Imagine for a moment the difficulties in telling a long-standing respected member of staff that they are being made redundant then, in the next breath, having to be the inspirational, motivated leader of a disoriented and demotivated team. Cuts in staff travel costs may also mean this must be achieved at a distance. This has become the daily reality for many managers.

People have told us that huge demands are being made on managers’ personal resilience, with many feeling stressed and starting to question their own performance. Our ‘skills rescue package’ is therefore deliberately aimed at helping the individual manager through these testing times, giving them practical tools for getting back on track, in readiness for the upturn.

Matchett* are offering 5 key titles from our Leadership & Management portfolio, all of which can be delivered in sharp, 90 minute sessions or as full day courses, depending on the requirement:

The Art of Remote Management – best practice for leading geographically-spread teams
Coping With Stress – building your own personal and emotional resilience
Critical Thinking – how to make that tough decision (and also make sure it’s the right one)
Running meetings – ensuring your people are engaged and motivated so your meeting objectives can be met
Tough Conversations – delivering difficult messages with respect and confidence

One thing is for sure, what constituted effective management 12 months ago, is not necessarily as effective now.

Want this session tailored to meet your exact needs?

Contact us for a bespoke detailed session outline, or to arrange a no obligation meeting.

“It would appear that for most programme and project management practitioners the reality is that accreditations are not only becoming increasingly mandated when looking for a new role, but more importantly they are also rewarded with higher salaries and day rates.” said the report’s author and Arras People managing director John Thorpe.

The survey of programme and project management practitioners suggests that APMP can have a positive impact on both remuneration and contractor day rates with 52% of those with the qualification commanding fees of £400 to £600 per day.

The popularity of the ubiquitous PRINCE2® accreditations, long seen as an industry standard methodology, is also reflected in the survey, although the overall impact on salary is “not significant” due to the fact so many practitioners hold the accreditation.

“Many project managers have hit mandatory requirement that they have PRINCE2® which rightly or wrongly has achieved the de facto standard” said John Thorpe “The PRINCE2® accreditation does have a positive impact on the PPM practitioner distribution by salary across the whole and also when reviewed for just project managers. As expected, because it is now a baseline accreditation the actual difference is not significant reflecting its ‘me too’ position.”

With the profession facing tough economic times and jobs and contracts at a premium, increasing numbers of professionals are turning to the APMP qualification to provide an edge in the employment market. A shortened route to APMP, launched in 2010, specifically for those holding the PRINCE2® Practitioner qualification is especially attractive to those wishing to stand out from the rest.

Liz Wilson, head of Professional Standards and Knowledge at APM said: “Those who have achieved the APMP have had their project management knowledge professionally recognised by APM. These research findings from Arras emphasise that employers place a high commercial value on this achievement, too.”

APMP is part of the association’s suite of qualifications providing support for professionals throughout their career. Accredited at IPMA Level D and SCQF Level 7, APMP is a knowledge based qualification for those wishing to achieve a broad level of project management knowledge sufficient to participate in projects from individual assignments through to large capital projects. Find out more about Matchett Group’s Accredited Project Management (APMP) course and also details of the next public course being held on 14th – 18th May 2012.

Business Acumen, part of our Management and Leadership training.

Interested in this course? Please get in touch.

To see the complete top 50 visit the Training Top 50.

Our delegates have an excellent pass rate, with 100% receiving their qualification so far this year and 93% in 2010. A record we aim to maintain!

If this or any other bespoke project management training is of interest please call us on 01295 814200.

The GSA is part of the Wilmington Group PLC and draws from the combined expertise of two group companies – Matchett and Quorum Training.

Our mission is to help graduates become competent, confident, focused and self-aware professionals, who can work in a team, deliver results and make a measurable contribution to the organisation’s performance right from the start.

Discover all of the details, including pricing, programme and date information on the dedicated GSA website!

Make friends with people you don’t know

Add as a friend? Think before clicking “confirm”. It’s one thing to add an old friend and then never speak to them. It’s another to add anyone whose name you kind of vaguely sort of recognize or don’t know at all! If you accept those invites, you’ve only got yourself to blame. If you scan through your Facebook friends list, you’ll doubtless find a handful of people in there you barely know. Why are they there with access to your ‘life’?

