Are you teaching your people to land before you expect them to jump?

Imagine this…

… you’ve volunteered to do a parachute jump. It’s for charity, so it’s all in a good cause.

You turn up on the day, terrified but rationalising that many people do this, it will be fine.

You get a short briefing, watch a safety video and a quick demonstration of how to land, then one of the instructors throws you your chute and says, off you go, get on the plane!

What are you thinking?

Besides the colourful language in your head (or maybe you’re even saying things out loud!) I imagine you’re probably thinking, “is that it? Where’s my training? What if my chute doesn’t open? How do I land when…? Where’s my practice jump? I wanted to have a go at jumping from a reasonable height to test my technique!”;

Undoubtedly you will have loads more questions, and probably a whole host of other thoughts too!

Let’s face it, we only know, and I mean really know, that our people can do what we’ve trained them for when they choose to do the right thing in that moment of truth.

Take the customer service agent that sticks to the rules when the customer just wants that bit of empathy and flexibility.

Take the team member who knows a colleague is stretching the boundaries of acceptability, and they know in their heart of hearts they should say something but choose not to, for fear of repercussion.

Take the new starter who has been trained but still lacks the confidence to take the step and do what is required, only to pause and do nothing for fear of failure.

Brené Brown, author of Dare to Lead, asks how can you expect your people to jump if you don’t teach them how to land first?

On reading this, I realised that this is precisely where ‘What Would You Do?’ fits into someone’s development journey; it creates a safe space where peers can learn to jump and land in a safe space. First, they get to test their theories and assumptions, surface issues and unhelpful thoughts with their colleagues. Then, through sharing experiences, they work together to create a shared pool of meaning and understanding, which prepares them for the ‘jump’ when they handle those moments of truth that define your organisation.

‘What Would You Do?’ is a social learning experience for groups to come together to discuss moments of truth and test and explore how they would handle a given situation. Each session is facilitated, group coaching if you will, where the group calibrate to a shared understanding of what it means to do the right thing and what ‘good’ looks like.

It’s no wonder why this has proved to be an award-winning tool and has served organisations to deliver in four distinct ways:

Embedding new rules and levelling up behaviours

A leading financial services organisation positively moved their cultural needle across four out of five areas, including trust, collaboration, inclusion, and involvement in just three months!

Their regulator tasked them to level up their understanding and application of conduct rules across 1,500 people. We worked with them to create a suite of content that they could use to teach their people to land in a safe space.

The feedback was terrific, with 100% of people who took part (98% of the total workforce were involved in sessions) reporting they felt better able to apply the rules in their job. The feedback from the regulator was very positive too.

Embedding company values to build a stronger organisation

A leading pharmaceutical business engaged with us to embed their new company values across their EMEA region. The goal was to bring the values to life and explore living them in the wide and varied divisions and departments. The solution was customised, aligned to their values, and adopted internally by the learning team to facilitate cross-functional groups.

Again, the feedback was remarkable for both the process, which teaches people how to land, safely exploring assumptions, testing courses of action, and working through potential consequences in the safety backdrop of ‘what if’.

Embedding new skills to prepare the next generation

A top-four, professional services firm adopted ‘What Would You Do?’ for their annual development session. One hundred apprentices were brought together for a day-long, online session purposefully designed to be very interactive. Included in the day was an escape room experience, among many other activities and workshops. ‘What Would You Do?’ was woven into the day to provide a space where apprentices could safely test their knowledge across topics such as business skills, wellbeing, social styles and inclusion.

The feedback was extremely positive; the apprentices really valued the opportunity to discuss and apply their learning in a practical context. In addition, they were able to test and explore, giving them greater confidence going back into the workplace. As a result, the apprentices felt better prepared in their role.

Building knowledge, testing understanding and values-based education to create winning behaviours

A leading sporting body approached us to see how ‘What Would You Do?’ could help elite athletes avoid the daily traps they face with what to eat and drink and how to train. They need to be on constant alert as to what is safe to consume.

How can they be sure of the proper process to follow in any given situation? What are their rights? Both of these challenges are further complicated if they are competing overseas.

Failure to comply or do the right thing can affect themselves and their teammates. For some, there’s the prospect of losing their medal if they make a wrong choice, however unintentional.

The organisation is building on its values-based education programme and want to engage athletes in a new and interactive way. ‘What Would You Do?’ enables athletes to engage with other athletes and explore and test ‘what if’ against typical situations they face all the time. They can test understanding, surface issues, concerns and play out situations against the practical challenges they face.

