Catalytic Intervention

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2010-12-23T11:27:00.001+00:00

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Our End Of Year Review – Six People Trends We’ve Observed In 2010

2010-12-10T10:54:00.001+00:00

The year has remained dominated by economic uncertainty, with some sectors still in recession, whilst some (exporters) are having a best ever year. Growth has remained elusive for many with a fatal cocktail of oversupply and increasing commoditisation driving down prices.

What does this mean for people management?

The recession has not flooded the market-place with high calibre people, because either they have been locked-in to where they are or have moved jobs below the recruitment market’s radar.
The people who decided to hunker down in not wanting to be last in/first out are beginning to look around. If 2009 was about going backwards, and 2010 was about standing still, 2011 had better be about moving forwards otherwise there is large cohort of people who will be in the job market.
Self-Employment. A confluence of economic factors, lifestyle changes, enabling technology and organisations shrinking their core activities continue to drive the increasing size of the freelancing/contractor/consultant part of the working population. The people doing this kind of work range from a minority of hyper successful who through a combination of the right smarts, the right temperament and the right work ethic enjoy as much work as they want, to the majority who fashion some kind of living. And beware the consultant who is really out of work looking for a job and offers to work on a project at much reduced rates.
People engagement has been on many HR peoples’ minds. How to mobilise the whole organisation’s discretionary effort in support of common goals? Why is the correlation so strong between seniority and the application of this discretionary effort?
Many UK businesses are still over-managed and under-led. UK plc productivity figures have gone backwards in recent years, we’re still behind the US and even France with its shorter working week. Getting the middle layer of managers (the ones that deal with the bulk of employees on a daily basis) to consistently and collectively offer leadership and a sense of purpose to their teams remains a major challenge. Our own work in this area suggests a small increase in leadership behaviour demonstrated by critical mass of middle managers has had a massively positive (and more profitable) effect.
The generational divide. This seems to be increasing. Younger workers having a very different mental approach to work and their employer than their middle aged equivalents. And its more than being at different life stages. Younger people have no mortgage worries (they can’t afford one), and no pension lock-in (final salary gone and money purchase a laugh). The two main UK reasons for conservative career decisions. We sometimes work with clients where the room composition can be 1:1 in terms of number of people and number of nationalities. But then you notice they are all under 35. Technology will also drive the generational divide, not in terms of technical understanding, but in terms of application usage. Social networking, a preparedness to share personal data, affinity groups, and tribal loyalties will amplify these differences. Email is seen as the middle aged communication medium of choice.

Your own hiring/selection/development/succession planning/retention/exiting of people needs to be adaptive, innovative, motivating and sustainable. Above all it needs to be strategic.

If you would like to talk over any of the issues raised in this article or how Predaptive might be able to assist with your people policies we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us.

A Most Dangerous Position To Be In, When All The Sexy People Stuff Had Been Said But Nothing Has Changed

2010-12-10T10:52:00.000+00:00

Some organisations give good rhetoric. They talk about inclusiveness and claim to follow the latest thinking about engagement. They launched a Vision and Mission some time ago and have a laminated set of values issued to all. They’ve run a 360 and the CEO has held a series of ‘doughnut and coffee’ sessions. The Directors have done a ‘back to the floor’ to discover the ‘real’ story and the company made a matched contribution to Children in Need.

Yet when to talk to ‘the workers’ about how things feel in the organisation or ask them about morale, or look at how enthusiastically people have signed up for the Christmas party, peoples’ views bear little relation to all the enlightened management practice that has supposedly been going on. Cynicism, suspicion and a general weariness flavour the comments as if the organisation has done nothing at all. And that’s the point, if people receive all this communication about cultural change, about how things will be different and about a new way of doing things, and then nothing much happens, what are they supposed to think? Launching all the things in the first paragraph doesn’t make them happen.

Questions that should be asked beforehand. Why does management believe all this stuff is required? Has it articulated the problem to be solved, or the opportunity to be exploited? Has it defined measures of success for each intervention? Has it created some accountability in the process of implementation and follow thorough?

And that brings us to an uncomfortable principle. An organisations’ delivery of enlightened people practices cannot exceed the quality of its management’s ability to do so. Put more simply, management has to change and improve before the wider organisation can make the same journey. That ability to be consciously aware of its own shortcomings and to transcend is a critical early stage requirement in any people related change process.

Predaptive’s work always includes working with management on making sure any given messages always aligns with behaviour and is followed through with measurable actions. Building a world class organisation isn’t about launching things; it’s about doing things and making change stick.

What 360° Free Text Boxes Can Tell Us About What An Organisation Is Thinking and Feeling

2010-12-10T10:50:00.002+00:00

One of Predaptive’s customer offerings is to run confidential on-line 360° feedback and reviews. These are usually designed around a carefully developed questions set that is cross-referenced over time to indentify trend data.

Most 360°s contains a free text component, where responders can make additional comments. Below we have captured the most common positives and negatives and then themed them into a summary form. They make for interesting reading.

Negatives

Mangers that don’t walk the talk. There is a gap between what they say and what they do.
Inconsistency. Managers who are too moody, or change their stance on key issues without explanation.
Non delivery of commitments and promises.
Unapproachable. Managers who are too busy, whose diaries are too full and who can’t find quality time to work with their team.
Colleagues who are poor team players.
People who avoid responsibility, who won’t own issues.
People who ‘just don’t get it’. This usually refers to a person’s mental approach to work.
Unreasonable demands being placed on people. This is commented on across all layers of the hierarchy.
Too little visibility of senior management.
No leadership from the top.

