Cutting costs within Financial Services
What do you do when you want to pay for a product? Use your digital wallet? Use your smartwatch? Dig into your wallet for your debit or credit card? Financial services is changing; with the aggressive entry of Fintech, incumbents are being challenged to keep up. As customers, we are no longer loyal to one […]
Making change happen, and making it stick
We define Project Management as the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to achieve agreed deliverables. In isolation, a successful project would simply look like the completion of a said set of tasks (within schedules and budget of course!) Change and Project Management are linked as they usually have a mutual […]
How ‘Playbooks’ can score Business Success…
Some of you may be watching the Rugby World Cup, naturally hoping your team has prepared itself for the win in Japan. “In business as in sports, it pays to be prepared” – sports teams use a set of ‘plays’ or game tactics to garner team success. Arguably, a ‘playbook’ is similar to a business […]
Change in a changing world
We are surrounded by change; change may arrive as a gentle breeze or as a violent hurricane and may be planned or unplanned. Today the UK is going through a major change in the form of Brexit and we are potentially going to witness more and bigger changes in a matter of weeks than we […]
The Power of Visualisation
“A picture tells a thousand words”. Hear this phrase and your mind may jump to your favourite piece of art, or perhaps a holiday photo perfectly capturing a moment in time. Unless you work in a creative industry, work probably doesn’t spring immediately to mind. But how often in your working life have you sat […]
A disengaged employee? Perhaps they’ve outgrown their role…
Key to the role of being a manager is to get work done through other people. To do this effectively, managers should look at building their team and developing the individuals within it. Leadership is about empowering your team; by giving them opportunities to grow, developing their skillset and ensuring each member becomes a reliable […]
To plan or not to plan – that is the question
We operate in many organisations around the world and spend considerable time working with managers in creating robust plans which they can manage their teams against. Planning is often seen as being too difficult with too many variables which, in their eyes, mean that it is not worth the effort and, in any case, because […]
How Winnie the Pooh can mentor us to be better Managers…
What if I told you that many of you have already read a book that (read in a specific context) can teach you a lot about the importance of value-focus in becoming an effective Manager. In this productivity-driven world, Managers often fall foul of developing targets and performance measures, without the necessary focus on being […]
“Quick, look busy!”
A recent article published on the BBC really caught my eye. Something I had witnessed consistently during my career as a management consultant but had not had the lexicon (or the data) to articulate. The article focused on a productivity study by Ashridge at Hult International Business School of employees in a wide range of […]
The importance of developing your team as part of a Manager’s responsibilities
Is your team just running? Or are you proactively developing their skills and knowledge to help them run faster? Whether you are leading your team to a rugby world cup final, or taking your business to the next level, the fundamentals of management are the same – directing individual accomplishments towards organisational objectives, generating teamwork […]