Every athlete needs to focus as they work towards and prepare for major events without fearing they could fall foul of application of or changes in the rules. They face personal challenges and moments of truth all the time; they may see others testing the boundaries of what is allowed, which brings enormous consequences for the sport and its broader perception.

So, we’ve found four different ways ‘What Would You Do?’ can support organisations to deliver results and engage their people. And each time, we’ve taken the social learning concept and adapted it to meet specific needs with great success. So, how many more might we find? Well, we don’t know, but we’re confident there will be more, and we’re excited about finding them!

‘What Would You Do?’ is about teaching people to land before they step onto the plane for real. It’s about taking knowledge and embedding it through reflective learning. ‘What Would You Do?’ creates psychological safety, which removes the fear when testing understanding, exploring ‘what if’, and assessing the consequences of a given course of action. This means your people are better prepared for the situation when it presents itself.

Discover more at www.wwyd.games

Posted On January 26, 2022 By Ricky Muddimer In Culture, Leadership, Productivity /

It’s time to face the facts – you need to focus on your managers.

How many well-intentioned organisational transformation fads, sorry, projects are you going to embark on before you address the brutal facts that it’s your people who can make the most significant bottom-line impact? And that goes both ways, by the way.

Let’s list a few of those so-called transformation programmes; Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, offshoring, digitalisation, virtualisation, artificial intelligence. All of them start with the best intentions, yet, if McKinsey are to be believed, 70% will have failed to deliver their intended outcomes.

Take the late 90’s and early 2000’s which saw a plethora of large businesses in pursuit of the holy grail of cost reduction offshoring their call centres – only to find that the brand damage was too much to bear. A mass U-turn ensued, and we are still reminded today that our contact centres are UK based!

Every year Boards of Directors are challenged to grow, become leaner and deliver a better yield and rightly so. The problem is they’re so focused on the tangible and the measurable they ignore what’s really important – their people. People are viewed as a cost that can be trimmed in hard times, not the asset that can deliver significant value. People are intangible; they’re unpredictable; they’re amazing and frustrating all at the same time.

“culture eats strategy for breakfast”
Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, and yet despite this erudite insight, we continue to overlook the potential in our people. We give them poorly trained managers who fail to inspire or motivate and to compensate we turn to another fad, another silver bullet destined to fail due to lack of proper involvement and engagement. And so, the vicious circle continues.

The brutal fact is your people need leadership, direction and above all, purpose. Jim Collins shares the importance of purpose in his book, “Good to Great”. He argues you should recruit for fit with your purpose not merely someone who can do the job – this is the first pillar of the ‘good to great’ journey: getting the right people on the bus.

When you consider that your managers are responsible for 80% of your workforce, (yes, 80%!), that’s an awful lot you’re leaving to chance with poorly trained managers! Yet we continue to under-invest in this population: the sheep-dip of knowledge and skills doesn’t work without an embedding strategy or high-quality coaching and mentoring; rendering any development you do a complete waste of time and money. Worse, this lack of proper investment in skills only serves to unwittingly sabotage strategic projects and transformation programmes, so you lose out twice! Worse still you keep repeating these mistakes!

The pandemic has exacerbated things, companies have, understandably, adopted a conservative approach with everything in a holding pattern, waiting to see how the world evolves. It is over a year since the onset of the coronavirus, a year in which managers have been left to fumble their way through without the skills to support their teams remotely.

Yes, things remain unclear, the future uncertain, but the past has taught us that your people are your secret weapon – or your Achilles heel.
You will need to trust them to execute the short-term strategy as you navigate to clearer waters. So, isn’t it time you started to invest properly in your managers and develop the capability you need, and your workforce deserve?

Posted On January 18, 2021 By Ricky Muddimer In Culture, Leadership /

The right mindset for remote managing

I get it: remote working and managing are scary things, and no more so than in times like this. There’s an overarching feeling of uncertainty about the world – it feels as if your work situation changes as often as the news headlines do!

When you’re so used to having direct access to information about how everyone is doing, losing that can give you a sense of being out of control that’s hard to come back from. You can no longer mobilise people into instant meetings, have mini one-on-ones over a coffee, or even catch up at the water cooler.

Despite this, as a manager, it’s important to make sure you have the right mindset for working at home, for the sake of leading your team effectively. You need to be comfortable with the uncertainty around you (or at least appear like you are) as, for the most part, you can’t change that. However, what you can do is create certainty, as much as possible, within the team.

Think to yourself, “What can I control in this situation?” and you’ll find it comes down to two main things: what you need to achieve in the immediate future, and how best you can support the team.

