22 Sep 2017 | Culture, Leadership, Management, Productivity |
The focus on happiness at work is unhelpful and misses the point. Work isn’t about happiness, it’s about getting stuff done. As my Dad once said to me, “If it was meant to be fun, they’d have called it ‘fun’, not ‘work’”. I talk to audiences about how organisations...
28 Jul 2017 | Culture, Leadership, Management, Productivity, Recruitment, Trust |
We create job descriptions so that people know what we’re employing them to do and we sit them in teams of people that are doing similar things at the same time. Then we keep an eye on them to ensure that they do what we’ve told them to. We hire HR experts to help us...
12 Apr 2017 | Leadership, Management, Trust |
As a leader, how well do you know your team? Would a significant number of them would do the wrong thing if you weren’t around to keep an eye on them? Do you listen to what your team are telling you? How much airtime do people with less experience get in your...
16 Feb 2017 | Management, Productivity, Trust |
Autonomy motivates performance There is a lot of evidence for the effectiveness of freedom or autonomy as a motivator of the kind of performance and attitude that business leaders want to see (see ‘Drive’ by Dan Pink for some of it), and it’s not a new idea. Indeed,...
29 Jul 2016 | Change management, Culture, Leadership, Management |
Have you ever wondered why, in spite of your best intentions and all of the evidence that they can make a huge different to a business’s results, the great initiatives you put in place to enhance the performance and happiness of your workforce don’t deliver the...
18 Nov 2015 | Culture, Management |
You could spend all day every day reading advice about how to be a better manager of people. We’ve set managers an impossible task and it’s time we stopped beating them up about failing to get everything right all of the time. Managing people is about creating the...
