Smugglers and Skywalkers: The Life Cycle of Successful Teams What’s been your biggest achievement today? Have you by any chance destroyed a Death Star, brought down an Empire, and become a fully-fledged Jedi, all while rescuing a Princess and redeeming one of the universe’s most feared evil enforcers, in only one day? If you [...]
Starting with the Marshmallow: The Key to Successful Teamwork Here’s a challenge for you: find 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1 metre of tape, 1 metre of string and a marshmallow, and put them all together to make the tallest free-standing structure you can in 18 minutes. Sound interesting? Well, if you do – and [...]
5 Tasty Ingredients for a Stupendous Employee Engagement Sandwich Employees are the bread and butter of successful organisations. But we all know you can’t make a sandwich out of just bread and butter. The perfect sandwich needs a few ingredients - at least some sort of filling, and maybe even a smidgen of sauce. [...]
New year, new me…: how can we cut back on negativity? Have you made a New Year’s Resolution this year? Perhaps you’ve decided to eat less, or cut some pesky food item out of your diet altogether. Maybe you’ve told yourself to exercise more. Or you might have resolved to spend less time stressing [...]
Fun and games: is Gamification the new key to professional development? So Christmas is fast approaching, festive spirit is in the air, and soon there’ll be presents littering the bedrooms of excited children everywhere. Toys and games still take top spot on their Christmas lists – who wants socks? – but research suggests that [...]
Culture, Creativity… and Coffee? Creating a Coffee Shop Culture There’s a smorgasbord of things leaders can do to infuse their organisations with a positive, creative, productive culture. Common suggestions include formulating a strong, solid vision and values to inspire and motivate employees; organising regular team social events, even just a simple get-together over lunch; [...]
Corporate culture – a story for success? If half your employees suddenly decided to quit their jobs simultaneously, and with no warning, how would you feel? You probably wouldn’t be the happiest bunny in the burrow, and you’d likely feel pretty betrayed too. After all, you gave those people a job, salary, and development [...]
Growing concerns: how can managers provide the right development opportunities? It goes without saying that the business environment has undergone massive changes in recent years. Globalisation, erratic economic fluctuation and technological development are altering our workplaces beyond all recognition. Organisations are becoming less hierarchical; they’re traversing a turbulent tide of continuous transformation; and they’re having [...]
Bore-Outs in the workplace: how can we prevent them? Last July, the news broke that Frederic Desnard – an ex-manager for French perfume company Interparfums – was suing his ex-employer for a whopping €360,000 for rendering him ‘mis au placard’ – essentially bored stiff while at work. Desnard described how his work was so [...]
Resistance isn’t futile: people resist change for good reason 70% of change initiatives fail[i]. If you’ve had any experience of organisational change, you’ve probably already come across this infamous statistic. It’s enough to make change leaders everywhere quake in their boots – particularly since change is becoming a frequent feature of today’s business world. [...]