Reduce the usual timeframes you workaround. While three months may have been a reasonable length of time to look ahead previously, we can hardly predict what will be happening in three days now. If you limit your plans to the next day or so, you can have a much more decisive say in how it will turn out, which helps keep your staff focused on getting their jobs done. Focusing on the time frame that you can control will help the team members regain their sense that they are in control of the situation.

One thing to note, though: be prepared to balance the control you have over your team’s work, and the control they have. It’s great to give tasks out, as that helps focus the team and provide direction for the day. But you’ve got to let individuals have a say in what they do and, particularly for remote workers, how they do it. Every time you take control of something that you did not need to, you weaken their sense of control; and that risks increasing their feelings of uncertainty and anxiety.

Everybody’s going to have a different schedule when working from home, and having an overbearing boss demanding they send the finished product to his or her inbox every hour is going to cause unnecessary stress. Trust in your team to get the job done, to help them create their own sense of control.

Take on a mindset that assumes the best of your people. When things go wrong, understand that it is because everybody is feeling a little stressed right now, and this was just a mistake. Do not personalise mistakes, or assume that they are happening because people are not as focused as they would have been in the office. Just because you cannot see the work being done anymore does not mean that they are not working. Let’s face it, the team has managed to carry on working when you were in a meeting or popped to the loo; they will also be working even though they are not at their usual desk.

Be curious about your team. Use this time to get to know them a little better, so that if things do go wrong or off-schedule, you can identify if they’re struggling with working remotely. Previously they will have relied on close colleagues for support, so now’s the time to reach out for yourself. There’s probably something you could be doing to make their lives and work easier! Even if there isn’t, they will appreciate knowing that you care.

Having the right the mindset about how we work together is an essential key for success as a remote manager. If you can bring control back to your immediate surroundings, and make a conscious effort to see the best in your people, you’ll be one step closer to nailing working from home.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Posted On March 23, 2020 By Ricky Muddimer In Leadership, Productivity /

Showcasing WWYD at the Festival of Work

We are looking forward to attending the Festival of Work, a fantastic new event run by the CIPD, and showcasing our game-based learning resource What Would You Do? (WWYD).

Running in London on June 12 and 13, the Festival of Work combines the CIPD’s Learning and Development and HR Software and Recruitment shows, with an added element focusing on the future of work.

It should be an informative and inspiring event for HR and L&D professionals – and we’re hoping some of them might like to drop by our stand and try out What Would You Do?

Based on concepts of peer-assisted learning and psychological safety, the game aims to prepare managers for potential workplace situations before they occur in reality.

We’re firm believers in the power of game-based learning, and we’ve witnessed the benefits for ourselves while introducing What Would You Do? to L&D practitioners.

So this blog takes a look at the reasons why game-based learning is so effective in helping to solve business and management issues. Read on to find out more.

Why use game-based learning?

It unlocks latent tacit knowledge and skills

All employees have knowledge that’s almost never utilised. Game-based learning can unearth this hidden potential by bringing people together to discuss everyday scenarios, and share knowledge and insights.

It brings learning to life

Fed up with not getting ROI from your training investment? When learning lacks practical application, it fails to stick. Gamification brings teams together to discuss how the theory they’ve learnt in the classroom would work in practice, test meaning and find a solution to common issues.

It removes friction and improves collaboration

Gamification makes learning social, which improves collaboration, communication and team work. It helps to break down internal friction and barriers by increasing awareness of peers’ roles, ideas, perceptions and experience.

It removes silos and presents the bigger picture

Specialised teams (silos) can be susceptible to a lack of communication, an insular perspective and unhealthy internal politics. Game-based learning brings people together from different teams, increasing collaboration and communication, creating continuity, and helping individuals see issues from a wider viewpoint.

It creates psychological safety

Gamification creates a safe environment for players to share thoughts and ideas, and to discuss and debate issues in the interest of playing the game. This means players can be more open, communicative and creative without fear of failure.

It’s engaging and fun!

Traditional training can be uninspiring and fail to resonate with learners. Instead, when people focus on a game, they are so engaged, they don’t even realise they are learning!

Find out more about our game-based learning tool What Would You Do? by visiting stand F11 at the Festival of Work on June 12th and 13^th at Olympia London.

Or click here to read more.

Posted On June 11, 2019 By Ricky Muddimer In Continuous Improvement, Leadership /

We got a Bronze at the Learning Awards!

Thinking Focus directors Ricky and Rob had a fantastic evening at the Learning Awards 2019, and were over the moon to pick up a Bronze award in the Start-Up Learning Provider of the Year category!

We are so proud to have been recognised alongside some of the very best L&D practitioners in the UK. Ed Monk, the CEO of the Learning Performance Institute, which runs the awards, said they’d received over 800 entries in total – so just to get to the shortlist means we were in the top 10 per cent!

