Archives for February 2008

PMN at Hamara Healthy Living Centre

February 29, 2008 by admin

The Progressive Managers’ Network is coming to South Leeds, in partnership with the Hamara Healthy Living Centre.

Would you like to learn a management tool that is guaranteed to:

Save you time
Increase levels of trust in your team
Improve communication
Make you a noticeably better manager
Get more done – more quickly
Accelerate the professional development of your team, and
Reduce the pain of performance reviews?

The launch event, Brilliant 121s, which will be free of charge is to be held on April 29th with other dates planned as follows:

28th May – Giving and Getting Great Feedback NB -date changed from 27th

24th June – Practical Coaching for Progressive Managers

15th July – Effective Delegation

At the event you will get a free gift to help improve your management worth more than £25.

Places are strictly limited so please book your place online here. Or call me for more information on 0113 2167782.

The first event is free of charge.

Subsequent events will be charges at £120 per session. We will be offering a limited number of reduced price places at just £20 per session. Please get in touch and make your case to secure a reduced cost place.

If you know of a manager who might be interested please forward them a link to this page.

The point of the excercise?

February 28, 2008 by admin

The point of the exercise is to do work you care about with people that matter.

Managers who can help employees find the ‘space’ to do work that they care about with people that matter will soon find themselves recognised as an outstanding leader of a high performing team.

Do you know what your team members care about – really?
Do they get to work on those things?
What are the success stories that show that your organisation and its people (still) matter?
What can you do to make your company ‘matter’ more?

Wonderful Advice for the Would Be Entrepreneur

February 26, 2008 by admin

Wally Bock is one of Americas top management coaches. To celebrate National Entrepreneurship week in the US and his 25th anniversary in business he has been reflecting on what advice he would give to people thinking of starting a business now.

His advice includes the following:

If you’re thinking about starting a business today, listen. It will always be hard. It will never be the right time. You will never know enough. And you are certain to have at least one big, bad surprise along the way.
Hook up with people who can fill in your gaps and give you good advice. Learn the basics of business.
I suggest that you acquire a rudimentary knowledge of bookkeeping. It will help you understand, in your bones, that to make Profit go up, either Expenses have to go down or Revenue has got to go up.
Cash flow is king. You can make a profit and still be in trouble if your cash flow is bad.
No marketing, no money. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is. It won’t sell itself.
You have to be willing to be accountable for everything. For some people that creates awesome stress. Others use it as a source of energy.

It all sounds pretty spot on to me – and not a word about a business plan! I would especially endorse the recommendation about hooking up with people who can fill your gaps. Recognise your strengths and play to them. Recruit others who love to do the stuff that you hate.

The best entrepreneurs, who start the most successful businesses, are builders of great teams.

You can read his full article here.

Problems With Partnerships

February 25, 2008 by admin

Fellow Leeds blogger Todd Hannula has shared some of his concerns about ‘partnership’ over at his Social Catalyst blog which prompted me to comment. I think this matters because so often I see partnerships of competent, mature and capable organisations that in ‘partnership’ become the corporate equivalent of a three year old having a temper tantrum in a sweet shop.

I work with a chief executive who has a plaque in his (home) office that says ‘Partnership: the temporary suspension of mutual loathing in pursuit of funding’. How true in many cases!
One of the challenges is that partnership is a ‘weasel word’ with many definitions:

a relationship of two or more entities conducting business for mutual benefit
a legal contract entered into by two or more persons in which each agrees to furnish a part of the capital and labour for a business enterprise, and by which each shares a fixed proportion of profits and losses.
The persons bound by such a contract.
A relationship between individuals or groups that is characterised by mutual cooperation and responsibility, as for the achievement of a specified goal: Neighbourhood groups formed a partnership to fight crime.

Then there are different types and levels of partnership:

Self Interested Partnerships – only put in place in pursuit of funding
Mutual Partnership – in pursuit of a single relatively narrow agenda that benefits both parties
Strategic Partnership – characterised by a wider and longer term context and relationship
Shared Destiny Partnership – close to a merger situation where both partners share a single vision and go a long way towards the integration of cultures and systems. All partners face extinction as a consequence of failure.

One of the challenges in making any partnership work is to recognise it for what it is, be up front about it and manage the partnership accordingly. Don’t pretend that a self interested partnership is in fact deeply strategic. And never try to build a strategic partnership based on what you can win in the short term.

Make sure that all partners know exactly what type of partnership they are pursuing as differing expectations can be very damaging.

Support for Entrepreneurs

February 25, 2008 by admin

There really is no shortage of support for people who want to have a go at starting their own business. Just take a look at this website that offers 99 free sources of on-line support for would be entrepreneurs. And while the web is packed full of advice and guidance the real world marketplace is pretty crowded too with advisers, mentors, coaches and trainers all queuing up to offer advice and support.

But how much of this stuff is really useful? For most entrepreneurs the barriers are not intellectual or technical (although often these are presented as excuses for not making things happen ) they are really about self confidence, self belief and a strong conviction that a better reality can really be brought into life.

So a couple of words of advice on choosing and using people and resources to help you with your entrepreneurial dreams:

Make sure that they really are interested in helping you do what is best for you – including walking away from entrepreneurship as it is certainly not right for everybody.

Make sure that they are not under the influence of external goals and targets to encourage people into entrepreneurship. If they are employed by a project that has to encourage entrepreneurship to get funding then make sure that they put your best interests before the outputs of the project.

And finally:

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Buddha

But what if I am employed to encourage people into enterprise and entrepreneurship?

Always practice from a client centred (rather than a policy centred) perspective. ie make sure that you use your knowledge and skills to help your client to do what is best for them given a range of options available to them – entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, employment, work experience, skills training etc.

It is almost certain that in fact the project that you work on is designed to develop an ‘enterprise culture’ and the best way to do this is to help entrepreneurs to go into entrepreneurship having fully considered all other options. Sure a number will decide that there are other ways to achieve what matters most to them – and many of the people you work with will put their enterprise dream ‘on hold’. Once you start helping people to make really informed decisions based on their own self interest and an objective analysis of the pros and cons of enterprise not only will the start-up rates improve but so too will the survival rates for small business. And this is the metric that really matters in building an enterprise culture.