What we're thinking

October 10 sees World Mental Health Day, which aims to boost awareness of mental health, specifically advocacy against stigma through education and awareness-raising. This year the focus of WMHDAY is on ‘Young People and Mental Health in a Changing World’ – you can read the full report here. WMHDAY defines ‘positive mental health’ as the ‘ability… Read more

I’ve been delivering Zoomly’s ‘How to motivate people’ workshop quite a bit lately and it often strikes me how some participants feel powerless to deal with demotivation in those they manage. First, I qualify the workshop title: ‘motivate’ actually isn’t something we do to people – it’s more about what can do for people. So… Read more

‘Onboarding’, ‘Induction’, ‘new starter journey’, or simply ‘welcome’ – different employers have different labels. So if any of the above grated with you, sorry – I just went with the labels that many of Zoomly’s clients seem to be using right now. Who am I to offer tips on induction? Well, as someone who supports… Read more

Here in the UK, April sees the beginning of a new financial year, specifically for our personal finances and tax payments. Financial advice websites and ‘personal money’ pages of newspapers are full of advice about how we should best stash our cash to make sure we take advantage of tax breaks to save. ‘Huh. Some… Read more

  Right at the start of Zoomly’s ‘How to influence and persuade’ workshop, we discuss the importance of influencing for mutual benefit. If that’s your goal, chances are you won’t sink to using manipulation, which is a concern people naturally have about this topic. The simple way to decide if someone’s influencing or manipulating is… Read more

What’s stopping you from delegating? This is something we deal with right at the start in Zoomly’s ‘How to delegate effectively’ workshop. For example, people can feel very uneasy about the whole idea of asking someone to take on a task and get it done. Typical objections that I’ve heard include: “They’ll think I’m arrogant”… Read more

Whenever I lead Zoomly’s ‘How to coach your people’ workshop, there are a few things we need to clear up early on. For starters, what coaching is – and isn’t (for example, mentoring, counselling, consulting to name a few). After that, a perfectly reasonable question always comes up: When on earth am I supposed to… Read more

After Action Reviews (sometimes referred to as AARs) have their origins in the United States military. Tools and techniques that improve team performance often have a military provenance. An advantage of techniques with military origins is that they’ve been tried and tested when the stakes were very high. The idea is that after the ‘action’,… Read more

Each year, Investors in People (IiP) publish their ‘Job exodus trends’. This does what it says on the tin: how many people are thinking of leaving their jobs in the coming year – and why? At the end of 2017 IiP polled 2000 people. Remember, 2017 saw the lowest UK unemployment levels since 1975 (4.3%… Read more

Here’s a Christmas tree made from business jargon, HR-speak and general nonsense that I’ve collected throughout 2017. Some phrases, such as ‘end of play’ may not be new – but they’re still in use. Other words and phrases are new – at least to my eyes and ears. So what? Here’s a little plea: can… Read more