Freeing up the Sales Force for Selling

Most sales reps spend less than half of their time actually selling. Here's how companies can reshape sales operations to allow them to focus on their real job.

Here's a situation that may sound familiar. "Inside" sales reps at a global manufacturer spent 75 percent of their time away from the phones — pushing through stalled deals, scurrying for data to answer questions from customers, and cobbling together one-off proposals for even the simplest requests.

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Top Executives Need Feedback

And here's how they can get it

By the time you become a senior executive, you have no doubt honed a set of skills and talents that enable you to be effective in your job. To help you get to this point, you likely had coaches and mentors who closely monitored your progress, prodded you to develop your talents, and, when necessary, confronted you with criticisms that you may not have wanted to hear but needed to hear in order to continue your upward path.

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Giving Up Power can Boost Performance and Profits

• Conventional leadership and management approaches reflecting an organisational culture based on rules, command and control.
• When a community-based culture is implemented, employees are intrinsically motivated to perform well.
• Leaders who can adapt their approach to meet the needs of the team help create motivation and gain commitment from their people.

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September 2011

Catching the Next Wave

Nothing continues forever, even success!  The Sigmoid Curve demonstrates how the factors that have created your success in the past are not be the factors that guarantee your success in the future.

The time to plan the next phase of personal and/or organizational growth is when you are at the height of your success, don't wait until you have peaked and then wonder why others have moved have left you behind.  Read more…


Preventing Job Burnout in Your Organisation

Professor Maslach discusses what can be done about job burnout and its high costs, both to the employee and the organisation. She suggests a roadmap for effective intervention strategies that turn the syndromes of exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectiveness into energy, involvement and achievement.   Read more…


Values & Commitment

In their book on values-based leadership, The Leadership Challenge, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner highlight their research into the relationship between personal and organisational values clarity and the impact on people's commitment to the organisation. The results of their research challenges the popular process many organisations adopt when working with values and clearly indicates the difference personal values clarity makes to people's levels of commitment.   Read more...

August 2011

How do we make training stick? 

In this article Donald Taylor explores how formal classroom training (the 10%) can deliver more impact with on job support (70%).  It provides a useful insight on how to apply the 10/20/70 model of learning.  Read more…

Top ten smart apps for learning and development professionals

James McLuckie of Eden Tree provides a  list of must-have smartphone apps for learning and development professionals.  Read more…

Questions to sharpen your business strategy

Successful business strategy lies not in having all the right answers, but rather in asking the right questions, says Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons. In an excerpt from his new book, Seven Strategy Questions, Simons explains how posing these questions can help managers make smart choices. Key concepts include:

• Asking simple questions enables business teams to focus on key issues instead of on the distracting information that can obfuscate clear thinking.
• A successful business strategy requires an ongoing, face-to-face debate, which a manager can facilitate by posing the right questions to the team.
• Each of the key questions are the root of an "information imperative"—a particular topic or process that a manager must master in order to implement a strategy successfully.

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July 2011 

Keep it simple

The manager's job is to raise revenues, reduce costs, and improve quality. In an increasingly complex world, where theories of management get more complex and implementing becomes an even greater challenge, it is worth going back to the fundamentals of management and make sure you do the basics well..  Read more…


Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence has become increasingly popular as a measure for identifying potentially effective leaders, and as a tool for developing effective leadership skills. Despite this popularity, however, there is little empirical research that substantiates the efficacy of emotional intelligence in these areas. The aim of the present paper was to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and effective leadership.

Emotional intelligence as assessed by a modified version of the Trait Met a Mood Scale in 43 participants employed in management roles. Effective leaders were identified as those who displayed a transformational rather than transactional leadership style as measured by the multifactor leadership questionnaire. Emotional intelligence correlated with several components of transformational leadership suggesting that it may be an important component of effective leadership. In particular emotional intelligence may account for how effective leaders monitor and respond to subordinates and make them feel at work.  Read more…


Is courage in the workplace now 'coming of age'?

The turbulence of the marketplace, new opportunities constantly emerging, the uncertainty about the future, the lack of job security, the need for greater flexibility and creativity all indicates that predictability is history.

