The Stanton Marris Blog

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  Keeping things simple

  I’m renewing my campaign on keeping things simple.  It’s long been one of our hallmarks as consultants to help our clients make complex things simple.  Perhaps it’s in the nature of management to proliferate frameworks and systems and measurement.  It sometimes takes an outside view to help organisations back to the essence.

  Adrian Furnham, Professor of Psychology at University College London, wrote recently in The Sunday Times of the perverse consequences of performance management systems.  They’re meant to systematise how things are done and to encourage the less good performers to do better.  Instead, with their complex rules and targets and metrics, they tie up the best performers in red tape and allow the worst performers to play games.  I once had a client who introduced a performance management system with a 76 page book of guidance.  They then wondered a year on why it wasn’t working.

  So let’s get back to the simple things:  good managers who are clear with those who work for them about what is required, support them to deliver those things, are able to have tough conversations with them when they aren’t delivering; good leaders who can look beyond their BlackBerries to the longer term, ask the hard questions and challenge their organisations to grow and deliver more.   Let’s remove the organisational cobwebs – those over-engineered performance and reward systems, the crazed strictures of procurement bureaucrats, the non value adding paraphernalia imposed by corporate centres. 

  One of our current clients has a doctrine of making things simple.  If you’re reading this, I encourage you to play your part in challenging these over complex systems.  Ask what their real purpose is.  Ask whether they really serve that purpose.    Then be rigorous is cutting them back to the simplest system to meet their purpose.

  Read the full article "Keeping things simple"

  Published April 22, 2011
  Written by Andrew Jackson. This article is filed under: leadership development, organisational culture
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  Practical steps to happiness

  ABCD (resist the urge to hum along with the Jackson Five) is a well established framework and tool that comes out of positive psychology – it can be used to build optimism, positivity and resilience. As a manager coaching people through tough and uncertain times it’s worth remembering the ABCD of how to get people to think more positively – you can apply it in individual conversations and in a team discussion.

  • Adversity – we encounter it and react to it
  • Belief – our reactions create and are conditioned by a set of beliefs
  • Consequences – the beliefs are the cause of what we do or feel or think next. Often actions or thoughts reinforce the Belief set.
  • Dispute – if you want to change the Consequences dispute the Beliefs: the perception and interpretation of facts, the inferences and assumptions etc

  Use the framework to talk through critical incidents and get to the really helpful discussion:
  How could you challenge and change the habitual beliefs that follow adversity?

  • What’s the evidence for your belief?
  • Are you catastrophising – imagining the worst?
  • Is there another way of looking at it?
  • Is it useful to think about this now?
  Read the full article "Practical steps to happiness"

  Published April 13, 2011
  Written by John Bruce-Jones. This article is filed under: Change, communication
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  If you haven’t read this yet, you should

  How often do you read a business book and come away completely satisfied? Like a perfect five course meal with three wines.  In this case my metaphorical five course meal was in a restaurant that has been open since 1981 and I’ve never visited, so all the more surprise that it catered perfectly to my tastes which are not, as you may know, entirely mainstream…Enough of the analogy – I have just been through “Gary Yukl’s Leadership in Organizations (7th ed)“  published by Pearson.

  Yukl has been researching and writing on leadership for 40 years and this textbook for business schools is on the 7th edition, much updated and revised over the years since it first came out in 1981.

  There are libraries of theories, models and prescriptions on leadership  – I’ve certainly read a stackful over the last 20 years – but how to make sense of it all? They all sound plausible but what theories and concepts of leadership have any demonstrable, evidenced, link to leadership effectiveness and organisation performance?  The answers are all here for those with the patience to seek them.

  Don’t skip to the last chapter to find Yukl’s “The 7 (choose-a-random-letter)of leadership” because he eschews the easy answer. But it’s going to help me articulate the 10 Killer Questions of leadership (sorry to disappoint but I am a consultant, not an academic!)

  What’s your top business book?

  Read the full article "If you haven’t read this yet, you should"

  Published April 6, 2011
  Written by John Bruce-Jones. This article is filed under: leadership, organisational performance
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  25% women on Boards by 2015

  The findings of the Lord Davies Review, published recently, with its recommendations on how to increase the number of women on the boards of listed companies in the UK establishes the following as key development needs:
  1. Companies should treat women’s leadership as a dynamic and strategic opportunity rather than an equal opportunities issue.
  2. Companies should consider raising their board’s and their nominating committee’s understanding of and ability to address unconscious bias.
  3. Board placement researchers and interviewers should understand and adopt processes to eliminate unconscious bias.
  4. Boards should provide senior women with influential board or executive level mentors either from within the organisation or outside it.
  5. Senior manager development needs to enable them to recognise and act on their own unconscious bias to ensure women’s skills and experiences are not stereotyped and their talents overlooked.