Well done to all the finalists, and we would particularly like to congratulate VirtualSpeech, who won our category, and LearnBox, who scooped the Silver award.

Ricky said: “To have been nominated in such a competitive category is great recognition for what we have achieved in such a short space of time. We have a solid platform on which to build and grow our business in the future, so look out for new products and development soon.

“In less than three years, we have won 50 new clients, worked on assignments in 13 countries and across 28 sectors, and worked with well over 2,000 people. We’ve grown our team, produced a book and created a new L&D resource, the gamified learning product for managers called What Would You Do?, and a step-by-step process blueprint for developing team, department or organisational strategy – known as the ‘Strategy Wall’.”

The Learning Awards recognises and celebrates outstanding examples of high standards, best practice, innovation and excellence in the corporate L&D sphere. The glittering awards ceremony on February 7^th took place at the prestigious Dorchester Hotel in London’s Park Lane and was attended by around 400 guests representing organisations from across the world.

Host for the evening, BBC star Claudia Winkleman, introduced the Start-Up category by saying: “This award is for organisations under three years old who have already made a significant impact on the sector. So you truly are amazing to be in this group.”

Ricky said: “Being shortlisted for this award has given us a great start to a year in which we’ll be developing our business further and rolling out What Would You Do? and the Strategy Wall. All of which ultimately leads to what, for us, is the biggest buzz of all: seeing the impact of our work and hearing our clients report fantastic results.”

He added: “Thank you to all those who have helped, inspired and supported us: We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Posted On February 8, 2019 By Ricky Muddimer In Uncategorized /

Improving workplace productivity, step 3: The cost of interference

If I told you that you were only performing at 60% of you, would you want to do something about it?

Once you got past the emotional reaction of feeling criticised (“Who is this guy?”, “Who is he to challenge me?”), it is likely you will feel the need to justify yourself. You’ll probably point out how hard you and your team are working and highlight your performance versus your targets and KPIs.

But this is not about targets and KPIs, this is about potential.

It is not my intent to criticise; I am instead challenging the way you see the world. I see it in every client we work with, and it sits at the heart of our Thinking Focus belief statement:

We believe that people, teams and business units underperform, not because they want to, not because they mean to, but because they can’t get out of their own way!

Every day you and your people face challenges and constraints, either self-imposed, real or perceived. Your people face systems and processes designed with the best intent yet which fail to empower them to deliver greatness, forcing compliance and restricting innovation and creativity, all in the name of consistency. Well, guess what: the only consistency is your people consistently underperforming and not reaching their potential!

In over a decade of working with clients across the world, I and my colleagues at Thinking Focus have noticed the startling reality that, when asked, people in all businesses state that ‘interference’ (the stuff that gets in our way) amounts to an average 40%. Yes, 40%! Which means that, if this is true, people are performing at an average of just 60%!

While I accept that this observation is hardly scientific, the consistency in what more than 200 clients have reported to us over all these years is uncanny. Moreover, a CIPD survey suggested the exact same number, give or take 1%. It would seem that our anecdotal findings are actually supported by an external reference point!

So we know there is a problem, now let’s look at what can you do about it.

Here are three things you can do to get started, and they won’t cost you a penny or a huge amount of time:

1. Quantify the size of your problem or opportunity

The key here is not to get to focused on the number, but instead to look for the opportunity. Dig beneath the surface. One obvious thing to do, which is rarely done, is to ask your people what it is that gets in the way of them doing their best work. So ask them:

What ‘interference’ do they have to deal with every day? Get them to externalise it but don’t justify, defend or seek to fix it at this point. Your goal is to understand the issues
Can you quantify this interference as a percentage? Ask them how much it affects their ability to perform at 100% of their potential
Use this as a rudimentary guide, to size your problem/opportunity

So, for example, if they suggest that the ‘interference’ is at 35%, this means that they are performing at 65% of their potential. Ask them what impact a 1%, 2% or 10% shift would have on their performance. Is it worth fixing? If yes, go to step 2.

2. Review the ‘interference’ list

Invite your people to review the list of ‘interference’ and ask them to focus on just three right now; three that could add the greatest value with least effort. In essence, identify the ‘low hanging fruit’ which will eliminate, improve or mitigate the impact of ‘interference’. Then invite volunteers to pitch up and take on the challenge to fix one.

3. Let them go!

Now, support them, provide time and resources, and let them go unlock some potential for you. This is important as you are empowering them to own the problem and fix it. It also means that any long term solution will be owned by them and will likely lead to wider adoption of their solution than any imposed by management.

