Developing People and Gardening

Michael McKinney over at Leading Blog has found some great stuff on developing people from Lord Sharman.
“To some degree, developing people in an organization is impossible. You can’t develop them; they develop themselves, and so your job is like that of a head gardener. You figure out what the various microclimates are around the place, [...]

How Top Companies Breed Stars

Geoff Colvin, Fortune Senior editor at large has just done a great piece for Fortune Magazine on how the best companies go about developing leaders. It is a long piece – but here are the headlines:
“You couldn’t be blamed for rolling your eyes when American Express chief Ken Chenault says, “People are our greatest [...]

Bob Geldof on Time Management

 
This morning on Radio 4 they did a piece on the role of the internet in modern society.
Bob Geldof offered a wonderful piece of time management advice.  I understood him to say that that none of the companies that he was ‘involved with’ were allowed to receive e-mails before 2.00pm.  He went on to say [...]

Managing People With Passion

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My working life has been spent working with a wide variety of organisations. But they all have one thing in common. Each is trying to make the world a better place. Whether operating in the private, public or third sector they have all been about making things better.
People join these organisations because they:

Want [...]

Diversity and the Art of Delegation

How do you get other people to do what needs to be done?
How do you make time and space in your diary to do the things that only you can do?
How do you manage to escape doing those aspects of the job that you don’t like or find hard?

Delegation of course.
But what if your team, [...]

Hungry for It!

This is a great post that I think says a lot about manager/employee relations in much of UK management.
Personal Assistants and secretaries marching in the streets to demand the opportunity to

unleash their potential at work;
make progress not coffee;
be recognised as ‘career girls not cover girls’ and as ‘office heroes’.

It captures what the Progressive Managers Network [...]

Love, Hate and Indifference

For a while now I have used a Honda advert in my work with clients – the one with the fluffy bunnies and the dirty diesel engine that becomes clean and environmentally friendly.    It has a wonderfully catchy tune with the lyrics  ‘Hate something, change something, make something better…’
It helps people to understand that both [...]

Appreciation, Affirming Feedback and Retention!

According to the Department of Labor in the USA, 64% of working Americans leave their jobs because they don’t feel appreciated, while Gallup research shows that 70% of working Americans say they receive no praise or recognition on the job.
Is there any reason to suspect that things may be different or better here in the [...]

Things To Do To Develop Teamwork

I have recently been doing a some work with managers to help them learn how to coach their staff to improve performance. One of the most common topics for coaching was team working. Several managers came up with variations of “I wish I could help so-and-so to be more of a team player.” [...]

Interruption as the Biggest Enemy of Productivity?

Mark Howell over at Strategy Central writes:
Do you know what the biggest enemy of productivity is? Can you guess?
According to Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, “proximity is an invitation to interruption and interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity.”
Interruptions maybe a problem – but proximity is not the cause.
I work with colleagues all over [...]