line with your competition, engines revving, watching the lights go from red to green and the flag comes down to signal the start of the race. Your heart thumps as the tyres screech and slide on the tarmac as you move forward in a pack. You slowly overhaul car after car with your 1% advantage.
Continue readingEmotional Unintelligence
There is a strange illogical perception among managers who consider themselves hardnosed, driving and forceful. They think being emotional and letting the bad temper show is somehow practical. In fact, it is a negative emotional outburst which has no place in the work environment. That is being emotionally unintelligent! As an example of positive management behaviour, here is how to address absence issues. Don’t focus on the number of days absent, focus on the number of days present. In the UK there are 223 workdays in a year. If this employee has only attended for 213 days, then you lost ten days of their help to achieve your and your organization’s goals.
Continue readingManaging remote employees
One of the things the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted, is how many managers need to see their people working to believe they are not being lazy. McGregor’s Theory X and Y, asks if you think people are inherently lazy or if people want to do a good job. Our straw polls at our Workshops average out at about 70% Y, people want to do a good job. How does the manager cope when he or she can’t watch their team working! Enjoy the video!
Continue readingA Cost Is A Cost
It is better to manage a cost crisis before it arrives. You may not have time to act and then the crisis becomes a disaster. I heard the story from the Chief Executive of a national low-cost airline about how much money they were able to drive out of their costs when faced with fierce competition. That is the ex-Chief Executive, they went bust. Why did they wait for the crisis before acting? Why not reduce costs, overhead and direct, now and put the cash to better use? We’re all used to reducing our direct costs, aren’t we? What do you budget? A 5%, 10% reduction?
Continue readingStart-up Team Culture
You’ve got a great idea. You’ve got some start-up funding and you’re building a team. It’s a busy time and as easy to sow seeds of failure as it is to sow seeds of success. The culture of your business is an important factor. You and your people must live and breathe that culture. It needs to inform every decision, every action and every strategy. Enjoy the video!
Continue readingCompetition and Innovation
Any competitive enterprise is a race of some sort. You train to be better at the techniques you know. You seek out coaches who can help you achieve that new advantage. Occasionally, someone comes along with an innovation, like the Fosbury flop in 1968, that everyone rapidly copies. Just like athletes, your organization has to train and innovate, if it is going to be in the race, never mind win.
Continue readingWhat Do You Buy And Pay To Throw Away?
The cost of your purchases includes “how” you want to buy them. There is a 40x multiplier between buying potatoes from the field and after processing as crisps (chips in the US). You need to ensure “special requests” that were needed a few years ago haven’t become lodged in the purchasing specification. You may be paying a special price long after the need for the special product has been designed out of your process. Two examples follow showing the value of an overhead cost reduction review between buyer and seller.
Continue readingPlanning
Let’s look at issues around the art and science of planning. We all know the “fail to plan, plan to fail” maxim but do we all plan in enough detail? Recent research on people with heart conditions showed that seven out of eight failed to adopt a healthier eating and exercise regime despite clear communication of the likely consequences. Perhaps we have a belief that we can bluff our way through when it comes to it. Is abhorring managerial professionalism another symptom of the English disease?
Continue readingDoes employee engagement lead to more reward?
Let’s boil employee engagement down to the basics. Engagement relates to the psychological contract between employer and employee. Fundamentally it moves away from the idea of “economic man (or woman)” which even economists now recognise fails to predict much of human behaviour. Instead of a “you chop a hundred logs I pay you one pound” contract, the form is that “both parties will make their best endeavours for the other”, to do their best in a business setting. Some organisations operate a hair trigger “fail and be fired” policy while others regard moving someone on to greener pastures as a catastrophic failure of organisational culture. The model we promote is “tribal”. If someone has worked successfully for years and now needs leniency for a time you give it. If the tribe’s shepherd has kept everyone supplied with mutton for years but now has a performance issue, bear with it. He or she may well bounce back more committed than ever, as they don’t want to let their tribe down.
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