The implications for organisations and its employees is that increasingly, those organisations which are best able to tap into their talent pool and engage most effectively with their employees will be those which are best prepared to prosper through their ability to effectively respond to changes as well as having the resourcefulness to create new opportunities.  Read more…

June 2011 

Management to Leadership 

The distinction between management and leadership has arisen because of the difference between management which focuses on the issues of the day and requires efficient organisation and implementation, whereas leadership requires a focus on the future and involves motivation, vision and managing change.  Read more…

How to make meetings work for you

Done well, meetings can instigate change, contribute to success and build relationships, but in order to achieve this, meetings need to make optimal use of everyone's time.

Fortunately, running a meeting well is a skill which can be learnt and improved upon with experience. Following these simple guidelines will help to ensure that your meetings are focused, well run, attended and received. Read more…

The future of learning at work

Donald H Taylor suggests four things learning and development must do to remain relevant in today's changing world of work. Read more…

May 2011 

Communicating across the generations 

How well do you manage to communicate across the generations? Often find that they just don't hear you, even though you have explained it really clearly? Here are seven tips to help cross the divide and ensure they hear you. Read more…

Presentations that Stick

You have all heard presentations that really 'stick'. Chip Heath, a professor at the Stanford School of Business, who has investigated why some communications succeed and why others fail, explains how you can make your ideas 'stick' when talking with an audience or your team. Here are seven tips to help cross the divide and ensure they hear you.

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April 2011

Three steps to building a better senior team

When a top team fails to function, it can paralyze a whole company. This article identifies three key things to focus senior teams and ensure they are effective in leading an division or organisation. Read more...

Measuring the Contribution of Employees

Financial performance - observed through balance sheets, cash flow reports and income statements is, and always will be, the principal measure for evaluating a company's performance, but what happens when a company chooses to measure the profit it makes per employee. We know very talented people make significantly greater contributions than a low performing employee so can their contribution be quantified? Read more...

Creativity and innovation create a market advantage.

Doing what you've always done will ensure you get what you've always got. This articles looks at ways to develop creativity and innovation that will generate breakthroughs that stimulate growth and performance. Read more…

March 2011

Three steps to building a better senior team

When a top team fails to function, it can paralyze a whole company. This article identifies three key things to focus senior teams and ensure they are effective in leading an division or organisation. Read more...

Measuring the Contribution of Employees

Financial performance - observed through balance sheets, cash flow reports and income statements is, and always will be, the principal measure for evaluating a company's performance, but what happens when a company chooses to measure the profit it makes per employee. We know very talented people make significantly greater contributions than a low performing employee so can their contribution be quantified? Read more...

Creativity and innovation create a market advantage.

Doing what you've always done will ensure you get what you've always got. This articles looks at ways to develop creativity and innovation that will generate breakthroughs that stimulate growth and performance. Read more…

February 2011

Seven Questions to Focus Your Business Strategy

To stay ahead of the competition, you must translate your competitive strategy into day-to-day actions that will enable your company to win in the market.  Harvard Business School professor, Robert Simons sets out seven key questions you must be asking yourself as you look towards the future and sharpen your business strategy.   Read more...

Improve your LQ [Leadership Quotient]

You can find people in leadership roles almost everywhere you look. However, simply having the responsibilities of a leader doesn't necessarily make someone a leader. Assess your own leadership strengths and identify things that will improve your leadership skills.   Take the test now.

Business Acumen – The new focus for company learning

For many, business acumen is a missing leadership competency. Managers without business acumen don’t understand how to interpret financial statements as well as they should and don’t know how profits and losses interact with the company’s balance sheet. They lack an in-depth understanding about the interrelatedness of their decisions and the profitability of the company.  Developing business acumen is becoming a new focus in workplace learning.  Read more...

January 2011

Learning and Development 2020 - A Guide for the Next Decade by Martyn Sloman

This article challenges L&D professionals to embrace a new role for L&D that begin with an understanding of the way a Company delivers value for its stakeholders. L&D is about developing the individual and organisational capability that improves customer value... read more

Five Ways CFOs can make cost cuts stick

To get cost-management initiatives to stick and deliver lasting value, companies should focus on why cost management is important, connect cost management to strategy, and treat cost reductions as an ongoing exercise... read more