You probably have, on the whole, the right team in place to get your company moving - but you may not know how to work together to strike gold.
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Why are you working so hard?
Our research shows that leadership teams which talk together about what they are aiming for are the ones that generate truly exceptional results. In our Six Conversations Leadership Programme we call them Ambition Conversations.
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Do You Need to Improve Your Productivity?
FW Taylor on improving productivity Do you ever despair about the inefficiency of your organisation – or of the way you spend your own time? If so then our first great leadership thinker, FW Taylor, has some ideas that can help you break through to be more productive. FW Taylor – Who’s he? Frederick Winslow Taylor focused his thinking on the improvement of work and productivity in the emerging workplaces of the industrial revolution. I’ll let Peter Drucker introduce him to you:- “He was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years in the developed countries. Taylor was the Isaac Newton of the science of work and laid the first foundations to which not much has been added since” Recognise any of this? Taylor called his approach to work and productivity ‘Scientific Management’. It was a large body of work but some of the key principles
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Why do I keep having the same old conversations with people?
Some frustrating conversations just seem to keep cropping up – and not always with the same people! They are frustrating because we know that failure to move them on is reducing our effectiveness and keeping us from the outcomes we need. This month’s thinker has some ideas to help you break these patterns to get better results. The games people play (yep, that means us!) Eric Berne took Freud’s ideas and made them accessible by focusing, not on the individual but on the patterns of interaction (transactions) between them. His seminal 1964 book ‘The games people play’ introduced not only the Discipline of Transactional Analysis (TA) but was also, arguably, the birth of ‘pop psychology’. Before we look at the ‘games’ (the recurring relationship patterns) that we all play, we need to understand the underlying ideas in Berne’s work on TA. Some (now) familiar ideas… Berne explains that we play ‘games’ from one of three basic roles (‘states’):- Parent. In which we play the part of an authority figure. This is
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The 7 Illusions of leadership Why top teams settle for ordinary results – despite extraordinary efforts
The leaders we meet, in organisations of all types, are all telling us the same things. “I’m incredibly busy”. “My days start early and end late, my inbox gets filled with hundreds of emails a week, I have back to back meetings every day and I’m having to work evenings and weekends just to keep up.” “I’m frustrated”. “I can see the potential of this organisation but progress is incredibly slow. We’re finding it hard to make the few percentage points of growth in our annual plans – let alone the transformational changes that we need to breakthrough to the next level” “I’m not enjoying it”. “I worked hard to be in a leadership position because I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help this organisation, and the people in it, reach their potential. I thought leadership would help me learn and be the best I can be. Most of the time it feels like a treadmill – just to keep afloat and to keep paying the mortgages
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