Blog

How to move from being a colleague to becoming a leader?    It’s elating; that feeling when you’ve just achieved a promotion.   At last, a chance to implement your plans, to see your ideas come to fruition and the opportunity to lead your team to great things.  And then it hits you. You’re going to have to manage the same people who used to be your colleagues.   The ones who you’ve – let’s be honest – spent more than an occasional five minutes gossiping with by the coffee machine, or had a few nights out with celebrating. […]

Resilience; what does it mean to you?  Resilience centres on the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, disappointment or uncertainty. It could be small scale such as managing stress in your day to day work, or more significant such as making difficult decisions that could affect both the future of your business and your employees.  Resilience allows you to adapt your plans, be flexible […]

Why do people resist change – even if they know it’s the best option?  No matter the size and scale of the change – from implementing a new piece of software to making sweeping changes to the whole company, improving customer service or downsizing the business –  it’s crucial for leaders to ensure that change is managed well.  It’s fine to have strategic ideas at management level, but without the enthusiasm […]

Curiosity is a crucial ingredient in making a leader successful.   The ability to build a high performing team and lead organisations requires many attributes including sound judgment, confidence, authenticity and the vision to take your company forward. And the greatest, it could be argued, is to have curiosity.   As learning and development consultants here at Excel, we sometimes find that clients on our programmes have many great leadership traits. However, some don’t […]

Here are the critical components of influence.  Did you notice that at some point in the last few years, Millennials started to take over the workforce?   There are nearly seventeen million millennials in the UK, making up over a quarter of the total population. Millennials already make up the largest generational workforce in the UK – with them expected to dominate the UK workforce by 2020.  Projections state […]

Feedback – often delivered formally at annual reviews, can strike fear into the hearts of employees at every level.   For those receiving it, it can seem critical, sometimes harsh or unfair. For those delivering it, it can be a delicate balance between providing encouragement to the employee and flagging performance that is under par.  Feedback is a crucial part of development – or is it? Used […]

Intro  When you work in the training and development space, as I do with Excel, it’s pretty common to have ‘off the wall’ conversations with people about human nature and behaviour.  Particularly when you deliver programmes which help people improve their personal impact.  I guess this is a natural human trait; if I am in this box, does it make […]

Intro  For those of you that are regular subscribers of this podcast you’ll know I am a massive advocate of some of the more innovative ideas about making our organisation‘s great places to work.  Though one of my passions shouldn’t really be called innovative in some companies, it still is…..  ….. guessed what it is yet?  Wellbeing.  Last […]

You might think that by now, in the 21st century, we’d finally got over the whole ‘Men are from Mars’ thing, but to be honest, it’s never gone away. (If you’re not familiar with this book, it basically states that fundamental psychological differences between the sexes is the cause of all their communication problems.) I […]