  I believe addressing these requirements needs Boards to adopt:

  • A long-term, strategic approach to ensuring that women of high potential are more effectively identified and offered the development and experience needed for them to become board member.
  • Boards and Nominating Committees need to have their awareness raised of the existence of unconscious bias in their organisations and its potential negative impact on the performance and advancement of women. A highly effective means of doing this is a short workshop including forum theatre scenarios to illustrate how unconscious bias plays out in relation to women in masculine organisational cultures. Interactive activities are then powerful in enabling workshop delegates to identify and adopt the behaviours they need to practise to address unconscious bias.
  • Companies should consider assigning executive sponsors to their high potential women. A sponsor is someone who acts: on their protégé’s behalf as an advocate for their next promotion; expands their perception of what they can do; connects them to senior leaders; promotes their visibility; opens up career opportunities and gives career advice; offers advice on executive presence. 
  • Leadership development programmes need to incorporate learning on unconscious bias and how to lead and manage inclusively to enable women to achieve their full potential.

  What do you think is required?

  Read the full article "25% women on Boards by 2015"

  Published March 24, 2011
  Written by Ian Dodds. This article is filed under: Boards, culture change, leadership development
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  7 ways to bring meaningful engagement to your business

  It’s a big ask. Chief executives are suddenly recognising that ‘effective engagement of our employees’ is the key to increased productivity, to profitability, to the successful implementation of strategy, the retention of key talent and thus the key to competitive advantage. They instinctively know it’s important to ensure employees want to follow through on delivering the strategic intent, yet there is much confusion about what it is, how you create it, whose job it is to make it happen and how you measure it.

  In reality it’s about getting people involved and inspired about something important and then contracting with each other to do something different as a result. Our conclusion is that employees in today’s world recognise they have choices and are not going to blindly follow commands from their leaders; they want to be engaged in a way that is meaningful to each of them and only then will they give their discretionary commitment and energy to take action .

  So how exactly do you go about it? Here are seven key learnings for meaningful engagement:

  1.  Start with the business case for engagement – what are you trying to engage people with? What will the benefits be?

  2.  Define engagement in language that is meaningful in your particular organisation context and to your key audiences (avoid the off-the shelf frameworks)

  3.  Convince your colleagues that engagement is more than a one-step process – it is a planned series of linked actions and supporting activities – for which leaders need new skills and confidence to use them

  4.  Clarify who’s responsible for making engagement work – CEO, top team, leaders, Communications and HR (all of them)

  5.  Use internal stories of successful engagement that have lead to measurable benefits and outcomes to illustrate what you mean by engagement – and to draw out the lessons of what works and what doesn’t

  6.  Use the power and influence of people who have been involved in those successes to convince others of the benefits of a more thoughtful and planned approach

  7.  Introduce regular ‘leading’ indicators of engagement so that you can use the data to prioritise the right activity that will deliver the results you want – before it is too late. Get these ingredients in place and the results will follow.

  What does meaningful engagement mean in your business?

  Read the full article "7 ways to bring meaningful engagement to your business"

  Published March 16, 2011
  Written by Virginia Merritt. This article is filed under: engagement
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  When talking about it doesn’t help

  In turbulent economic times – and after a very long winter – how do you keep yourself going? Research suggests that ‘talking out’ your concerns does not always help and that suppressing negative thoughts can be just as bad for you. However, research also shows that ‘expressive writing’ can boost your well-being, reduce health problems and increase your happiness.

  • If you are struggling to come to terms with a negative experience (a professional setback or even redundancy), try spending a few minutes each day writing a short account of it. Constructing a written narrative (which is naturally more coherent than a spoken narrative) helps people make sense of what has happened and move on more quickly.
  • If you’re suffering from more generalised dissatisfaction, try spending a few minutes each week noting down five things for which you are grateful. Research shows that those who express gratitude in this way end up happier, more optimistic, healthier – and even exercise more.
  • Alternatively, spend some time planning your best possible future. Research suggests that although visualising a successful future is unlikely to increase the chance of achieving your goals, it can make you significantly happier. Spend a few moments describing for yourself an ideal future which is realistic, but in which everything has gone as well as it possibly can. In research, this technique was shown to make participants significantly happier.

  In summary, something as simple as writing a few notes during the course of the week can make a real difference to your sense of optimism and energy levels. (Research quoted in ‘59 seconds: Think a little, change a lot’ by Richard Wiseman.)

  Read the full article "When talking about it doesn’t help"

  Published March 10, 2011
  Written by Bronwen Ballard. This article is filed under: communication, employee motivation
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