I will be one of six speakers of the evening and I will be speaking on ‘Taking Chances and Recognising Opportunities for Growth’.

I’m quite looking forward to it. If you are there do come over and say hello.

For more CMI and WiM Events go to:http://www.managers.org.uk/events

Short circuit all this by getting professional help early on.

If you have not, I would encourage you to do so.  I am not a marketeer or a specialist on internet stuff, but I am learning more about what works for my business and how I can grow it further through the Internet for less.  I am finding new ways to provide good services and to connect with my clients too.

I recently signed to up Google+, somewhat apprehensively I must admit, but I am becoming more and impressed by what is available here for free.  I still have a lot to learn and more of its offers to explore and learn to use though.

One of the very interesting options available is Google+ Hang Outs.  I’ve not tried this yet but have signed up for it.  I am going to be arranging a hang out in the next couple days and would love to invite you to join me.  We can try it together.

If you’d like to join me, please let me know.  We can connect on Google+   My unique link to Google+ by which you can join me is here  https://plus.google.com/?gpinv=2GaLJSjbBwE:iZakUlYoYZ8  I believe you’ll have to join, as you would expect, but it’s worth it.

And its all for free!

As I’ve already mentioned, I am not an expert on this in anyway, but I would like to recommend someone who is.  Her name is Mari Smith, she’s Scottish, I believe and lives in the US.  I’ve found her articles helpful, informative and quite invaluable in helping me with internet related things.

I’ve shared a recent article of hers from her blog below.

http://www.marismith.com/ten-reasons-googleplus-hangouts/

Don’t forget to join me and let me know if you’d like to be part of my Google+ Hang Out event.  I look forward to hearing from you. 

https://plus.google.com/?gpinv=2GaLJSjbBwE:iZakUlYoYZ8

This is what makes the difference in every business between a manager who is effective and succeeds and one who does not.  Although one can find the occasional manager who has succeeded in spite of this, as my husband has just rightly reminded me, I believe implementation is the key.

What we really want is to achieve a far higher number of effective and successful managers in the UK than we see today.

There has been a lot of reporting on the ineffectiveness of UK managers in recent years.  The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has been running surveys, monitoring this issue and reporting its findings regularly for some time now.

Many of our UK organisations accept the need for management training and most provide in-house programmes themselves, access externally run programmes or run training in conjunction with external training providers such as our own.

However, even with all this financial and time outlay by businesses and individuals, why are reports on UK management or managers effectiveness still found wanting?

In my view it all comes back to implementation.

It is all well and good to attend hour after hour of training, to cover theoretical material and even do some roll play whilst in sessions and to even culminate with a project or report as part of one’s study, but what happens after all of this is done?

It is my experience that not enough time is spent in real and personal learning beyond the course or the classroom.  What I mean is the personal learning that brings about actual change in practise and performance.

The fault may well be that of the business itself.  It may be that not giving enough focus is placed on the case made for evidence of implementation.  May be not enough time is allowed to implement learning effectively; to make changes to individuals own management approach and style.

It may be that businesses do not understand what it means to their long term progression, staff retention, customer relations and innovation.  It seems that businesses do not realise that the impact on efficiency and improvement.  How we apply what we know bears fruit.

If managers and staff are not required to demonstrate continual use of and improvement of their management skills, even long after a period of training, then any period spent in the metaphorical classroom will be short lived and ineffectual.  The money and time expended will have been wasted.

Another issue here is in understanding how long term learning and practical performance improvements take place for the individual in the work place.   Unless required to do differently, most people, even after training just resort back to their previous behaviours.

Senior managers need to realise their responsibility in not only doing this themselves and leading the way, but in creating the right environment that allows learning implantation to happen for manager and team leaders at lower levels within their organisation.

I would like to see, as the requirement to demonstrate with the CMI Chartered Manager Award, that managers within organisations are require to demonstrate how they have used what they have learnt and the differences their learning has made to their daily performance.

So how could this be made to happen?  Well all of the types of training previously mentioned are highly necessary and important to have and where they are not in place this should be put in place as a minimum.

