One of my favourite types of project is when I can work on the 'People Strategy' for a company. Probably in part because of my mixed business/HR background – as a People Strategy goes hand-in-glove with the Business and Financial Strategy of an organisation – and...
I have been recently helping a large mining company in Kazakhstan with its strategy for its corporate university. Even prior to the Covid pandemic the wish was to move heavily into digital. Which was also the only way they could meet their vision of 100% of their...
Having done executive coaching for over twenty years, it is interesting to see how little the challenges facing newly hired executives coming from other companies, or indeed those promoted internally, appear to have changed. It is just as fascinating is to realise how...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
I wrote in my introduction to this series of blogs about them ‘containing my ideas, thoughts, observations and helpful tools, based on my experience’. GAPS is one of those incredibly helpful tools. In the late 90s and early-to-mid Noughties when I was at Shell, I did...
It seems that at almost every Russian or Kazakh company for which I work, I end up helping them design their Executive Coaching programme and process. I am of course more than happy to help. It’s pleasing to see Executive Coaching becoming more acceptable and...
I shouldn’t still be surprised, I know, but the number of line managers I continue to meet in different companies and different countries, who still only think about formal training courses for the development of their staff, (or even the individuals themselves who...
Having worked with CCL (Center for Creative Leadership) in both Russia and Kazakhstan, who were the originators of the 70-20-10 meme for corporate learning & development many years ago (sometimes written 70/20/10 or even 70:20:10), and also being a researcher by...
Having run the leading Corporate University in Kazakhstan and now advising one of the top Corporate Universities in Russia, both of which were under the expectation of their stakeholders that they would be developed and ‘transformed’ into something better - without...
I was having lunch with somebody who used to work for me in Kazakhstan and who had recently left to join an international consulting firm. In fact I had hired him and seen him grow and develop so that he was actually heading up our HR Consultancy team before he left....
I’ve been recently conducting some focus groups for my Russian clients. Finding out what I already know: that Russians in general are not a very mobile workforce, and in this case do not necessarily want to move from their larger city place of work to a much smaller...
Many years ago I worked for four years as a recruiter for Royal Dutch Shell. If you do ten interviews a day you need to get very good at asking questions, as you do if you teach interviewing, which was also part of my role. This was useful experience for me later, not...
I’ve had lots of jobs, either as line manager or the senior HR person, in technical organisations. Where most of the people are engineers and/or scientists. And I am very aware of the difficulties involved in the identification of high-potential people (‘hipos’) in...
My current Russian client, a large and very successful petrochemicals company, has had many reorganisations in the last couple of years. One of these that they are implementing in all their production locations, is a systematic delayering. I recently designed...
Recently with a new client in Russia I’ve found myself in executive coaching sessions talking about brand. And previously in Kazakhstan, we built the concept of brand into the new senior leadership development course we introduced. Brand is a concept I embraced many...