Young Professional Development Programmes
The older you get the more likely you are to be attracted by nostalgia and the belief that things used to be better. Whether this is really the case is not the subject of this blog, but there is one subject on which almost all companies, whether in Russia, Europe or...
HR and The Business
One of the classic challenges for HR professionals, even heads of HR, is understanding the business. My career is unusual in that I have had both senior HR roles and senior business roles, and in fact there was a period where I moved back and forward between the two....
Matrix management: alignment and influencing across boundaries
I‘ve been recently helping a couple of fellow consultants who are designing and running a leadership development course for the European organisation of a Japanese multinational. They asked me to do an hour session with each group on managing in the matrix. The...
Talent pools
I have been assisting a new Italian client design a talent management system and an important part of this has been the concept of talent pools. Groups of people selected as ‘talent’ on whom to concentrate attention. I was reminded how often I have helped introduce...
Developing Competence Frameworks
I was recently asked by a consultancy if I could help with their bid to a client who, as part of the project, wanted to set up competence frameworks. Did I have a couple of slides to explain how one would develop such competence frameworks and some examples of...
Stakeholder Mapping
I was recently asked by a fellow consultant if I could help and shed some light with information about Stakeholder Mapping, for a company for whom they were designing leadership workshops. I’ve used Stakeholder Mapping a lot during my career, especially when running...
International Best-Practice Crisis Management Building Blocks
Just before the Covid-19 pandemic started to hit Europe, we began Crisis Management consultancy for a large petrochemical company. Working together with the former global Head of Crisis Management for Royal Dutch Shell for over five years, we were asked to share...
The Leadership Qualities of Positivity and Optimism
Some time ago I was coaching a very senior director in Russia and about a year after we began, their company invited a well-known international consultancy to conduct a leadership potential assessment on the top fifty or so executives, of which they were one. Although...
The rediscovery of peer-to-peer expat support
Recently I’ve come across a number of articles heralding peer-to-peer support as a new concept in the management of global talent mobility. The articles suggest the challenges of relocating and settling abroad, from administrative and official tasks through to...
Factors in choosing a new location for a shared service centre
One of the interesting aspects of being involved with shared service centres is the choice of location for a new one. This happened a few times when I was Vice-President for Strategy & HR for Shell’s global business service network and, although it wasn’t the...