Upload Drunken Pictures

Unless you look after your privacy settings, embarrassment and shame are almost inevitable on Facebook – from the mildly upsetting double-chin shot to much, much worse. Have a little common sense. If you go out for a big one on a Thursday night, posting humiliating, drunken photos of your friends on Friday morning is a recipe for disaster. Because if a friend then calls in sick at 9am, the last thing they want their manager to say is: “I’ve seen the pictures of you crawling in the gutter last night. I’m not amused or impressed, get into work!”

Update your status when you’re supposedly ill

If you’ve pulled a sickie or are genuinely ill, it’s probably best to stay off Facebook. How many times have we seen it? Someone calls in sick in the morning and then updates their Facebook status throughout the day, documenting a day of ice cream, chips, theme parks or bungee jumping. Get dressed and get to work you lazy so and so, or else you’ll probably be fired. And it’d be your own fault for adding your manager to be your Facebook friend!

Moan in your Facebook status

The most annoying thing that people do on Facebook is to spray their walls with vanity-filled drivel, by posting self-indulgent awfulness in their status updates. “Kathy is sorry how it ended but it had to be done. I love you and will miss you, and I hope you can apologise one day”. Really! If you’ve got something to say to someone, say it. Also don’t complain about your customers or colleagues, it’s clearly unprofessional.

Spill secrets

You can’t exactly whisper on Facebook, so secrets are best confined to corridors and corners.

And these could just be me but …..

Watch you’re grammar and spelling mistrakes
Come on, people: ‘Your’ is ‘your’. ‘You are’ is ‘you’re’. It really isn’t hard to get that little one right. And understanding the difference between there, their and they’re surely isn’t too much of a challenge?

Invite me to be a Zombie Pirate Snot Monster
Please don’t do that ever, ever again.

However, now we watch CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, NCIS, Law and Order and in the UK Waking the Dead and Silent Witness, the list continuously expanding to meet our insatiable crime addiction.  Even reality TV is not exempt, as real crime cases and police chases are played out on various channels.

But, if anyone had suggested that you could commercially sell a programme where crime is solved with high level mathematics, and that people would watch it – even recently we might have thought they were mad.

However, running to 6 seasons, Numbers clearly won hearts and minds, making maths sexy and a part of our crime wave.  And it’s all about thinking differently to solve problems.

This sort of approach is highly unusual, but the programme illustrated the concept of solving problems with original and creative approaches.  Companies whilst they talk of “creativity” and” innovation” don’t seem reflect this – they want to continuously approach the issues with the same questions, the same methods of solution.  In the past this only creates better “Hoovers” not Dysons!

One of the key elements of creative problem solving is changing the question.  Are we trying to solve the right problem – are we making the wrong assumptions in our zealousness to “do something”.

Creativity in problem solving requires a different approach.  It requires looking at things in a different way – asking the different questions, being a bit “out there”.   Sometimes this is difficult, especially when you are trained to think in a particular way, tackling problems the way the company has always done them.  Creative approaches require out of box thinking with the odd lucky break.  The real trick is to know how to spark them off.

One of the ways of doing this uses a process through which managers can steer their staff, this can be remembered as the 8 “ates”

1. Initiate – creating an environment where blame is lost and people feel able to create
2. Substantiate – check the problem is really the problem and the assumptions behind it
3. Generate – spend time creating a load of ideas, some of which are allowed to be completely ridiculous.  This is the time where quantity is more important than quality
4. Incubate – sift the ideas and think about them at a distance to work out which are really doable.
5. Graduate – prioritise the ideas and chose one to address your challenge
6. Innovate – use the idea, try it out
7. Validate – check the outcomes once the innovation is implemented
8. Evaluate – review the impact against the original problem and desired outcomes and then return to the beginning

This process can be cyclic or have iterations within the cycle going from generate, back to substantiate, if you discover the problem is wrong, or re-initiate if you feel that people are stuck.

Done well this can help people jump out of their existing methods of working out problems, facilitate the move towards different thinking and more successful solutions to problems that arise in the workplace.  The challenge – getting people to take the first step, perhaps in our terms “activate” the process.