Management training is the foundation to good management practise.

But this is only the start and not the end of training and learning.  We need to build on this by creating long term learning that is seen to change and improve performance and behaviour.

What needs to happen after these initial types of training has taken place is for support, guidance, and challenge to be given to help managers learn how to make more practical connections between what they have learnt and how they implement it in their daily management.

The use of mentoring, coaching and 360 degree assessment can provide the next stage.  In the case of 360 assessment, this should probably be done before management training is started in the case of existing managers and team leaders and again afterwards.  This will help to measure change and progress.

These tools can provide the mechanism for making the difference in implementation.  These offer ways to raise personal awareness on how ones management skills are perceived by others around you, (at an early enough stage, for new managers and to deal with difficult areas with more experienced managers) before things become more of a problem for the business.

After identifying performance failures and bad behavioural habits of managers coaching and not group or team training can provide more focused, speedier method for change.  Good coaching will explore not only how one uses what has been taught, but any patterns of thinking, approaches or attitudes that hinder implementation of what one has learnt.

Most of the time it is not that we do not know what to do, but that we need an objective pair of eyes to help us see more clearly what the picture is and how best of apply our knowledge more precisely for the greater good of the business.

Coaching provides an objective supporter that has no axe to grind but is able to challenge our thinking and actions.

Although coaching has gained more credibility recently in the UK its effectiveness in management is still not seen or appreciated; its benefits are largely ignored.  There is still a level of ‘I should not need support’ in UK businesses.  This can be one of reasons UK managers are not as effective – are loosing out to other countries as a result.  We all need help at some time in our careers.

How do we improve the standards of UK management?

By:

• Taking a more long term approach to management training and learning;
• Creating and investing in management training which focuses on learning implementation, behavioural and performance improvement;
• Using tools to measure, help and support actual learning implementation, such as 360 degree assessment, coaching and mentoring;
• Expecting and gathering evidence to back up any claims of improvement from a range of sources, ideally colleagues, staff and customer;
• Rewarding success based not only on financial results, but also on positive behaviour;
• Creating positive values and behaviours that are practically and actually implemented by all managers.
• Create an environment where both training and learning is expected long term.

The bottom line for improving UK management standards is in how we implement what we know to be right in our heads into what we do practically each day.  Practice does make perfect, and heralds improvement.   It’s all in what we do and how we implement what we know.

  It’s all in what we do and how we implement what we know.

Developing Your People, Building Your Business, Achieving Your Dreams.

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During the session we were asked to work in pairs and to use some of the techniques we had been looking at.  My partner and I decided to work on a real life issue. Role-play can be so faults sometimes, but there is a place for that when nothing real is available – I digress.

Anyway, one of the issues that came up as my partner and I worked together was the difficulty we all sometimes experience in helping and supporting family members, particularly when they are adults.

When we work with relatives this can compound this particular issue even further. 

Those closest to us can sometimes be the most difficult to work with because they are (and we hold them) so close to us our hearts; our emotions are more involved and acutely heightened.  Our expectations and judgements are much higher and we tend to give more credence to whatever is said and done by each other – taking it all, sometimes too seriously.

At times, this can be quite unfair if you look at it objectively, because our closest relatives are in reality just human, like everyone else.

The colleague I was working with shared that he had wanted to and had been trying for years to support a close relative in business.  My colleague was himself  as  much more experienced in business and could see just what his relative needed to do.  However his attempts to support this individual were not being received or accepted. Needless to say, this was leading him to feeling more and more frustrated.

Our discussion took the form of firstly looking at his approach, his expectations, motivations and methods.  I then asked him to compare his approach to this individual to the one he might take with a client, a complete stranger.

I also asked him to reflect on his true motivation – the question being ‘Was his attempts to help truly about his relative or himself?’  I know this might seem a little hard, but when things appear difficult sometimes, it helps to go right back to basics within ourselves and recheck our motives.