As you might expect the positive comments are often the reverse of the negatives, but with a twist.

Positives

Managers that behave consistently.
Managers who demonstrate fairness and even handedness (no favourites!).
People who are straight talking, regardless of who in the hierarchy they are talking to.
Colleagues who are supportive.
The friendliness of fellow workers.
Colleagues who have real expertise they are prepared to freely share.
Managers who are effective coaches.
Visible senior people who demonstrate real leadership through their communications.
Managers who help simplify, prioritise and organise workloads.
Managers who make people feel valued.

If you would like to organise your own on-line 360° feedback mechanism, please contact us.

Moving Motivational Ability Up The Agenda

2010-10-18T11:59:00.002+01:00

These days most managers say they are familiar with the seminal motivation models, whether that’s Maslow or Herzberg, Expectancy Theory or Intrinsic Motivation.

That being the case why is it common to find a large minority of people in any organisation below even an average level of motivation? Is that just a standard distribution curve no organisation can escape from or is it more a comment on the quality of motivation application from the majority of managers?

When we work on designing a Management Development Centre we always include something to bring out motivational ability (or not). Being a bad motivator is something no self respecting manager would admit to, so it’s interesting to see how many managers don’t have any vocabulary for talking about how they go about doing it. When we ask the question the most common reaction is to drag up some half remembered theory (see top of article) from a training course long ago attended. Practical application seems rare. And it’s very unusual to see motivation on a management meeting agenda apart from when approached financially with something about incentive schemes.

Here’s our quick check list to get motivation properly focused on:

Make sure you (really) understand the theory. Recap, relearn to study from scratch.
Nail the difference between needs and drives. Its needs that stimulate drives, not the other way round. (Needs being a proxy for wants, hopes and desires as well as real needs).
Think about what motivates you. There is a connection here, the more self aware you are, the more sensitive you become in understanding other peoples’ motivation.
Don’t be reductive. Motivation is more complicated than just applying a carrot or stick.
Personalise. The most effective motivation strategies are designed for individuals not teams or functions.
Don’t ask people what motivates them, because either they don’t know, or they’ll make something up, or they will try to intuit the answer you’re looking for. Work out what motivates people by taking the time to get to know them. Remember all behaviour is goal directed at the conscious or unconscious level. People reveal so much through how they behave. Become a great observer of people.
Motivation is highly situational, the more context you have the more informed your insights will be.
Run a session on motivation at your next meeting, talk about how improvement strategies could be adopted.

If you would like to work with Predaptive on improving the overall quality of your mangers’ motivation skills contact us.

Why Family Is Bad For Business

2010-10-18T11:55:00.004+01:00

What descriptor do you use to describe the people who work in your organisation? Employees, workers, staff, group, team, family? Or do you stick with the literal, neutral term and call them – people?

The term that is most dangerous to use is family, and not because of its alliterative relation, happy. When an organisation talks about its people as a family it thinks its doing the right thing, focusing on being inclusive and supportive through demonstrating a collective set of cultural norms. We think it’s an incorrect metaphor for two reasons:

Family membership (by blood) is never a choice and family membership by marriage can be fraught with difficulties. You cannot appoint family members, nor can you withdraw family status. Trying saying to a sibling we cannot afford you must leave the family, never to return. Or explaining how the families changing vision means a particular family members’ skills are now ‘non-core’
The other reason is one of hierarchy. One of the pleasures of being in a functional family is everybody knows their place. Who is in charge, where we all go for Christmas, who makes key decisions etc. That’s why the opposite of a functional family is so awful; when families fight for position, try to usurp someone’s position, not make allowances for a tradition that has become the norm. This kind of ritualised behaviour in organisations can be really dangerous.

Here is a word to try on your organisation. Describe the people as a community. A high-functioning organisation will be effective in delivering the three dimensions of community:

Place - This is likely to be physical space(s), and certainly will be different virtual spaces (email, phones, web etc)
Interests - People who engage in similar work with similar skills and expertise. People who work with the same customers and get passionate about the same products and who want to achieve similar standards of excellence.
Belonging - Shared corporate values a common vision and some close personal relationships.

Membership of this community is highly conditional. There are standards of performance and behaviour that are non- negotiable, people are allowed in but it takes a while for them to become fully accepted. The community will fight to support someone who remains true to the community ethos but will expel people who let the community down.

How credible would you sound in describing (in an organisational-wide session) that we are a community?

Predaptive works on building employee engagement (which bolsters community spirit). For more information contact us.

Using Appreciative Inquiry- The Positive Way To Deal With Difficult Change

2010-10-18T11:51:00.001+01:00

How do you get a group working in a high functioning state without going into the common spiral of overdosing on problem diagnosis and failing to get to any agreed resolution?

One way might be to use the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach. This whole system approach came out of the US in the 1980s, becoming an effective organisational tool that focuses on what works and making better rather than what is failing.

AI is a constructive method for understanding what we can take from the existing organisation/working practice that’s good/works well, and how we can build on it with our version of what we are trying to achieve, what the architecture looks like and finally, how we might make it happen? The four stages are:

DISCOVERING: Identifying the organisational processes that work well.
DREAMING: Envisioning processes and practices that would work well in the future.
DESIGNING: Planning and prioritizing those processes in a workable form.
DELIVERING: Implementation of the new proposed design.

By focusing on what works, and by increasing conscious competence, teams and organisations can build real momentum around scalable new ways of working. It also works well for developing best practice norms and standards.

A challenge for AI can be engaging with people who are locked into a remedial, negative approach to problem solving. People who believe there is little or any merit their organisation or team does that can be modelled positively; they simply want to have reductive, whinging conversations. In really serious cases this mental model can have solidified into a cultural norm, sometimes infecting large teams, even whole divisions.