There are many benefits from adopting this approach, including:

There is a cathartic release from sharing ‘interference’
Your people feel listened to
They feel included in the choice of priorities
Your people feel empowered to improve their world
Ownership will increase as they go fix it
Business performance improves

I am not sure I can see a reason not to, can you?

Posted On December 13, 2018 By Ricky Muddimer In Productivity /

Five traits you will find in all the most productive organisations

If, like us, you are lucky enough to work with exceptional companies, you cannot help but look behind what makes them the success they are. And you discover that their success is not an accident but is rather down to obsessive execution underpinned with core disciplines.

From our research and observations, Thinking Focus has identified five traits you will find in all the most productive organisations. These guiding principles can be applied by any organisation to enable their people to be productive in the right way. They also form the basis of our 5Cs Results Model, which we use in our work with a range of forward-thinking organisations to help them accelerate business growth, embed change or transform culture.

Purpose and Clarity

The most productive organisations we’ve worked with regularly reinforce purpose and clarity within all their people. A clear and compelling purpose – the ‘why’ we do what we do, aligned to what we do – is consistently shared and communicated, so everyone has a common clarity of vision. This increases effectiveness as people work to their greatest level of contribution in order to help achieve the big picture.

Take note, though, not to confuse being efficient with being effective. We have worked in, and with, organisations where people were highly efficient and executed their tasks promptly and to a high standard. The problem was, they were not working on the right things!

As a leader aiming to help your people be as productive as possible, challenge yourself: Is it efficiency or effectiveness you’re after? You are likely to have efficient people, but do they understand why they are doing what they are doing? If not, revisit your purpose and get them focused on doing those things that will achieve that purpose.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins shares the importance of getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus, which sounds spot on to me. However, he goes on to say that those right people are the ones who buy into your purpose, not your plan. This means that if, as is often the case, the plan needs to change, those right people will remain committed to the vision and the higher purpose that drives everything you do.

Collaboration

In our work, although we shouldn’t be, we are always surprised by how much internal politics, assumptions and egos get in the way of productivity. The cultural environment is set up to be adversarial, which is not conducive to delivering the strategy. So many senior leaders will argue that they achieve the outcome they wanted, but we often wonder at what cost to their teams. What underlying damage has been caused and what is hidden from view that challenges the definition of productivity? Is the focus on the short-term nature of business and the need to deliver results or is it on the long-term performance of the company?

If I refer back to Jim Collins, he shares ‘level 5 leadership’. Level 5 leaders build with the next generation in mind, they are ambitious and focus on the success of the company ahead of themselves. The level 5 leader is obsessed with sustained results and will do whatever it takes to get to great.

In our experience, companies whose leaders collaborate more effectively achieve more significant results, and we have seen those indicators of level 5 leadership where the focus is always on the higher purpose.

Capability

When we talk about capability, most people think of training but it’s actually much more than that as Paul Matthews, author of Capability at Work, explains:

Knowledge – do I (the worker) have the knowledge to do what is required?
Skills – am I (the worker) able to apply myself to do what is required?
Mindset – do I (the worker) believe I can do what is expected of me?
Physiology – am I (the worker) able to do what is required physically?
Environment – have we (the company) provided the right systems, processes, tools, management support and culture for our people to perform effectively?

In our experience, the organisations that develop more productive workforces and the ones who recognise that there is a need for a balanced assessment of capability. The inclusion of ‘environment’ in the list above is significant and its notable that the onus here is on the company. It is no surprise that the elements that make up the environment are key to engagement, and that the link between engagement and productivity is long since proven.

Capacity

The topic of bandwidth is a perennial one. Most teams will argue they are at full capacity whereas most leaders believe there is scope to do more. The reality probably lies somewhere between the two!

However, the most important thing here is to be clear about what we have on the agenda and why. Does the list pass the purpose test, will doing ‘it’ enable us to achieve the higher purpose? If not, it should not be on the list at all.

Warren Buffet invests much time deciding what makes this list and what doesn’t make his list. There is no ‘We will have a go if we get the time’ list or ‘Let’s spend a bit of time on it’ list. It either makes the list, or it doesn’t; there’s no half way house. Leaders are paid to make big decisions, to choose what strategy we should back and why. Indecision leads to a straddled strategy which is trying to be all things to everyone. In our experience, companies who have followed the mantra of ‘If we could only do one thing?’ are more productive and effective.

Commitment

Commitment is a set of tests or questions which should be asked on a regular basis. This provides a navigational check in the context of an organisation’s vision and strategy to see whether the current plan is going to hit the mark.

