change

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Can we take positivity too far?

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Can we take positivity too far?

Many years ago, there was a period of dislocation in my work life and I was suddenly scrabbling to relaunch my independent career with no work on the horizon. At the time we had very little savings and I was the main earner for our household of four. I was feeling worried and anxious.

 

A friend, who lived abroad, was briefly in the country and we had a chance to catch up. She asked how I was, and I started to explain my financial worries and work concerns. Abruptly she cut across me to say, ‘But when you’re working you earn good money, right?’

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How Appreciative Inquiry Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

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How Appreciative Inquiry Supports Diversity, Equality and Inclusion

The words are easy: we want to create a diverse and inclusive culture, that promotes equality of access and opportunity. The business case for creating a work environment that is inclusive of difference, that honours and makes good use of diversity, and that manages itself in such a way that all employees feel they are fairly treated, has long been made. The challenge is how to achieve such an environment. I want to briefly consider how using Appreciative Inquiry can support the development of such a culture.

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Working with the Organisation’s Shadowside: Helping organisations discuss the undiscussable?

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Working with the Organisation’s Shadowside: Helping organisations discuss the undiscussable?

At the recent EU AI network meeting some colleagues and I fell into a conversation about working with the organisational shadowside. I thought it was interesting enough to share.

 

What is the organisational shadowside?

While discussion our work, we identified a common experience, when working with faith organisations, of encountering such a strong surface ‘story’ about what it meant to be a good person of this faith that it was impossible for the organisation to talk about actions and feelings in the organisation that didn’t fit that story. In one example it was the hurt, anger, betrayal, resentment and other difficult feelings following a round of redundancies that had taken place the previous year that was unmentionable. In another it was the difficulty of working and living within the constraints of monastic vows that was pushed under the carpet. The challenge we encountered wasn’t the stories themselves, it was the sense that we were being drawn into a secret or ‘shadow’ conversation that couldn’t be fitted into the accepted organisational story.

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How Positive Psychology Can Promote Children’s Wellbeing and other Benefits

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Young children need to learn the skills necessary for managing their emotions. Adults who can model this are essential in helping to shape children’s emotional development. There is a strong link between mental health concerns in children and their ability to regulate their emotions. Assisting children to cultivate positive emotions helps to mitigate mental health issues not just for them but for future generations also.

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What Is The Most Effective Way To Achieve Organisational Change? New Research Results

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Ever felt that the traditional approach to change doesn’t deliver the results you hoped? Wondered if there is a better way? Well interestingly Bradley Hasting and Gavin Schwarz[i] recently published a lengthy paper comparing the effectiveness of two different approaches to organisational development. One is the traditional mode, known as diagnostic, and the other a more recently developed approach, championed particularly by Bushe and Marshak[ii], known as dialogic….

Ten Top Tips For Online Training

Like many others, over the past months I have delivered a lot of training online that I would normally have delivered in person. Here are some of the things I learnt.

1. Breaks

Resolve to take a break of 10 minutes every hour. It is constraining and exhausting being stuck in one position with a fixed gaze. The last course I ran, one of the spontaneous comments made was, ‘what I love about this course is the breaks.’ Well, good to know I’d got something right!

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Some Challenges Posed by Hybrid Working and How We Can Meet Them

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Hybrid working, for many a necessity induced by lockdown, is rapidly becoming a work pattern of choice for the future. Goldman Sachs are one of the few organizations so far to have declared against the trend with their boss David Solomon rejecting the idea of remote working, labelling it an “aberration”. The more common view seems to be that the working pattern has changed for good. Google, for example, expects 20% of staff to work from home permanently in future, while Microsoft is to make remote working a permanent option. This shift towards more flexible working patterns poses some tough questions for managers and leaders.

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It’s OK To Not Feel Great, We’re All In Mourning For Times Past.

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I suppose it was that Sunday evening press conference that brought it home to me. It was as Boris articulated the ambition to get people back to work, hung about with caveats and advice to avoid public transport, that the penny really dropped: that ‘getting back to normal’ was a complete pipedream. What he was doing, never mind the rhetoric, was starting to articulate the new normal, which wasn’t going to be a whole lot like the old normal.

10 Top tips for keeping up morale

Many of us are having to manage more anxiety than normal, as well as drastic changes in our daily lives. There are two key principles which it is useful to bear in mind: Managing anxiety takes mental strength and energy, and, that the state of our morale affects the state of our immune system. (At this point I have to say this doesn’t mean that anyone who becomes ill wasn’t positive enough. Absolutely not. Rather just that we know that keeping our spirits up is important to supporting our immune system. It’s not a guarantee of perfect health!)

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Did you know? Build in Wellbeing from the beginning

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Lots of people feel instinctively that happiness and wellbeing at work must be important. But are they a business necessity or a ‘nice to have’. Surely it makes more sense to ensure your business is profitable and thriving before you start worrying about how people feel?

