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Today, We Need Platforms for Cohesion More Than Ever
The past seven months have seen the UK undergo a mass home-working experiment. During lockdown, some 20 million workers were estimated to be working from home (for comparison only about 1.7 million people classed themselves as home-workers pre-COVID). We have been forcibly stripped of human contact, in our social and work lives. For many of…
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Why is it Important to Know Your Character Strengths?
Written by Dr Andrea Giraldez-Hayes What do you spend more time doing, thinking about your weaknesses and trying to fix them or thinking about your strengths and building upon what is working? If you are like most people, the chances are that you are in the first group. However, it should not be the case.…
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Is respect the key to positive organisational performance?
A workplace where everyone, no matter what their status, is treated with dignity and respect is a workplace where good stuff happens. According to a 2004 Gallup study of 50,000 workers across 27 countries, respect is the number one driver for workplace engagement. It is perhaps the most fundamental ingredient for positive workplace performance, because it…
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Boosting Motivation for Performance
Written by Paul Berry, Performance Psychologist Consultant A thriving field of academic research is concerned with understanding the factors that explain and underpin outstanding performance. Across a wide variety of performance domains, including elite sport, space exploration, the military and the performing arts, the ability to sustain high levels of motivation has consistently been found…
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Strengths Based Leadership
Written by Dan Collinson, Learning & Development Consultant We’ve all heard of the phrase ‘play to our strengths’, but in practice we tend to spend more time focusing on weaknesses and trying to fix them. By doing so, we are setting up teams for competency rather than enabling them to thrive. In an era of…
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All for one: Setting team goals to enable flow
There is plentiful evidence for the value and impact of goal-setting in the workplace. According to a CIPD report: “It is now generally accepted that goal-setting is effective and valuable for steering and improving performance.” The basic concept at the heart of goal-setting is that having a specific and appropriately challenging goal will lead to…
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Meaningful Connections in the Extremely Digital Time of Covid-19
How are you? A question I’ve always found difficult to answer, especially at a start of a business call. Do people truly want to know how I am? Or, is it just a formality? But now, more than ever, we should ask questions that truly allow us to connect – especially at the beginning of…
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Reaching Peak Flow: Are Your Teams Safe to Stretch?
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” That quote, attributed to automotive business magnate Henry Ford, perfectly sums up why taking risks, trying new things and stretching ourselves is so important for a high-performing workplace. After all, without people feeling comfortable to think differently, how can organisations achieve innovation? It’s also…
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How to Build Meaningful Human Connections
Meaningful Human Connection is about tapping into what’s most authentic and real about us humans, what connects us, and what makes us different. The first few works and sentences of each new interaction matter the most to set the foundation for that connection, and in so many situations this always starts with ‘how are you?’…
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Facing Change Positively
We live in a fast-paced and ever evolving world. With advancements in technology and globalisation it is critical, now more than ever, to be agile and change rapidly and effectively. When we think about the world of work 10 years ago, there has been unprecedented levels of change. Organisations which haven’t kept up with these…