We use a concept we call breakthrough AI – where if we can get a senior team thinking differently, who can view the future positively, who can show (at least) a little leadership can be a breath of fresh air and can quickly start to change the collective mind-set.

If you would like to find out more about using AI techniques in your organisation please contact us.

All In The Family

2010-10-18T11:49:00.000+01:00

The political pages are full of talk of sibling rivalry, inter-family conflict and the psychological damage that family members can do to each other in work situations. Ed winning the Labour Party leadership over his older brother David looked unlikely back in the spring, but it’s a reality now.

The big decision the brothers’ face now is whether David will stay on as a cabinet member and support his brother using his experience, influence and intellect on his behalf, or step back from the shadow cabinet to defuse any speculation about conflict and set about developing a new career of his own away from that particular limelight.

Thousands of miles away Kim Jong-il has just appointed his son Kim Jong-un as a general, a move that’s probably designed to signpost a transfer of power. There are other disappointed (and possibly embittered) sons, sisters and brothers-in-law in the background, but without a free press we won’t see hundreds of pictures of them and be invited to interpret their facial expressions.

When family members work together there’s plenty more going on psychologically than in ordinary working relationships. The emotions in play can be far more intense and the stakes are different.One family member who maybe doesn’t work as hard as others is no big deal in a family who have different professions in different organisations, there may be some grumblings about a lazy kid sister but it has no major impact on the day to day lives of all the family members. If one sister is focused on amassing a fortune ready for an early retirement to a Florida villa, whilst another is busy creating a nice nest egg to help her children gain a good education and get on the housing ladder, and a brother is busy spending everything he earns (and a little more) to enjoy the life he has right now then there may be a few snide remarks at Christmas, but they’ll likely get along fine.

When those different objectives exist within a family business, and family members have varying visions of where that business is going and what the key objective is, then emotions tend to run high and the resultant conflict is just as likely to be destructive as positive.

Predaptive has worked with a wide range of family businesses over the last decade, helping them to be clear about the business goals and work more effectively together as a committed team as well as a functional family. If you’d like to learn more about how Predaptive could help your family business to succeed on its own terms then contact us.

What Is The Most Effective Learning Style – ‘One To One’ Or In Groups?

2010-10-18T11:46:00.000+01:00

Surely the answer to this is the same as the answer to any other complex issue – ‘it depends’. Historically we view learning from our experience of childhood education and classrooms of thirty or so children with varying abilities and backgrounds miraculously taking on-board literacy, numeracy, science, the arts and plenty more. This can be either incredibly stimulating or a complete nightmare for us as students in the preparation for our lives ahead in work and at play.

Most of us have had limited experience of one-to-one teaching; where we’ve been ‘singled’ out for attention or for ‘special’ requirements like learning a musical instrument. These can be very trying circumstances; intensive focus on very specific requirements with no-one else to share the attention and nowhere to hide!

Today, however, more people are looking at one-to-one coaching, for example, as a way to get specific skills honed in a style that is bespoke to our individual requirements. We all remember some words of wisdom we received from someone we looked up to as a mentor or role model that gave us that individual focus and helped at a crucial stage in our development.

There are more opportunities today to look at different learning methodologies and chose those that best suit our needs. Here are some of the key areas that should be considered when choosing between Group or One-to-One learning:

Specific or Generic
How widely spread is the skills and knowledge required? How similar is the application to other related work environments? How easily transferable are the techniques needed?

Tailored or Off-the-Peg
To what extent does the learning and material need to be adapted for its application? How bespoke does the ‘fit’ need to be for the desired effect? Is there a ready-made solution available?

Simple, Complex or Subtle
Even complex subjects can be learnt in groups but sometimes where the distinctions are more subtle than complicated, a one-to-one approach ensures better understanding.Learning StylesSome individuals thrive in group activities whilst others find it easier to take on information without distractions or the need to compete for attention.

Cost v Investment
What is the budget available? Does it include the costs of premises, equipment, travel and accommodation? How much time is ‘lost’? What is the ROI expected and what is the most effective way to achieve it?

For more guidance on tailoring your personal development plans speak to us.

What We’re Watching: The Wire

2010-10-18T11:43:00.001+01:00

Management consultants and leadership gurus often spend a lot of time looking for inspirational leaders and models of managerial success with which they can inspire people.

It’s become almost a cliché to draw examples from the military and sports. Those examples are often filled with products of private education and great universities, excluding individuals from more diverse backgrounds, or adding them in as ‘exceptions that prove the rule’.

The Wire offers up a variety of perspectives on leadership, management, vision, values and goals. None of them are particularly attractive, but the contrasts between them are instructive.

The show focuses largely on the drug trade in Baltimore. We’re introduced to the harsh realities of life in a criminal gang, with strong leadership, high risks and rewards, brutal performance management and a focus on delivering financial results. Yet even in this world we see conflicts around values and goals – Is market share as important as sustainable profitability? Is some competition healthy? Does co-operation with competitors create long term security of income? These conflicts tend to lead to murder rather than a board room spat, which does draw them into sharp focus.

More interesting challenges appear when the drug trade intersects with law enforcement, the school system, local politics and the media. The need to produce quick results and TV friendly statistics pulls against the need to actually make things better for the long term. Every Sales Director can relate to the struggle between working to produce solid, sustainable revenue, and having something good in the forecast for next quarter.

We don’t recommend that you adopt the leadership and management practices you’ll see in The Wire, but it is a great way to explore how different approaches work and the benefits and limitations of each.

