Managing Work while Having a Personal Crisis

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We always try very hard not to bring our personal life to the office, but sometimes it just impossible. Unfortunately, we have to deal with difficulties that occur in our personal lives even at times when we have a lot of office work. Divorces, death in the family, health or personal crises make us re-evaluate […]

Launching behaviours – looking for an interactive activity

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Hi, I have around 1 hour at our next team meeting to launch our new behaviour framework – its already been talked about and shared but this is an experiential session to get everyone involed with the behaviours to ensure they understand them and ultimately recognise why we need them. I am on right after lunch […]

The psychology of inspiring leaders

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Many believe that great leaders of their time were born and not made. But are we really sure the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Gandhi and Winston Churchill to name a few, are examples of those were born to be powerful or did they apply their innate intelligence, confidence and judgement to lead from the front? […]

Soft Skills are not soft.

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I once had someone suggest to me that I would not be capable of working amongst the “brutality” of business life.  I listened with great interest as there might have been some truth in what they were saying.  Upon extensive reflection, I considered what might be behind their comment, as it intrigued me enormously.  It intrigued […]

The value of contrast

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What if changing one thing in your message could impact four crucial purchase intent-related actions? Would you be interested? I’m here to tell you that you can do just that. New research shows that using one simple messaging technique can increase your influence on buying decisions by a statistically significant margin. Here’s how I reached […]

Infographic: Emotional IQ and you

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Emotional intelligence (EI) is a person’s ability to understand emotions in themselves and others. EI is quickly becoming a more preferred metric than IQ for evaluating employee credentials. It is believed that up to 58% of the variations in personal success factors can be attributed to emotional intelligence. Better work relationships are seen more frequently […]

How to ensure your public speaking is pitch-perfect

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Claire Rowland gives us public speaking tips from the perspective of a training venue.  Although skills such as management, salesmanship and innovation are all perceived as key to the success of businesses and their employees, a similarly important skill, public speaking, is less developed within the UK workforce, with many employees lacking confidence. It’s easy […]

How to keep your ‘passives’ engaged

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With the economy on the up and a dynamic recruitment marketplace in position, employees soon realise they can be more selective about who pays their salary. Gary Cattermole offers his advice on how to avoid losing the staff you’d like to keep. Normally we’re always talking about retaining top talent, but with the recruitment market […]

Why you can’t hire your way around the soft skills gap

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Thinking you can cut corner when recruiting for soft skills competencies? Think again, says Bruce Tulgan. In fields, especially the STEM fields – where significant education and credentials are the very threshold criteria for most jobs, supply is far below demand. That puts most STEM field employers squarely in the middle of the technical skill […]

UK businesses lose out because of lack of cultural awareness

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Gary Muddyman, CEO of global translation company, Conversis, and Bill Rivers, Executive Director at the Joint National Committee for Languages talk about how British businesses could be losing business to overseas competitors because of a lack of foreign language skills and cultural awareness amongst their staff. According to new research by Conversis, a quarter say […]

The 5 Ps of Vocal Impact in Presentations

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When delivering a presentation, voice projection is essential. The 5 P's is a way of maximising all the vocal aspects. P ower – Too loud a voice can be annoying particularly for those at the front of the audience – Too quiet can say that the Presenter lacks confidence and others at the back can't […]

Insight: A quarter of UK workers suffer from uninspiring managers

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As post summer holiday blues sets in as we return to our desks from breaks away, nearly a quarter (24%) of the UK workforce – 7.2m – are feeling the effects of uninspiring leaders in the workplace, according to new research by Investors in People, the standard for people management. Despite the importance of leading from the front, over […]

The four golden rules of persuasive presentations

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Paul Carroll gives us some simple presentation tips. When it comes to persuading your audience while delivering a training presentation or pitching to a client, there are really only four golden rules – but what they lack in quantity they make up for in importance: Make sense and be brief You may remember the saying […]

The 12 most important missing soft skills

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Bruce Tulgan identifies the top 12 missing soft skills among today’s young talent, pulled from research done by his consultation firm, RainmakerThinking, Inc. So many business leaders and managers at all levels fall for the myth that soft skills are 'nice to have' rather than 'must have' – simply a luxury they cannot afford to […]

Storytelling: Beyond the buzzword pt2

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Fiona Quigley concludes her piece on why telling stories is such an effective part of corporate learning strategy. Why do people engage with a story? Storytelling is essentially about making meaning. As we listen to or read others’ stories, we integrate our own experience by trying to connect the stories to something we already know. […]

Storytelling: Beyond the buzzword

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Fiona Quigley explains why telling stories is such an effective part of corporate learning strategy. So we’ve all been telling stories for ages and ages – it’s part of the human condition, right? It is, and storytelling as a ‘thing’ has become popularised in all areas of society and in business. In the last few years, […]

Email Frenzy – Professional email etiquette

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“I know that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant” RICHARD NIXON According to the Radicati Group an estimated 183 billion emails are sent every day. That’s around 2 million emails every second sent by 1.2 billion email Users! […]

11 top tips for good coaching

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The sports world would never be without their top coaches, and neither should we. Here Gary Cattermole advises businesses of his top tips to coaching. Preparation is key The coach needs to understand what the business wants to gain from the sessions, as well as what the member of staff wants to gain. It may […]

20 Reasons Why people should join us – a recruitment interviewer’s toolkit

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Starting my human resources career in a supermarket, a wily manage, George, said to me: "Remember, Bryan, if they're any good be a salesman". He was referring to interviewing candidates for jobs in the store. The supermarket was based in a rough area of London where a couple of C.S.E. s was applauded. High labour […]

Five communication errors we all make

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Sometimes to solve a problem it's just a simple matter of good communication. Paul Russell gives us a quick guide to communicating well.  Most of us consider ourselves great communicators. After all we communicate all day long through email, telephone, social media channels and blogs – we live in the communications age, don’t we? But did you […]