Is our purpose clear, compelling, and understood by the business?
Are we collaborating in the most effective way?
Have we developed the capability of our people to achieve our goals?
Are we choosing to focus our resources on the right things?
Are we committed to this vision (are the right people on this bus)?

These questions all elicit a deliberate Yes/No answer, with those who adopt level 5 leadership using the ‘No’ answers as opportunities to fix it on their journey to greatness.

It is worth noting that level 5 leaders show humility and are more likely to be cautious in their evaluation, rather than deluded or over-confident.

Posted On November 1, 2018 By Ricky Muddimer In Productivity /

Tackling difficult conversations is vital to drive your business forward and maintain your productivity

Tackling difficult conversations: it’s all a game

Do you avoid difficult conversations?

You’re not the only one: research shows that many of us opt out of having conversations where there’s a feeling of confrontation.

We worry that we’ll say the wrong thing and make the situation worse, our imagination creates a whole host of scenarios as to how they will react or we simply don’t like feeling uncomfortable, so we delay the conversation or worse ignore it all in the hope the problem will go away.

It’s easy to allow ourselves to believe that going into conflict will create a cost to our business – but avoiding it is more costly. It leaves problematic situations to run unchecked and limits your productivity in the short and long term. Colleagues know you have shirked it and are dissatisfied that you have let them off the hook!

Stop making excuses

If we’re honest, most of us find ourselves putting off those difficult conversations, and we often do it in very similar ways. We come up with justification for our lack of action: “I’ll see if it sorts itself out”, “it might just have been a one-off” or even “it’s better if they work out for themselves where they’re going wrong”.

Essentially, they’re all excuses for avoiding a conversation we don’t really want to have. Recognising when you’re doing this is vital – only then can you stop yourself in your tracks and decide to take action.

Make it a real conversation

Of course, once we do resolve to tackle the situation and have the difficult conversation, we can still run into problems. One of the most common we see in our work is that people try to control the conversation: they prepare for it and plan it out so thoroughly, it’s no longer really a conversation.

For the person on the receiving end, that can be a very negative experience. They don’t feel heard and they aren’t involved in working out how to move forward, so they’re unlikely to engage with it. As a result, the problem isn’t really resolved, resentment starts to build and it’s likely it will all spill out again in future – and will probably be worse than the first time around.

It’s natural to want to feel prepared, but accepting you can’t predict or control the whole thing is an important part of dealing with difficult conversations. You need to listen to the other person and you need to take on board their ideas for improving the situation. You don’t have to have all the answers on the spot, but it’s vital to come back to them with a solution that reflects what they have told you and shows they have been heard.

That may sound like it’s easier said than done. However, there are plenty of ways to improve your confidence in dealing with conflict and ensure everyone comes out of a difficult conversation feeling positive.

The importance of dealing with conflict

According to research by ACAS, 81% of businesses said conflict has a negative impact on performance, 75% said it wastes management time, and 44% said it costs the company money. Yet as few as 61% of businesses said managing conflict was a priority and only half of organisations offered training in conflict management to their leaders and managers.

So companies which help equip their managers to deal with conflict will almost certainly feel the benefit.

Training people to have difficult conversations

You might think there’s no substitute for experience when it comes to getting better at those difficult conversations, but you can train people to be better at them. The key is to do it in a way which is easy to translate to real life so they can use the skills they learn once they’re back in a workplace situation.

Our game-based learning tool, What Would You Do?, is designed to do exactly this. It uses real-life scenarios to get people thinking not just about the best way to tackle a difficult situation, but also how their mindset influences their behaviour and the results they can achieve.

They can debate the merits of different approaches, discuss how their teams might respond to each, and bring in real-life examples of similar problems they have faced. The game encourages people to look at all the options, including their own role in both creating and resolving conflict, and weigh up the best way to proceed.

Creating an atmosphere where those conversations can happen

The beauty of the game is how well it translates to real life. Throughout development, we saw how managers – even those who had been identified as struggling with their role – took on learning from the game scenarios and began to improve their day-to-day approach. Companies testing the game told us it was more effective than any other tool they had tried.

The key is in giving managers the skills they need for real life – not just box-ticking in a training room. By letting them explore the potential impact of different approaches, they begin to learn for themselves that they can achieve more positive results by tackling things differently. This switch in mindset happens steadily during the training process, but it sticks: back in the workplace, their behaviour is immediately improved.

When managers feel confident in handling difficult conversations, they won’t shy away from inviting them. They won’t allow problems to fester, and their team’s productivity is likely to be consistently high as a result.

Equally, if teams know they can take any problem to their manager and have a frank conversation with a positive outcome, they will feel more comfortable raising difficult subjects. Managers who have the skills to listen and engage effectively, and to take positive action, will have a happier, more engaged and more productive team.