Great leaders and ruthlessly effective management don’t always put their efforts into the greater good.

7 Core Organisational Development Capabilities

2010-08-05T16:16:00.003+01:00

How effective is your organisational capability? Below we list the current top 7 taken from our recent work with clients. Organisations and people that can add-value in these areas seem to make a real difference.

Can you change the behaviour of your people?
It starts and finishes here. A behavioural change will lead to different activities which will deliver better results.
Engaging people through giving them meaning and direction in their work
Employers can no longer guarantee job security. What they can guarantee is a place where people feel valued and their contribution can be shown to make a real difference.
Placing leadership at the centre of your management approach
Too many organisations are still over-managed and under-led. These turbulent business times require people at all levels of be able to motivate their teams and deliver effective change. Good management practice is still critical but it needs to become a servant to strategic leadership.
Improving the design and effectiveness of your people related processes
Today people are more demanding, more expensive and more complicated to employ and manage than ever before. Legal compliance is only part of it. All people processes (appraisals, induction, succession, performance management etc.) need to be audited for the value add they should bring. If they don’t make a difference, reinvent or scrap them.
Increasing and building new performance capabilities
The recession looks like being L shaped. OD needs to be help people transcend tough trading conditions and believe they can grow the business and their own performance. This isn’t a time for explaining (again) why the market is difficult, but for doing something about it.
Energising and changing your culture
Culture is expressed values. Its though values you can a change the culture. Indentify the behavioural indicators that make the values explicit and you will move the culture. Connect to point 1
Creating high ownership and accountability throughout the organisation
Our litmus test for whether teams are fully engaged depends on if they have management imposed activity targets. If somebody is only doing something because they are being told to (and wouldn’t do it otherwise), you find a low ownership culture. High performers own their activity, they set their own quality and quantity targets to achieve the outcome they require.

How did you score? If you would like to talk about Predaptive help organisations embed these OD capabilities please contact us.

How Do You Approach People Development/Training In Your Organisation?

2010-08-05T16:08:00.003+01:00

It’s critical to get the right approach to how you develop your people. We have developed our own taxonomy for helping understand how mature an organisation’s Learning and Development approach really is.

One of the most common situations we find is how an organisation will promote the rhetoric of the right hand side but in reality have a mind-set more focused to the left.

To achieve the high impact people development of the Organisation Focused column requires a critical process to be followed.

Line management have to take ownership for, and be capable of, articulating the development gap for their people.

The required solution has to be validated and integrated with the organisations’ strategic imperatives.

The delivery phase meets the highest quality standards

Line management stay engaged with the process taking responsibility for making sure the new learning is embedded in the workplace and the success metrics are robustly pursued.

There is a clear learning loop applied where legacy practice is tested against new, current practice and emerging best practice is captured and codified.

Predaptive, in conjunction with its sister organisation Structured Training can design the most effective, high impact learning environments, including facilitating the transition your Learning and Development culture across to the right hand side of our model.

Can You Predict Business Success?

2010-08-05T16:06:00.001+01:00

Why is Google the Number 1 search business?

Why is Amazon dominant in bookselling?

Why is Rolls Royce one of the world’s top two aero engine businesses?

Why is Apple now more valuable than Microsoft?

Superficially, these questions look easy to answer; Google because they wrote a great algorithm, Amazon because they did on-line books first, Rolls Royce because they adopted/refined world class design and manufacturing techniques and then applied them with discipline over many years, and finally Apple because they have imac, ipod, iphone and now ipad.

But it's much more complicated than that. These success criteria seem so obvious now, but why only with hindsight and not at the time?

You could have bought Google shares at $85 a share when they went public, they are now worth around $485 a share (they’ve been over $650). Easy money?

Remember all the snarking at Amazon about being the world’s best internet bet but never made (and for many never would) a profit? During the 2001 dotcom crash Amazon shares could be bought for $0.08c, today they are around $1.15 and $800m profits forecast this year.

How many people thought Rolls Royce would survive their near collapse in the 1970’s, only pulling through with Government assistance to become the powerhouse they are now?

And Apple; now worth more than Google, Dell and Nokia combined. Remember when Steve Jobs was absent, there were no new products and it looked like they were sliding into irrelevance?

For organisations to thrive over the long term they need a coherent and mobilising vision, a way of looking at the market-place that others haven’t seen, and the obsessive application and pursuit of their strategic goals.

Who are the companies today that might be the Apple’s etc of the future?

Will Ocado come to dominate home delivery shopping? Can HMV avoid becoming a sunset business and reinvent themselves as an entertainment portal? - their results this week look encouraging. Will Ford complete their escape act from possible oblivion? Again the signs look promising.

All businesses trying to shape their future, how does your business’s over the horizon position look?

How Is Your Point Of View? - A Critical Requirement Of Today’s Manager

2010-07-15T13:38:00.001+01:00

One of the most revealing ways of indentifying someone who can influence beyond their level of authority and control (which is a simple, but effective definition of leadership) is to really listen for the person’s point of view. How often (and perceptively) do you hear them talk about their industry’s future, what the change dynamics facing their customers really are? How will their own role need to evolve to stay relevant? How will technology change their value chain? How will the new macro-economic environment evolve? Etc. etc.

Recently we’ve been working with an organisation that asked us to unpack the Point of View issue and turn it into something that their managers could develop for themselves. A word of caution, we found two issues that demonstrate an anti point of view, ways of behaving that masquerade as a point of view but in fact demonstrate the opposite:

Having strong opinions about what won’t happen, what won’t work and what people are mistakenly focusing on. This is saying rather than envisioning the future.
Having fixed views that don’t change. A Point of View is about passion and belief, but it’s not about dogmatism.

