by Kate Mercer | Jan 14, 2019 | Leadership
By managing individual team members’ expectations, and keeping a bird’s eye view of the process, you’ll be able to juggle different levels of accountability in your team and achieve the targets and results you want. Watch out, though, as it all starts with you… What...
by Kate Mercer | Oct 15, 2018 | Leadership
The world is more interconnected than ever before, so you’d think that direct communication would be a skill we’d become adept at from an early age. Not so, it seems. Many people seem to have missed learning or actively avoided learning it: the skill of making a...
by Kate Mercer | Aug 28, 2018 | Organisation Culture
As a contributing editor to inc.com, Jeff Haden has recently published an article entitled ‘A Study of 600,000 People Shows the Secret to Managing Millennials Is to Quit Thinking of Them as Millennials’. It’s a timely and essential read, and we...
by Kate Mercer | Apr 5, 2018 | Organisation Culture, Team Development
Take a look at job descriptions in almost any organisation. You’ll find they’re broad statements of areas of responsibility or lists of activities. Job descriptions like this are concerned with activity rather than output, and fuel the culture of ‘hard work’ and long...
by Kate Mercer | Jan 22, 2018 | Leadership, Organisation Culture
In a thought-provoking post from Neil Crofts, he looks at the effect of short-term planning on the way we live and work, and whether we should be challenging our notion of this. Most of us when we are young find it difficult to think more than a short time ahead. As...
by Amanda Baines | Nov 14, 2017 | Organisation Culture
We suggested recently that it might be a good time for you to take a long hard look at your organisation’s bonus scheme. Instead of motivating, engaging and rewarding staff for great performance and accountability, the bonus culture can get in the way, encouraging a...
by Kate Mercer | Oct 24, 2017 | Organisation Culture
In my last article I wrote about the trap of over-engineering your organisation as it grows, in the mistaken assumption that people and systems designed for third generation (3G) organisations will automatically be right for your larger 2G organisation. Equally...
by Kate Mercer | Oct 12, 2017 | Leadership
Do you have a tendency to fall back on professional skills – whether that’s data collection, analysis, re-engineering – to manage your growing organisation? Kate Mercer explains that instead you’ll need a whole new range of more ambiguous and...
by Kate Mercer | Oct 5, 2017 | Leadership
CEOs can cling to the myth, particularly in professional service firms, that they can continue to focus on their specialist work and a full client load. Someone needs to manage the place, so how do you make your organisation work when you’ve reached that...
by Kate Mercer | Sep 5, 2017 | Team Development
The best way to train your staff to really work as a team, so you’re tackling the real issues you have as a leader. Kate Mercer explains… Who do you call if a pipe is leaking? A plumber, right? You don’t call an electrician. And when he turns up, you don’t...
