Category: Management

Tips for Managers with Staff Working From Home

Image by Tumisu on Pixabay With the Covid pandemic showing few signs of abating many teams are now working part from home and part in the office. This can be challenging for any manager. You want everyone on your team to feel engaged, motivated and set up for success. Here are some handy tips. Set Clear Objectives. Spend time agreeing with each person what outcomes you want from their work. What... Read More--

Ten Tips on How to Approach a Difficult Conversation

Sometimes you have to have a difficult conversation.  You may have to reprimand someone, fire someone, end a relationship or tell bad news.  Most people approach these interactions with trepidation.  Let’s look at a couple of bad approaches and then some tips on how to do it better. The weak approach is to keep putting off the conversation in the hope that things will change and the discussion... Read More--

The Five People you Need in Your Life

Vidusha Vidusha Nathavitharana is an author and trainer on leadership issues.  He argues that you need five key people in your close circle. A Supporter.  This is someone who believes in you and likes you.  They are generally positive and supportive about your plans and ambitions.  They might be your partner at home or a colleague at work.  Whenever you feel down you can chat to this person and... Read More--

Be More Open and Less Directive, Start with These Words

In the 1970s, psychologist Matie Flowers carried out an experiment to study how teams discuss and make decisions.  Flowers asked 40 separate teams to come up with plans to solve a hypothetical problem at a school.  This involved a mix of issues including staff conflicts, inadequate budgets and classroom discipline. Each team consisted of four people who played different roles; superintendent, principal,... Read More--

How to Stop Killing your Staff

  Are you the kind of boss who gets in at 7.30 am, works hard till 7 pm and expects all your people to do the same?  Are you finding it hard to recruit people who want to?  Trust me when I tell you that this approach is not so good.  There is considerable evidence that in office work, long hours do not lead to increased output.  And there are negative consequences to overwork.  People get... Read More--

If you want more Creativity, Move the Kettle!

Alex Pentland Alex Pentland is a professor at MIT who combined staff identity badges with GPS positioning technology.  This enabled him to observe the movements of workers in an office much in the same way as we might watch streams of ants crossing the gorund. Among the many fascinating findings in his book, Social Physics, he notes, ‘Email has very little to do with productivity or creative... Read More--

Bad news does not Travel up the Hierarchy

Flight Crew of the Challenger On January 28 1986 the NASA Space Shuttle, Challenger, broke apart shortly after take-off from Cape Canaveral.  Five NASA astronauts and two civilian scientists were killed.  The cause of this devastating accident was eventually traced to the failure of an O-ring seal in the right Solid Rocket Booster.  Due to the cold weather, the O-ring didn’t seal tightly enough... Read More--

Treat Your Innovation Pipeline just like your Sales Pipeline

Managing the Sales pipeline is a well-developed executive skill in any company selling large ticket items to business customers.  Each sales person has to gather data and input their reports and forecasts.  Some of the key actions in managing the pipeline include: Qualification questions have to be answered.  Does the customer need our product?  Do they have a budget?  Are we in contact with... Read More--

Encourage Action with the Get Out of Jail Free Card

  Is your organization a little too comfortable?  Are your people risk averse?  Is there a blame culture?  How can you encourage innovation by getting men and women to be more adventurous and entrepreneurial?  How can you get them to take more risks?  Here is an idea that is borrowed from the game of Monopoly – the Get out of Jail Free (GOJF) card. Give every member of your team two... Read More--

The Innovation Journey Map

The Customer Journey Map is a popular management tool.  It is a visual representation of customer interactions with a company and a tool to investigate, analyse and thus improve customer experiences. The Innovation Journey Map (IJM) is a similar concept showing the journey that an innovation takes from initial conception through to final implementation.  The purpose of the IJM is to realistically... Read More--