Another approach is to try to view the situation i.e. his attempts to ‘help’ from the other person’s point of view.  How might his close relative be viewing his approaches?  Might he be as convinced of my colleagues motives or might he be being thinking differently? How might he perceive things?

When dealing with our closest relatives it can be difficult to disengage our emotions, personal motives and ‘parental’ intentions when dealing with our adult relatives.  But doing just that is important so that we can become more objective and find different and more effective strategies of approach to be effective.  When dealing with clients or strangers, well anyone we do not have a strong emotional bond with, we tend to engage a variety of  methods and approaches when dealing with difficult or what we may view as resistant people.

This is quite important to understand and necessary if we are going to be in anyway effective.  And as in this case, if we are going to use our years of acquired knowledge and experience for the benefit of our relatives; and if our relationships with those we love and hold dear, is to remain healthy and positive as we all mature.

As a parent managing the career of a young aspiring author, I also have to put these things into practice regularly. 

I really enjoyed this session and working with my colleague.  It reminded me that we all need to learn and put into practice what we learn as professional into our own lives.  Using the same levels of flexibility and objectivity we are prone to use when dealing with strangers, clients and staff at work, with those who are closer to us – they deserve it and so do we.

We all need to be honest with ourselves about our motives i.e. is this more about me than them or more for my benefit and pride that their success.

If we not objective and flexible or if we do not take the time to learn different strategies for dealing  resistance, we may well find ourselves stuck in our relationship and frustrated in our desire to help our loved ones.

In these challenging times we all need some help finding ways through it.  We all know that things will get better, but at times it can get hard to hang in there.  As I speak to many of my clients; (Managers and Business owners) many are finding it hard to hang in there.

When we’re experiencing times of difficulty, it is very easy for our mind and our thinking to be drawn continuously to those things we’re struggling with for a larger percentage of time.

It is quite natural that we consider what the difficulties, but we need to do this both logically and thoroughly, so that we are then able to understand what they are, why it’s happening and what we can do, if anything to improve the situation.  Sometimes things are beyond our ability to change and we can do nothing to immediately improve our situation.

When these times face us, the feelings of frustration and difficulty tend to be brought on by two ways of thinking:

1. Our natural or practised way of being or responding; and
2. Our desire and sometimes desperate need to see immediate change.

The first of the points above come from whether we are instinctively an optimist or pessimistic; how we have trained or practiced ourselves to respond and behave, when things are going the way we would like it to.

My experience in dealing with people is that based on our backgrounds and childhood experiences, we have preferred ways of behaving, which we’ve practised and adopted as being effective for getting what we want or helping us to deal with what we experience.

As adults though we can find that these methods are no long as effective as they were in our childhood and may actually work against us.  One can be too optimist and too pessimistic in our view or behaviour.  No one really likes someone who is too optimistic or too pessimistic either can end up not wanting to see the reality.  A little of either at the right time is what is required.

However, if we’ve been wise enough to realise our state and it’s effectiveness; and if we accept that this may need at time to change, we may have tried to find a happy medium, so that we are more flexible and realistic.  We may have found a range of ways to move ourselves from one to the other to obtain a more balanced view and way of dealing with life and the situations that may come our way.

I am naturally more optimistic, but there are times when even I find myself focusing on the difficulties I face, to the point of being in a cycle of negativity; feeling that I’ll never sort this one out.  Depending on who we are this downward spiral can last longer for some people than others.  I don’ tend to like being in the dumps for too long, it makes me terribly unhappy.  I’m sure I’m not alone here, but my naturally optimist nature helps me to get out of it more quickly than would someone who is naturally more pessimistic.

But even I have had to design a strategy to help me get myself out of the dumps as quickly as possible so as not to self destruct.  When I realise where I am, I use that place to get me to face things more honestly than maybe I have when I was being terribly optimistic.

In the next section I will be sharing some of the strategies I use to help me get myself through these difficult times and pull myself out of the dull drums.