Increasingly research suggests that investing in employee wellbeing by ensuring positive work relationships, an emphasis on strengths-based development, and worker happiness has productivity pay-offs. So why delay, start promoting positive psychology practices at work today!

Take a coaching approach - 7 top tips for developing talent in your team

A key challenge for leaders and managers is developing the capacity of their staff or team. Taking a coaching approach allows you to focus on drawing out motivation rather than trying to push it in!  It allows you to create energy and motivation and it is usually experienced as an empowering process by your coachee. It helps people develop their intiaitive and sense of ownership of their work and tasks, and, in general, converts potential into capacity.

Here are seven tips to help make your coaching conversations highly productive.

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Guest Blog - Talent and determination get you there, but how do you get them? by Saira Iqbal of Zircon Management Consulting

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We know it's important, where does it come form?

One of the most successful men I know grew up in the roughest streets of Bristol, and shared a cramped bedroom with his five brothers until he could  leave the family home and ‘escape’ to his second choice university.  Now a multi-millionaire cabinet minister, each of his milestones made it more and more apparent that his success was no simple stroke of luck.

There were no useful networks that his working class parents were a part of, there was no private school education to teach social poise; but there was drive that came from great ambition and pure determination.

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Key factors that create living human system learning and change

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Introduction

In the last twenty years a new understanding of organizations has been developed, understanding them as living human systems of enterprise and creativity. It offers as an alternative to the dominant view of organizations as large and complicated machines of production. Methodologies based on this understanding, for instance Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, World Café and SimuReal, allow the whole of the organizational domain to be approached from the living human system perspective. They allow us to address all organizational challenges from recruitment to redundancy within the same living human system frame. Four key factors underpin this approach.

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Book Review – Holocracy The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy: Brian Robertson (Originally published in AI Practitioner)

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Brief account of the book

The book has noble, honourable and inspiring intentions: it offers holocracy as a ‘new operating system’ for organizations that will create a ‘peer-to-peer distributed authority system’. This operating system creates empowered people who are clear about the boundaries of their authority, about what they can expect from others, and are able to be highly effective in their roles.

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Book Review – Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies PROFIT from Passion and Purpose, by Raj Sisodia, David Wolfe, Jag Sheth (Originally published in AI Practitioner)

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Brief Account of the book

The book is based on two rounds of research undertaken by the authors in collaboration with their MBA students. They identified the organizations initially by asking the question ‘Tell us about some companies you love. Not just like but love.’

Starter For Ten - How To Begin Applying Positive Psychology At Work

For those who would like to dip their toe into the positive psychology world I've plucked a few of the recommendations from my book, Positive Psychology At Work, for you to have a look at. Hopefully they illustrate just how intuitive a lot of this is - which doesn't make it easy to do in a hierarchical, busy organisation of course!

Elicit Success Stories

Start meetings with a round of success stories. Before you get into the meat of the meeting, usually a litany of problems and challenges, start by giving people the opportunity to share the best of their week.

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Five Top Tips for Having Great Meetings

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Many people find meetings challenging. These five tips will help your meetings be more successful, enjoyable and productive. 

You can purchase our E-booklet that will take you through preparing for and running a great meeting in a step-by-step way here

 

1. Start with something positive

How? Ask everyone a question like ‘What’s been your greatest success, big or small, since we last met?’ or, ‘Which of your achievements over the last month are you most proud of?’ or ‘Which of your staff do you feel most grateful too, and why?’

Why? Because sharing good news boosts mood (and shares resources) which enhances creativity and problem-solving abilities

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8 Principles Of Practice For Achieving Change

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1. Grow the strengths and resourcefulness of people

It’s all too easy to focus on how people aren’t equipped for the change: they don’t have the skills, the knowledge, the experience. How their existing strengths and resources (including their extended network) can help them answer the questions and engage with the challenge that the change poses, can be less obvious. By deliberately helping people recognize and access their existing strengths and resourcefulness we can increase their resilience, tenacity and confidence in the face of change, making the steep learning curve less daunting.

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How To Keep Your Employees Engaged At Work

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Engaged employees are a business imperative: they perform 20% better and give 57% more discretionary effort [1] Organizations with a high level of engagement have better quality, sales, income and turnover, profit, customer satisfaction, shareholder return, and business growth, and success. [2] It is estimated that currently only 19% of employees are highly engaged in their work, while active disengagement cost the UK economy between £37.2bn and £38.9bn a year [3]. 

Organizations often struggle to understand what creates engagement. Positive psychology research is revealing that employee engagement is primarily a psychological and social process. There are a number of steps organizations can take to increase engagement.

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Why We Need To Do Change Differently

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So Why Do We Need To Do Change Differently

1. Because the old ways are too slow and hard

Traditionally change has been a top-down, linear, compliance process; first designed and then implemented. In today’s fast paced world this takes too long and is too hard. People resist the pressure. Instead we need change that is whole-system owned and generated, focused on maximising tomorrow not fixing yesterday.