Ultimately, there will always be difficult conversations to be had in the workplace, and it’s unlikely anyone will relish the idea of having them. However, equipping managers with the skills to take on any conflict and come out of it with a positive result will help to reduce the impact on the business when they do arise.

If you’d like to know more about how game-based learning could help your managers to take on those difficult conversations, click here, or contact us.

Posted On September 12, 2018 By Ricky Muddimer In Leadership, Productivity /

How to increase productivity by getting your team to engage

How to increase productivity by getting your team more engaged

When it comes to productivity, employee engagement is vital: only employees who have bought in to your ‘why’ will be giving their all to help achieve your aims.

When engagement and productivity leave something to be desired, it’s tempting to blame the employee: they haven’t understood, they don’t care enough, their motivation is lacking. However, based on our experience working with businesses across many sectors, we know it’s usually down to management’s failure to help them to engage.

Why are my employees unproductive?

If you’re struggling to get your team to produce the volume or level of work you know they’re capable of, you need to examine their motivation – and the biggest factor in that is their engagement.

When you set tasks or targets, you base these on your ‘why’ – the ultimate aim you have in mind for yourself and for the team or the wider business. You can see a clear link between the work being done and the end goal. Where many leaders fall down is in communicating this with the team they need to achieve it.

It’s true that, to some extent, people are self-motivating: the best employees will want the satisfaction of doing their job well. However, if they can’t understand the part they play in the bigger picture or appreciate the ultimate aims of the business, self-motivation will not be enough to keep them working at their most effective.

In order to buy in to your ‘why’, employees also need to trust you – and to feel that you trust them. If you let them down, go behind their backs or demonstrate a lack of loyalty to them, they will never trust you and will therefore never engage with your aims. Building that relationship of trust is vital, and trusting them to understand and buy in to your aims is part of that.

What can I do to help my employees engage?

This is one of the questions that comes up most frequently in our work, no matter what the situation we’ve been asked to help tackle. While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, there are some simple steps any leader can take to improve engagement and lay the foundations for better engagement.

Honesty: Leaders often feel they’re doing the right thing by protecting their team from difficult situations and not sharing the full details of a challenge. Generally, the opposite is true. Employees are quick to realise when they’re being kept in the dark and it undermines their ability to trust their leaders. Wherever possible, share as much as you can with them about the wider picture – good and bad – and encourage their input in your plans for the future.

Be on their side: What people want from their managers is to feel they are supported and backed up. Managers need to listen and really hear what employees are saying, then act on it, even if that means taking issues to more senior management on their behalf.

Consistency: Following through what you say you will do is vital. Of course, it’s not always possible as circumstances change, but when that’s the case you need to go back and explain it to your team – taking us back to that point about honesty again. Consistency also means treating employees fairly and ensuring they know where they stand. There’s nothing more frustrating than a manager whose reactions are completely unpredictable.

Recognition: When team members perform well, make sure they know it has been noticed. We’ve all been in a position where we have slogged over a project and then felt our efforts haven’t even been seen – it certainly doesn’t inspire us to put as much work in next time. From a quick word to acknowledge individual effort to a team reward for a job well done, there are plenty of simple ways to make employees feel valued. Even the smallest acknowledgement can have a significant impact.

Development: Supporting team members to achieve their career goals is an important way to increase their engagement. Helping them develop skills in areas that will move them towards their ultimate aim, or putting them forward for opportunities that arise elsewhere in the business, will make them feel you are as invested in their future as they are. It’s a hard thing to do when you have a great team member as it may mean they move on to bigger things, but ultimately you will get more from an employee who feels you value them enough to support their future.

How can I get my managers to improve employee engagement?

Of course, it’s one thing to increase engagement with your own team, but getting managers at other levels to do the same with the people around them can be a bigger challenge.

There are ways to encourage managers to develop a more engaged workforce through training and development – and one of the most effective we have found is to use real-life scenarios. Asking managers to consider different ways of motivating their team and boosting engagement gets them to look at their current approach and consider whether it could be improved.

To support HR and L&D teams to do this, we have developed What Would You Do?, a game-based learning tool that can be used by any business. By posing challenges based on the real issues they may face in their day-to-day life and asking them to debate the merits of different responses, the game helps them not just to behave in the correct way in a training scenario, but to adjust their mindset and influence their thinking in the long term to give better results.

The result achieved through this approach have been impressive and the list of major companies turning to it as a training tool is growing by the day.

If you’d like to know more about how game-based learning could help your managers to develop a more engaged workforce, click here and read about What Would You Do?. To find out more about how it could be used in your business, contact us.