We found a strong correlation between having a coherent point of view and being someone others listened to as well. The person was influential, often beyond his or her own functional area and several levels higher up the hierarchy than their formal position warranted.

They were viewed as being interesting, ‘go to’ people who really know stuff, but equally they are not intimidated by not knowing stuff. Their learning curve constantly sits at a steep angle. This of course makes them interesting and valuable to clients as well. We found if these people were market facing their impact was significant. A point of view is not only good for the quality of conversation; it’s also very good for business.

The culmination of our work was the development of a point of view workshop that showed people the requirements of how to develop this (we believe) critical capability.

If you would like us to develop a point of view workshop for your managers/salespeople/potential leaders please contact Claudine McClean for an informal conversation.

Seeing Into The Future - Five Business Strategy Questions People Will Pay Large Sums For Insight Into The Most Likely Outcome

2010-07-15T13:35:00.001+01:00

We’ve always lived in interesting times, but mid 2010, there are some fascinating questions exercising people with the brains the size of planets in working out the best strategic response. What do you think will happen?

Will putting up a pay wall around the Times newspapers work? Can generic news content, laced with a few star columnists, persuade people to pay up? Will a cross-subscription model using Sky and other parts of News Corp. be used to entice people to sign-up? Many industry watchers credibility depends on the outcome happening in the way they have predicated. Most think it will fail, but has Murdoch again had a visionary moment linked to his strong business sense?
Has the airline industry fractured into different operating models? Short haul= low cost, long haul=full service, or can a long haul, low cost operator work? Will we see a different split of airline offerings; leisure either only low cost economy or private jet luxury, and business full service with all the extras? Many airlines are playing with these offerings already and, with further consolidation happening, more experimentation will happen. How will things change with the Middle East airlines operating the largest hubs in the world (they already are the largest purchasers of new jets), and what will the increasing environmental considerations do to air travel and its already shaky economic model?
Are book, music and video stores finished? Are we seeing the last 10 years of the physical product, be it a book, CD or DVD? Can your local store transition into something new, which not only offers a purchasing point but can also offer a compelling customer experience connected to that purchase, which cannot be replicated on-line?
How will BP emerge from its Gulf catastrophe? Certainly weaker, but temporarily or more permanently? Can it survive? What will be the long-term impact on deep-water exploration? Does it change the peak oil calculation? How will UK pension funds be affected?
The demographic time bomb. We all know the economic challenges of this shift in the UK population, with an unaffordable pay-as-you-go national pension scheme; but what about the business opportunities? These retiring baby boomers have disposable income, are asset rich and very discerning consumers. What will they do with this economic (and political?) leverage.

These issues might not directly affect you, but if you had to pose the five biggest strategic issues for your own organisation, what would they be? How coherently could you frame the questions and how insightfully could you answer them?

Click hear to see how Predaptive help organisations develop this critical capability.

Where Are The Cassandras In Your Organisation?

2010-07-15T13:30:00.001+01:00

If you thought Cassandra was a Greek myth long ago consigned to classical history with little to teach us about today you’d be wrong.

Simply told, Cassandra, because of her beauty, was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo. But because she didn’t return his love he placed a curse on her so that no one would believe her predictions.

This combination of real insight and powerlessness is one of the most frustrating positions someone can be in.

Every organisations has their Cassandras, we find they fall into two types:

Reductive Cassandra
These Cassandras focus on explaining why the world will fail, why things don’t work and why new ideas are dangerous.

These people in influential positions can be very damaging. Their power of argument can be highly developed, the problem is they don’t put it to constructive use.

Passive people give up the fight of taking their arguments on so an atmosphere of negativity and helplessness takes hold.

Constructive Cassandra
These Cassandras foresight needs to be given an outlet. Some of what they say will be genuinely visionary, some will be wrong. Often the most common mistake is one of timing. They turn out to be correct but get the year or the speed wrong. Remember Apple’s 1990s Newton PDA, a visionary product without the technology to deliver it. iPad is the Newton realised.

These are exciting people to be around, they are full of ideas, some that can be heretical, challenging the orthodoxies of the day. We call this process of evaluating these ideas, risk calibration, allowing enough of the creative flow to turn into something worthwhile.

Organisations that find a way of giving the best of these ideas traction are the ones that control their futures.

Can you indentify your Cassandras?

How To Identify People With Low Ownership Issues

2010-06-11T11:21:00.001+01:00

Ownership is mind-set determined – see how many of the following you recognise:

Yes I agree with you , you’re right I need to change - soon
These numbers are not good enough, they will improve - soon
I’m going to sign up for an MBA, its time for me to improve my business education – when I get the time
I nearly told her/him what I really thought of them. I was that close to losing it.
Next month/quarter/year I will deliver a better performance
Factors beyond my control were to blame for missing the numbers (select from a long list – the wrong weather a favourite amongst some company chairmen)
It’s a personality clash, there’s nothing I can do
It's good in theory but won’t work in practice (then it’s a bad theory)
My boss is a nightmare
I don’t have the resources, or its evergreen predecessor
I don’t have the time
We can’t fire them, it's too difficult (not if done correctly)
Better ongoing mediocre performance, than a vacancy (this breeds mediocrity)
People need time to come to terms with changing their behaviour (no they don’t, people need time to change their attitudes not their behaviour)
The other department/person/division is to blame.
We are incompatible star signs (true – said a manager earning £60K plus a year)
Where can you get good people these days?
People these days are more disloyal
I have an addictive personality
I have a low metabolic rate

The issue with this list is not to test them for truth, they might be, that’s not the point. People with a high ownership mind-set seek to transcend issues not use them as excuses as to why something has not been achieved/done/actioned.