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I can’t remember exactly what point we were discussing at the time, but it was around the different prospective that women bring to the table of business management.  Keith’s comment went something like:

 ‘Women are far better at cleaning that men are; when they clean the sink, they also clear underneath the basin of the sink.  Men never think of cleaning under the basin itself.  Women see things so differently sometimes than men do, and we are so much better for it.’

To be honest, I was quite struck by this comment, because prior to that point in time, I had never even thought about this in my role as mother, cleaner and all the other duties I do without giving much thought to them.  But in my experience with men, I have to say that Keith is correct.  I have never seen a man clean under the basin of the sink and would agree that it would be something I would think that women might think of, but not men.

Now before anyone gets the wrong impression, this was by no means a suggestion that women should stay in the kitchen or at home, quite the opposite.  We were discussing business management and Keith was noting some of the things he appreciates about the way women see the world and what they might consider to be necessary or important in business that a man might not instinctively think about.

And before all you men who might well clean under the basin of the sink send me horrid comments, just bear with me a little longer.

In churning this thought over and over in my mind, many times as a result of cleaning the bathroom, I began to wonder, why this might be an instinctive approach or activity to an every day job for women and not for men.

It is true that women have historically taken on the role of domestic goddess for centuries and there are lots or reason for this, many of which we will not go into now, and that by carrying out such roles probably in itself brought with it a range of knowledge and experience not achieved necessarily in other areas.

I have noticed though, as I am sure many other women have when they might have argued with their male spouses about the smell of their shoes, is that in the main, women have a much keener sense of smell than men do.

This may be as a result of women having the main responsible of bringing up the children; identifying when they are messy and need cleaning and changing, etc. In addition it has been proven scientifically that men require stronger smells and tastes before they can really notice things.  Men prefer sloppy kisses whilst women are equally moved by less sloppy kisses, anyway I digress.  So if cleanliness were left entirely to men the home would be in a terrible condition before it would be noticed.  And the point being that because of our sensitivity in the area of smell and mess, women cannot just ignore things, so are more prone to do something about it more quickly.

So this has given women a different prospective on the areas of the house that might well need to be cleaned, long before germs and bacteria run riot, and so that children and indeed the entire household remain safe.  However, the responsibility for the overall management of the household and the family is and should be a joint one.

There are many other areas of life and the management of the home and family that women have and continue to excel in, these are not always recognised as management skills but most definitely are, and bring a different, important and necessary perspective to management and business.

For example, women have learnt to read the emotions, body language, motivation, mood and activities of others and can usually also identify ways to respond.  An important series of skills that  work to keep families together, make individual members feel valued and a part of the whole and to know that their individual needs will be responded to even if not entirely met.

Women are very skilled at bringing people together in groups and networks; identifying the strengths, skills and resources individuals have to share for the benefit of the whole and getting each to share these.  When women are allowed to be themselves, and not necessarily always change their behaviour and responses to those of the opposite sex, they can bring their unique perspective to the benefit of the whole.

I am not saying that men are not capable of these things, but women, due to their view, what has been taught to them and have passed down from their mothers and to their children by them (particular to their female children), have practiced and taught skills that are even more necessary today, when the business world is in need of those who can hear and support the needs of the individual as well as the whole in order to create better businesses and society.  Women are also good at passing on the sense of duty and responsibility to others; all absolute ‘must haves’ for any effective manager and leader.

In light of the latest CMI survey and report on gender and pay equality, I believe that we must encourage more women to take up positions at high levels in the business and corporate world.  I feel that not to allow this different perspective to be shared at all levels in the work place is a huge and detrimental loss to society.  Women’s perspective should be accepted and received as equal, valid and important to society and business.  Not to do so is to ignore half of the skills that have made the human race successful.

So every time I clean my bathroom and in particular underneath the basin of the sink, I remember Keith’s comment.  It reminds me that my approach, perspective and view on the world and management is very important and valid; it reassures me that there are many of my male counterparts that appreciate the different perspective and approach that we women bring the workplace and the world at large; and it reminds me that I have a responsibility to share all that I have to bring.

Thank you Keith, we need more like you.

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