Team Leadership development

Developing Talent Management Pathways within an Organisation

Posted On: July 2, 2019By: admin Comments: Comment

Is talent management part of your strategic plan? With all the details involved in running a successful organisation, a leader can get overwhelmed at times. Therefore, it is good to step back regularly and remind ourselves that there are only a few key result areas that need our attention to lead to organisational success. Regarding the human resource side of this equation, implementing a clear talent management pathway within your organisation that attracts, retains and develops top talent will always outperform like-for-like organisations by a significant difference. Dr. Jim Asplund, one of Gallup’s chief scientists states, that the best-led organisations know the direct path to individual, team, and organisational success starts with a key investment in their employees’ greatest talents. How are you investing in this area? Starting a Talent Management PathwayWhat is involved in a talent management pathway? Assuming you have your recruitment processes in order, where you are only getting top talent into the final interview and consistently onboarding A players (ask me how) then you need systems in place to track each employee’s current growth and developmental needs. Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this. The heavy lifting has already been done, so it is just a matter of tapping into an existing resource. Harrison Assessments offers an online organisational dashboard, listing all employees, tracking their suitability alignment with their job role, along with their engagement in their work, and numerous other key metrics to assess existing talent and how to manage it. It

Overcoming Procrastination

Posted On: August 28, 2015By: admin Comments: Comment

The Mystery of Procrastination and how to conquer it. I haven’t met a leader who doesn’t struggle to some degree with procrastination. The funny thing is that most of us do not want to practice this debilitating behaviour, yet it seems to persist. We allow it to prevail in spite of our full knowledge that it eats into potential productivity and profitability levels. So what is the cause? Why do we continue to do the very thing we know is unhelpful? How can we overcome such a prevailing, and often, unconscious habit? Before we can hope to overcome this unwanted nemesis to greater effectiveness

Managing Organizational Culture

Posted On: August 26, 2013By: admin Comments: Comment

The three words of this article’s title seem simple enough to understand and many organizations invest heavily in trying to achieve just this. But I think in order for us to intelligently discuss this topic, we need to ask a couple of questions and bring further clarity to the topic. The first question is, “What is organizational culture?” The second question is, “Can organizational culture be managed?” So allow me in a few words to answer these questions by examining different definitions and then to investigate any potential steps that could be taken to produce positive change. Most people who deal with this topic will articulate organizational culture through summarising the individual elements that make up culture such as, collective – behaviours, values, myths, symbols, norms, rituals, beliefs and assumptions that “this is the way we do things around here.” It would be difficult to find leaders who would disagree with these fundamental components as being the essence of what makes up organizational culture. However, it is the expanded definition of culture that I am going to discuss shortly that starts to expose different opinions. Furthermore, the preferred perspective chosen profoundly affects the strategic approach taken to deal with it. Generally speaking there are two main paradigms of organizational culture that people choose between. Some see it as a singular dominating influence that each individual operates within. Others see it being made up of various sub-cultures within the one organization with continual superficial adjustments being made by those in each

Leadership empowerment: what is it and how do you do it?

Posted On: December 19, 2011By: admin Comments: Comment

There is quite a bit of talk today about the need to have empowered employees within the workplace. Unfortunately that is often all it is – talk! But what are the benefits and how do you accomplish such a task? Let’s start by discussing the benefits of having more empowered team members. Business environments change so rapidly today. There is a need to develop more empowered employees in order to keep up with today‘s fast-paced fluctuating global environment. In order for organizations to remain adaptable to customer needs, front-line employees must be given more authority and flexibility to make on-the-spot decisions. Research in the area of empowerment has revealed that increased empowerment produces greater organisational success factors. These factors include employee contribution, innovation, organizational commitment, expands latent talents, increases capacity to accept change, and increases employee retention. These benefits are all necessary traits for improving organisational success. Having discussed some benefits and hence the desirability for greater empowerment let’s investigate what we mean by the term ‘empowerment’. There seems to be a plethora of definitions but for me the best way to discuss empowerment is to break it up into two dimensions. Hence, empowerment can be summed up by looking at both its internal and external aspects. The technical definitions that describes these two aspects are psychological empowerment (internal) and leader-empowering behaviours (external). Psychological empowerment is made up of four facets, a sense of real meaning in one’s work, a sense of making an impact through the contribution you make

Emotional Intelligence – How to develop it!

Posted On: November 30, 2011By: admin Comments: Comment

Emotional Intelligence (EI) – that is, the capacity to work effectively with your and others’ emotions while engaging in human interactions. EI is demonstrating itself to be a critical factor in leadership effectiveness. Increased numbers of empirical research studies are being produced that reveal outcomes that can no longer be ignored by serious leaders. Some of the key measures associated with emotional intelligence that are being examined are job satisfaction levels, job effectiveness, the contagiousness of moods and physiological responses to others (heart rate, health). Studies show that the emotional intelligence of the boss directly affects employee job satisfaction levels, and this in turn impacts upon employee turnover. Furthermore when a boss brings a negative mood to the workplace through displays of irritability, and anxiety it takes away from a climate of enthusiasm, which diminishes work effectiveness. In contrast, when a boss is able to exude an optimistic and enthusiastic mood it impacts positively upon innovation, productivity, team work and increased resilience to difficult circumstances. With a greater number of research studies demonstrating the positive impact that increased emotional intelligence has upon business results, it is becoming more difficult to ignore this element of leadership development. The good news is that leaders can improve and grow in this area. I have worked one-to-one with leaders to achieve this very thing. So where do you start to work at improving this area? There are a number of options available to you. You might want to look at taking an assessment to