What’s good fun (or depressing if they work close to you) is, once you spot someone with a low ownership mind-set, how often these excuses crop up.

Predaptive help organisations create high ownership cultures, to find out more contact us.

How Do You Measure Up As A Team Manager?

2010-06-11T11:20:00.001+01:00

Over the last 6 months Predaptive have been working on a competency project that has indentified certain characteristics of the successful team manager. We have summarised those behavioural indicators into the following list:

They seek to add value to what the team are trying to achieve, rather than simply ‘manage’ them.
They balance the task-team-individual requirements as best they can.
They seek to work on connecting their personal goals with the organisational requirements.
They maintain the appropriate emotional distance between them and their team. Close, but not too close. Distant but not that distant.
They remember where their credibility should come from (contribution and expertise – not from position or hierarchical status).
They work to make their people smarter.
They constantly focus on increasing their motivation.
They try to make their day as productive, and their work environment as stimulating, as possible.
They make time for people, offering praise and encouragement.
They avoid the team becoming emotionally dependent on them and vice versa.
They seek to remain objective in all decision making.
They deal with the tough stuff quickly, decisively, fairly and consistently.
They hold themselves to the highest personal standards.
They work hard at championing the organisation’s vision and values. They see themselves as needing to demonstrate real role-model behaviour.
They are always confidential and discreet with information about their team. They don’t gossip about personal matters.
They focus on coaching and supporting rather than checking and policing.
They look to show they trust their people.
They offer praise and recognition where it's warranted.
They don’t seek to impose their personal views or work style on others. They allow people to be themselves.
They connect with people at the human level, not hiding behind titles or position.

Staying Power

2010-06-11T11:17:00.001+01:00

Sir Terry Leahy has announced he’s leaving Tesco after 14 years in charge. During that time the business has seen turnover rise by 310% and profit rise even more. Tesco has moved from being an also-ran in the UK supermarket field to the dominant player, overtaking Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer in profitability.

Tesco is unusual amongst its rivals in having long standing Chief Executives. 14 years gives a person time to see their vision turned into reality, passing through painful times of change as part of a strategy that shareholders, customers and employees know is likely to be given the opportunity to make it to fruition, making them more likely to stick with it.

It’s not just Leahy who has been given the chance to succeed. Despite being formed in 1919, Tesco has only ever had five CEO’s. One was Jack Cohen, the founder, the following two were his son-in-laws, followed by Lord MacLaurin. Lord MacLaurin was plain old Ian when he took over, his remarkable achievements at Tesco gave him the profile that led to a peerage. He claims his most important decision whilst at Tesco was appointing his successor, rather than turning Tesco into the UK’s largest retailer.

During the 14 years that Sir Terry Leahy has been with Tesco, Marks & Spencer have had five Chief Executives, the same number that Tesco has had in the last century. Marks & Spencer has not enjoyed the steady good fortunes of Tesco over that period.

Whilst it may be wise to replace a Chief Executive who isn’t delivering the goods, or an Executive at any level who isn’t performing, it’s worth reflecting on whether giving people time to execute their vision and invest in selecting and mentoring a successor can produce better long term results for all stakeholders.

To talk through how you can develop a vision led strategy, or to discuss your talent management plan contact us.

Taking Over A New Senior Role – The First 100 Days

2010-05-20T12:01:00.004+01:00

When taking over a role that puts you in charge of a business it's critical you use the first 100 days wisely. Much of the success you have in the first 2-3 years in the role will be determined by how effectively you use these 100 days. It’s surprising how many people think this early period is one for reflection and review rather than for action and change. As Napoleon observed when appointing a new general, you can do nothing to them in the immediate days after they are appointed, they can do what they will, because to criticise them would make the appointment look a mistake. Senior managers/directors should use this time accordingly.

Below we’ve put together a checklist developed from our senior executive coaching work. Doing these things more or less in parallel fashion will use those 100 days to real purpose.

Engage With The People

Informally meet all staff you are responsible for face to face ASAP. This can be onerous and arduous if you cover a lot of territory but it needs to be done. Town hall style is fine if a lot of people are involved.
Communicate a high level ‘impressions’ based overview of what your leadership will mean and what people can expect to see from you in the first few months. Communicate a date 120 days after you have started where you will talk about what you have learned and what your first year plans are going to include. This will inject a sense of pace and purpose into your approach. Stick to the timetable.
Conduct a 1-2-1 interview with all direct reports. Get them to present their KPIs and plans for the relevant period.
Meet all second line reports 1-2-1. Informal discussion to get their views establishes another line of communication without undermining their bosses (your direct reports).
Hold a team building workshop with your direct reports team. Focus on developing/reviewing/inventing a Purpose Framework of Vision, Values and Strategic Goals.
Start to form a view around the shape and composition of your direct reports team.
Set up a regular meeting process with your boss. Drive the agenda, make it your own. Spend time getting to know them and what pushes their buttons.
Network like mad across the organisation and in key adjacencies.
Begin gathering your key team; you need people you can really trust and relay on. If you are going to bring in people from a previous organisation try to balance their appointments with some incumbent promotions.
Key early relationships if you are at MD/CEO level will need to be with your Chairman, FD/CFO and HRD.

