Developing Successful Organisations and Teams

Welcome to our Newsletter! I send it to friends, colleagues and other work contacts to tell you what's going on and point to some resources you’ll find on our main website.

This is a shorter newsletter than previous editions but it has some useful stuff in it – some editorial about tight budgets, an interesting case study, this issue’s helpful tip, as well as some useful links. As ever we continue to work on many different things but with one overriding theme - helping you get the best out of others.

John Faulkes, December 2005

 

 

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When budgets are tight!

Training programmes, along with international travel, are usually the first things to go when cost-cutting measures in put in place. Yet you can still initiate change and make development happen, using methods that cost far less than training programmes or teambuilding events.

For example, a change in the way that senior managers tackle issues can often be just as effective as getting everyone together, and can be achieved with some one-to-one coaching sessions.  Some facilitated meetings can make a genuine impact, without having to run specific events.

Look at some of the examples below – and Contact us to discuss further.
 

Case Study – changing the role of project managers

We began this story in our last newsletter (which you can still get from our website if you wish). It concerned a pharma services organisation that is developing its project managers to be more commercially-focused and client oriented. But echoing the section above - in the middle of the development programme a spending freeze was imposed by the parent company!

This meant that we were unable to run a scheduled performance development workshop for the leadership team. But we had instilled in the leadership team members the importance of their role as coaches, and the task of guiding the PMs into new roles was able to continue, at least partially.

There were still a small group of PMs that were highly cynical about any proposed change. One in particular was a real problem. Experienced, highly articulate, with a very negative attitude. In the past, leadership team discussions had focused on how to dismiss him.

However, his line manager tried something new. Instead of constant argument, she tried using a systematic model of context, feedback and direct questioning. It worked amazingly well! He began to soften in his approach, to talk about helping her instead of using sarcasm and derogatory comments!

Working with Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology

As you may know from the newsletters we send, we have a great deal of experience in working with large Pharma/small Biotech companies. I work in close association with Ralph White from PPMLD, who has worked in the industry for many years as a scientist, project manager and learning/development adviser.

At present we are working on several projects that could be grouped under the heading of ‘Biotech into Business’

  • One is a program for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and government people from one region, to get together and better understand their mutual needs, as well as the best strategies to build effective offerings for larger partners.
  • Another program is focusing on developing early project management capacity with a range of companies who need to push their assets towards proof of concept in a systematic and timely fashion.
Contact us if you are interested to talk about this for your region or in association with your local incubator or network.

 
 

Helping you to get the best out of others

We can probably distil what we do into three areas – developing leadership, enabling managers to develop talent and helping to make projects and teams work effectively.

I work with a number of associates, including Louise Whitehead, who has a business background in the food/ leisure sector and has worked with the automotive, office supplies, engineering, healthcare sectors amongst others. We’re currently working on a leadership development programme with an automotive company.

As the title of this section says, we focus helping you to engage people and connect them with your strategy and your customers. Many people ask us how to tap into peoples’ motivation -  we find it’s so commonly depressed at in this day and age. We can help you to find out why and to understand what you can do to improve it.

We use a few online tools that are relevant to this -

  • Check out our ‘Coaching and Developing Talent’ questionnaire – currently generating a real ‘wow!’ in an international consumer goods firm. It can assess your current skills and give you straightforward advice.
  • Also, look at a demo of a simple but effective tool you could easily deploy for your staff – ‘Preparing for your performance review’. Check it out here.

 

This Newsletter's top tip: ‘What if you had….?’

Managers often find it difficult to encourage their staff to do better in future. People can find themselves stuck at a particular barrier – an area of performance that they just can’t seem to develop. When asked about it they are only too aware of their own shortcomings; their ideas dry up, their ambition is low.

One way to spark their imagination is to ask ‘What if?’ questions:

  • What if you had unlimited time?
  • What would you do if you had unlimited budget?

Or even more powerful questions, such as:

  • What would you do if you did have the confidence in that area?
  • If you could work at that level, how would you go about this work?

 

Not all, but many people will be able to paint a mental picture of improved performance. What you can do then is ‘work back’ from there – negotiate some things with them that they will do – some risks that they will take – some guided efforts that they will commit to.

Do Contact us about this, or any other aspect of coaching and developing your staff – we’d be happy to talk it over. 

 

 

John Faulkes
John leads TeamCommunications. He started his career in the pharmaceutical industry, including many years in HR / Development. He has worked extensively with management teams, developing leadership, driving organisation change and performance. Also helping to make complex project / line organisations work, and large, bureaucratic bodies to sharpen decision-making and build inter-disciplinary collaboration. He has worked with large and small pharmaceutical, fast consumer, engineering and public leisure sectors.