Moving from “the way we do things round here” to “why” and “let’s try something new” is the hardest move forward.  Companies that can do it can create the future Dyson, the next Walkman (already done by Apple) or the new generation Wii.

By Amanda Brown

If we, you or your team would like to examine creativity and problem solving further then please contact us

One of main ways I help businesses function healthily and deliver outstanding results is by getting them to notice how people’s behaviour and the quality of results they achieve are profoundly and constantly influenced by the ‘invisible’ dynamics of the system (organisation, business, team, etc.) to which they belong. I work with a method that I call Invisible Dynamics™ and results are often startlingly clear and accurate.

This new method can be used in four ways:

• It can help people diagnose and understand the nature of the issue or the potential of an idea by providing insights that they would otherwise be unable to access.
• It can be used to help resolve issues and develop new ways to restore balance to the system.
• It has enormous potential to be used creatively for service and product development.
• It can also be used to test and refine the quality of an idea, decision or strategy prior to implementation.

Leaders can get frustrated with their managers. “Why is it so hard for us to see what’s happening? Just sort it out it!” Conversely, managers get frustrated with their leaders, “Why don’t they just sort it out?” It’s self evident that underlying patterns of behaviour and culture undermine an organisation’s ability to perform. At the same time these underlying dynamics also consume considerable amounts of effort, energy and money that could be used more productively.

Individuals often feel that what’s happening is beyond their control but find it difficult to explain why. You may have experienced this yourself.

This fresh approach can:

• Reveal hidden blockages in the system
• Show how issues and challenges can be resolved more creatively / holistically
• Offers new perspectives and intelligent solutions that will work because they are aligned with the system.

“A totally complex and obscured situation suddenly became as clear as day. How come we couldn’t see the obvious before? For all our company leaders it was a total revelation.” O.Wasserman, CEO of Wasserman AG/Swisslog, Munich

However you’re connected, you’re affected

When you work in any business or organization, you are a part of a living ‘system’ that invisibly connects everyone in it. By default, you are a representative of and are affected by what has happened or is happening within that particular ‘system’ both consciously and subconsciously.

Compared to many conventional tools and techniques, this approach enables people who are dealing with problems, developing ideas or making decisions to see the true context that is influencing their issue and the interrelationships of the key elements involved. Such elements could include team members, managers, leaders, customers, suppliers, strategy, money, the environment, future goals, new product launches, plans, processes, competitors and other factors.

Making your ‘system’ visible

How easy is it to clearly see the root cause of the issue that is affecting your business area?

Using traditional approaches this often seems to be very difficult, especially when we are dealing with the complexity of larger functions and organisations. What we can see are the symptoms of something not working very well – dysfunctional behaviours, ineffective strategies, roles that don’t seem to work, low sales, silo mentality, collusion, poor communication, low morale/retention, etc. However, from a developmental perspective there’s little point in trying to fix the symptoms…as you might well have previously concluded!

Using the methodology of Invisible Dynamics, when people begin a process of enquiry into visible symptoms that takes them into the underlying force fields, what had previously remained stubbornly hidden then begins to emerge and is seen from this fresher perspective. Healthy action can be identified and when implemented is naturally supported by the system. The energy that was previously binding the system is released and becomes a health-promoting factor.

Until the recent groundbreaking work in the emergent international field of Systemic Constellations by people such as Hellinger, Ruppert, Mahr and Stam, there was little awareness that that we even belonged to systems, and even less awareness that we might be able to explore how we are affected by the health of the system. Now we can proactively work with it to bring about extraordinarily positive results.

I believe this approach will ultimately change the way we experience and understand working together and profoundly influence how we communicate, develop people, test strategies, engage with customers, develop learning interventions and healthily engage with change.

Jeff Delay (Matchett Associate Consultant) is an international coach and facilitator who specialises in organisational learning and change. If you are interested in learning more about this method please contact us

Answers

1. All months have 28 days!
2. Fifty? Well no! It’s Larry! (Larry is the fifth son).
3. Stairs
4. None! If you do not believe me, try writing down all numbers in words, you won’t find the letter ‘A’ in any of them.
5. Mount Everest, it just hadn’t been discovered!
6. Clara lives in the southern hemisphere.
7. Only once, then you are subtracting it from 20.
8. They were husband and wife.