Think About Your Personal Leadership Style

Decide what kind of leader you want (and don’t want) to be.
Correlate that to the immediate needs of the business. Does it require transformation, remedial action, a steady hand, shaking up???
Be prepared to make clear statements about your management/leadership style, what you won’t tolerate and what you really like to see in others. Clarity here will send out clear signals of intent and begin the important early process of expectation management.
If relevant, make sure people you have managed previously recognise that things need to change; old relationships cannot necessarily carry on as before.
Change things. Symbolic change can be hugely significant in setting out a new style, a new way of doing things. Never say "I’m not going to change things until I’ve had a good look at things". Do not begin with a strategic review, this creates a period of stasis and anxiety at the same time

Getting Your Hands On The Things That Matter

Get your arms around and understanding of the key data sets with the three requirements of
- Full disclosure
- Absolutely correct
- Available in a timely fashion
These data sets will be:
- Financial, including; cash, profit and loss and the balance sheet. Make sure you understand the balance sheet as well as the FD. Go through the overhead line by line to understand what the business spends its money on.
- Operational, including all key functional metrics especially those relating to customers, margins, input and output costs. Test the effectiveness of the Board/Management Report. Improve/change as required.
- Compliance, all issues to do with risk, regulation, health and safety, HR policies etc.
In these early weeks is more critical to understand problems/issues than to blame people for poor data. Openness is more important than quality (for now).
Planned decisions. Capture all decisions that are in the pipeline. Understand those that are legally binding, those that are committed, those that reversible.
Reputational Risk. Make sure all currently known issues are known to you. Be very clear with your DRs that for you, surprise (not bad news) is the worst sin of all, and will be very negatively received.

Engaging With Stakeholders

Map all key stakeholder groups.
Develop clear views around stakeholder risks, where power resides and think about where you need to quickly build relationship equity.
Develop engagement plans for individuals and groups.

Getting Your Strategic Point Of View Organised

Become the expert in understanding the current strategy and why it exists (or not) in the form it does.
Ramp your learning on understanding the market context, competitive pressures and major change drivers ASAP.
Get out and meet key customers, use it as an opportunity to evaluate the Sales Director.
Keep testing the organisation against the critical capability - Do we have the people, processes and proposition to GROW this business? Make this a standing agenda item.
If you need additional resource/focus to make this happen – do it.
Use the emerging Purpose Framework development to inform the major strategic themes.
To begin with remain as open and neutral as possible, opinions and decisions are a next stage.
Look for quick, small wins, improving the figures is a short cut to increasing your credibility, licence to operate. Do not become a ‘jam tomorrow’ leader.

Activate Real Performance Management

Understand all key performance drivers. Make sure accountabilities are clear and the reporting line from top to bottom is transparent and understood.
Validate current practice and improve where necessary around the right things being focused on by the right people in the right way at the right time
Review performance management system, develop as required (tactical). In the first year make a more strategic appraisal and to its effectiveness.
Focus on accountability, responsibility and ownership. Evaluate how expectations are set and met.
Review and reset consequences model (positive and negative).

Remember, you’re going back to the organisation after 120 days. This is as much to show what you have been doing as what you are going to do more/less/differently.

Predaptive work with CEOs or other Directors in an executive coaching capacity and on top team development. To find out more contact us.

Vision Building – What It Is And Isn’t

2010-04-14T15:56:00.000+01:00

From our work we’ve gleaned the following do and don’ts around Vision Building:

Don’t have a Vision and a Mission. We’ve never seen an organisation successfully communicate both of these and show how they can function interdependently. Also when you ask people to quote one they often quote the other. A good vision will do all you need it too.
No numbers or dates. Something that states £100m by 2015 is a goal not a vision.
Visions are aspirational and as much about the journey as the destination. They are for the long term, something that needs changing or can be achieved in 5 years is probably not long term enough.
Creating a future that a vision captures is where the real benefit is. There is nothing more motivating for someone than to have a future articulated to them that they would like to become part of.
Don’t confuse visions with marketing strap lines, clever word play or alliterative statements. Sure, you’ll want to distil it down to a short phrase, but start with the long version, otherwise it’s just a word-smithing exercise.
Where does a good vision come from? It comes from a passionate point of view of what someone or some team wants to create. Vision building is not a technical, tick the box exercise, it should come from the heart, a clear expression of a future state which is different from the current state.
If it’s done as in point 6 it becomes a statement of intent. It should be directional, broad enough not to be restrictive, specific enough to allow options to be discriminated for and against.
Finally, the most important point, vision building is a deep act of leadership, you're offering people an opportunity to take part in taking others (customers and employees) on an exciting journey together.

See Values and Goals for the other two components of an effective Purpose Framework.

Predaptive help organisations build and implement effective Purpose Frameworks; for more information please contact us.

Values – How They Underpin Everything An Organisation Does

2010-04-14T15:53:00.002+01:00

In building an effective Purpose Framework how you approach Values is critical to get right. Below we summarise the main points:

Culture is expressed values. Values are the basic building block of what it feels like to work in a particular organisation. If you want to change the culture, change the values.
A values driven organisation needs fewer rules, its values act as a touchstone for guiding peoples' actions and behaviours.
Values are not ‘common sense’, or ‘unnecessary because we all have values’. An organisation without clear values will not be able to offer any kind of ethical, contextual or behavioural framework. Whilst your personal values may be obvious to you they are not obvious to me. See MPs expenses for more context.
Distilling them down into five or six maximum is a good idea. Ten or more values is too many for people to carry round in their heads.
The whole focus should be on the behavioural expression of those values. You are not making a personal comment on an individual’s values, but on their visible behaviour - either positively or negative, as it relates to your values. The key here is to develop behavioural indicators.
You are not asking people to leave their personality at reception and become an organisational clone, indeed one of your values might speak to originality or creativity. An organisation does not have dominion over what people think or feel, but it can motivate people to behave in certain ways and proscribe behaviours it deems unhelpful or antipathetic to building its vision.
Values must always be viewed as a set. Never allow selective quoting, and never play ‘top trumps’ where one value is viewed as being superior to another.
A values-driven organisation feels inclusive, people are more positive about giving their discretionary effort, customers notice the difference.

