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Welcome to the newest part of our site where we will try our best to keep you up to date with what we are doing and give you an idea of the topics our clients our most interested in at the moment.
Each of our discussion topics come with downloadable pdf files that you can print off and use with your teams. There is SO much information out there on the subject of "Communication" that we have tried to keep things simple - if it can't be said on a page, it's not worth saying!
Looking back over the past year, the single most common theme that we have encountered is that of Leadership. Those in formal leadership positions have come to us asking how we can help them improve their Leadership skills and stop them drowning in paperwork. Those in teams, large or small, often express their frustration that their bosses are not really leading, just reacting.
For us, it is not a coincidence that as the economic environment gets tougher and companies continue to drive costs down, people are feeling the strain. And just when companies need their people - throughout the organisation - to show leadership, they unwittingly make leadership less likely by focussing on increasingly short-term objectives. As we tell our clients, at best this might be called "Reacting", at worst "Panicking". What it is not doing is encouraging real leadership.
For more on what we mean by Leadership read on below.
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Why feedback is THE essential leadership skill |
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Written by Moyra Mackie
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Tuesday, 05 October 2010 13:58 |
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Ken Blanchard, author of the "One Minute Manager" Leadership series, once described Feedback as, "The Breakfast of Champions". And from where we're sitting, it seems as if a lot of managers are skipping breakfast!
Like a good healthy breakfast, giving or receiving constructive feedback can set us up for the day - giving us physical and mental energy. But just like fitting in breakfast, we have to consciously make the time, forget the short cuts and resist the temptation of junk!!
Effective leaders not only give constructive feedback, they also seek and accept feedback about their own performance. We have realised, through working with our clients, that when managers admit to "finding it hard to give feedback" what they really mean is that they find it hard to give ALL kinds of feedback - either the critical kind or the admiring kind.
For us, feedback is the oxygen in an organisation and when you fail to give feedback you're in effect suffocating your team!
So let's look a little bit more about how to give constructive feedback and the benefits it will bring.
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Read more...
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Why is Leadership so hard? |
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Written by Moyra Mackie
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Tuesday, 05 October 2010 13:55 |
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Leadership is a much-misunderstood concept. Mainly, we think, because so few of us can look around and point to many people who are in management positions that we would describe as "good leaders". Why is this, when most people agree that Leadership is such an essential part of successful management?
Perhaps it's because we all have slightly different ideas of what exactly constitutes "good Leadership"? Perhaps it's because like most of the best things in life, Leadership is simple in theory, tough in practice?
We would agree with all of this, and add that one of the things that makes leading others so hard is that so few us are given any help or training in how to lead before we are given some real live people to manage! And there are many Leadership traps that we can fall into. For example
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Read more...
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