Posted On September 5, 2018 By Ricky Muddimer In Productivity /

Five reasons your team are not productive

Do you wonder why your team are not as productive as they should be? Here are five ways you could be running your business with the handbrake on!

Lack of Clarity

It may seem obvious, but for people to be productive, they need to have a clear understanding of what exactly is expected of them, what rules and boundaries they are supposed to operate within and what timelines exist.

Test it: Ask your people to describe to you their goal. Are they specific; is there a calendar date?

In the absence of clarity we are effectively saying we don’t care where we end up! Imagine telling your team we are heading north: exactly where will they end up? Just one degree out at the start can lead to being miles off where we thought we would be by the time we arrive north.

Absence of Purpose

People will add the greatest value when they connect to the guiding purpose. They will generously give discretionary effort when they connect with a higher purpose. Look at volunteers for good causes: they gladly give their time for free! Your purpose provides the sense check for every decision you make.

Test: Ask your people to articulate their understanding of the organisational purpose.

Consider: how well have you articulated your organisation’s ‘why’? In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins describes the value of a corporate purpose. Imagine recruiting your people with all your focus on the ‘what’. If, like many organisations, your strategy needs to change, the connection with the ‘what’ is lost and their commitment is now challenged. However, your purpose should never change and therefore a team recruited to connect with the ‘why’ will happily adapt to a change in strategy: they will see it as necessary to achieve the purpose.

Lack of Autonomy

Being too prescriptive, restricting the space for your people to explore and decide ‘how’ they go about delivering their objectives will feel, for them, limiting and disengaging. This feeling will restrict productivity, and your people will only do what is asked and no more as they are not expected to think. Even in environments that are heavily process-driven to maximise consistency, reduce waste and optimise output, people can be allowed to solve problems or create space for them to work on other areas of the business.

Test: Ask your people what frustrates them most about their work.

Look for opportunities where you can involve your people in improving the business, create mini projects for them to get involved in and make an impact on the company. When set up in the right way, these can provide many benefits; engaged people, improve collaboration & teamwork and tangible business results.

Lack of Confidence

People will hold back or fail even to get started on their objectives when they lack confidence or feel others lack confidence in them. This sense, feeling or perception creates inertia and leads to a waste of time which could cause missed milestones and costly project delays.

Test: Ask your people on a scale of 1-10 (10 is high) how confident they feel that they can achieve their goals. Look for a 6 or above.

A lack of confidence (a number of 5 or less) stems from ‘unhelpful thoughts’. These thoughts are based on assumptions, limiting beliefs and biases. They may not be founded in fact or reality yet we allow them to have debilitating effects on our performance. Externalising these thoughts is a crucial step to removing the interference they cause. This will require you to create an environment where people feel able to share concerns without feeling insecure or threatened.

Frustrating Environment

People get easily distracted, whether it’s internal politics, perceived unfairness in how colleagues are treated or the systems and processes driving them mad. While they are focused on these environmental factors, they cannot be entirely focused on delivering their objectives. As Peter Drucker said, “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”

Test: Ask your people, if they had a magic wand, what three things would they wish for to make it easier to achieve their objectives.

Look out for these three areas:

– Internal conflicts – a common cause of conflict is a lack of strategic clarity and purpose. It is this high-level perspective that enables priorities to be established and decisions to be validated. In the event of conflict, who wins out currently? Whose ego dominates?

– Do your systems enable your people to do their job or do they perform in spite of them? Designing your systems around your people AND processes will enable them to be more productive. How many workarounds exist in your business? Have your people accepted and normalised these productivity killers?

– Do the processes that you have spent time and money developing really exist and get followed, or are your people finding other ways to get the job done? Have your processes been over-engineered to meet overzealous interpretations of rules and regulations?

The environment question provides an excellent source of potential value. Your people will happily tell you what’s wrong if given the opportunity – however, this comes with a health warning! Once you ask, you will raise expectations that things will change and whatever you choose to do with the feedback, above all, you must maintain an open dialogue about your decisions and the reasons behind them.

Thinking Focus works with teams and business units in organisations around the world, helping them achieve breakthroughs by enabling them to think differently. Our clients range from medium-sized enterprises to divisions of blue chip multi-nationals.

Working with teams on a specific issue, or across a business unit to drive productivity, we tailor the approach to deliver the desired outcome. We challenge teams to deliver accelerated behavioural change and performance improvements.

Posted On August 8, 2018 By Ricky Muddimer In Productivity / 1

Why use game-based learning?

Purpose and Clarity

Collaboration

Capability

Capacity

Commitment