See Vision and Goals for the other two components of an effective Purpose framework.

Predaptive help organisations build and implement effective Purpose Frameworks; for more information please contact us.

Securing Your Future - Setting Strategic Goals That Deliver

2010-04-14T15:45:00.003+01:00

Given your organisation has its Vision, it now needs a set of Strategic goals that will drive its activities, priorities and decisions towards making that vision a reality. It’s in the Goals you find out how serious the organisation is about creating a future that is more than just a larger set of financial numbers than it's currently achieving.

Strategic Goals don’t normally number more than 10.
They will be clearly articulated, easily passing the ‘water cooler’ test of being understood by everybody.
Although simply stated, they will have significant detail underneath with a clear plan of how they will be achieved, with milestones and accountabilities clearly labelled. Strategy is essentially the mechanism for delivering the Strategic Goals.
Strategic Goals need to be masters (not servants) of, and integrated with, the current year’s business plans.
They should be more than just about financial growth. Profit is an output of doing something, so making more profit is a function of doing different things. The most effective sets may cover such things as:
- What it is you are selling?
- How you intend to engage differently with customers?
- Expansion, where, how, when?
- Solo or by making new partnership or alliances?
- Organic or acquisition?
- How you intend to use and develop your people capital?
- Technology, a disruptive focus or just a condition of play?
- Intellectual property development?
- Innovation?
- New markets and/or new segments?
- Challenging existing orthodoxies?
- New/emerging value chains?
- New costing models?
- New routes to market?
- Optimising or transforming – or both?
Leadership is critical to the process of developing effective and mobilising Strategic Goals. Without a point of view about the future, linked to the vision of what your organisation isto become, your Strategic Goals will not drive anything.
The best time frame is 4-7 years.

See Vision and Values for the other two components of an effective Purpose framework.

Predaptive help organisations build and implement effective Purpose Frameworks; for more information please contact us.

It’s Time To Get Real With The People You Still Employ

2010-03-11T13:32:00.001+00:00

We are seeing an interesting people issue emerging as we move into a post-recession environment.

A strand of the workforce that survived the redundancy programmes but was only just competent in their roles. They were happy to keep their heads down and the employer having cut the overhead dug in for the reminder of 2009.

These businesses are now looking to grow their revenues as quickly as possible back to pre-credit crunch levels, which means having a look at the quality of the people who will make it happen, and they are faced with a stark truth. The quality of your business performance will never exceed the quality of the people responsible for its delivery. The only exception is if you are lucky enough to have a product or service that people want to buy in spite of the people they have to deal with.

Managers who can only rationalise and justify problems are no good to you when your marketplace is sluggish and/or volatile. You need people who can transcend their current environment and develop new conditions of business, moving from a reactive stance to a much more proactive one.

It isn’t the worse performing people which hold an organisation back; it’s having too many mediocre ones in key positions. And there is a further brake on this being sorted out as a function of normal market conditions. Any recovery is unlikely to drive high levels of new employment, slow improvement continues to create a very tight jobs market, so these very average managers are not going anywhere of their own volition. This can create a real sense of negative change inertia, the good people who hoped the leaner organisation would be more agile and innovative find it’s even more frustrating than before.

The challenge for HR is to move from downsizing to genuine building of bench strength. It’s the only way to grow the business ahead of a poor demand curve.

What People Do On Trains

2010-03-11T13:27:00.003+00:00

Train travel is instructive for observing the work habits of ones fellow passengers. We think it is a very under researched area of human behaviour deserving of more attention.

Computer Jockeys
Hunt and peck typing is still the most popular form of typing. It’s interesting to see a form of genuine equality, neither sex seeming to have lots of competent typists. Our unscientific research shows Word and Excel being the most common programmes (excluding email see next section) with PowerPoint a very poor third. It’s much more common to see people watching films, although interestingly more in the evenings than mornings, a treat after work perhaps?

Writers
Still a common activity. Note taking and list making the most prevalent forms.

Talking
Only to people you’re travelling with, otherwise a very weird thing to do.

Email
BlackBerrying (or version of) very popular. Often done with lots of frowning, either due to frustration or difficulty reading the screen.

Phoning
We think this is less common than it used to be. Very little on the morning commute unless train delayed, evening calls ‘I’m on the train’ still easy to overhear, but generally the serial phoners are a smaller hard core.

Reading/Annotating Work Stuff
Prep for meetings easy to spot. Evidence of lots of printing still going on. Like all reading sends a lot of people to sleep...

Staring Out The Window
Who knows if this is work related?

Non Work Activities

Sleeping
We think more common among younger travellers. Burning multiple ends of several candles perhaps? Snoring seems to be generally tolerated by fellow passengers.

Newspaper Reading
If you work for a national newspaper you must weep every morning when you see the number of Metro readers.

Texting
It's in the non work section because so many people are smiling while they do it. People seem to enjoy text messaging.

Book Reading
Pleasingly still common.

Media Players
Noisy headphones the most annoying thing on trains, watching video becoming more common.

What is fascinating to speculate, is how much peoples’ industry on the train has anything to do with the quality of their productivity, and how they contract with themselves around the balance of work/non work activities.