Directive questions
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...
Identification of high-potential technical people in technical organisations
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...
The Ladder of Inference
One of my favourite tools for promoting productive conversations in teams is the Ladder of Inference. I first came across it more than twenty years ago when we were trying to change our ways of working in a huge global reorganisation and transformation. The phrase was...
Delayering
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...
Mixed feelings about Teambuilding
When I was head of the Corporate University in Kazakhstan, one of our ‘best sellers’ was Teambuilding. And my people were pretty damn good at it. Which I guess is the reason that we had so many companies as clients and return as clients. I have always had mixed...
Your individual leadership brand, and the brand of your team
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...
When is a team a team and when is it a group?
Two recent events have reminded me about work I did almost twenty years ago about the differences between teams and groups (and even bigger ‘teams’ like communities and networks). I was coaching a young lady recently promoted to manager in one of my new clients in...
Some dilemmas in the selection & development of high-potential talent
In the last few years I’ve been involved with setting up high-potential identification programmes in a number of companies, both in ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries. Recently we held a workshop in Paris for a client who wanted to review best practices, to help...
Job grading, job profiles and job families
I seem to have been involved with job grading, job evaluation, job promotion, whatever you want to call it, on and off for most of my professional life. And it keeps returning! I was lucky enough to be taught job evaluation at Shell (a version of the Hay Group system)...
Some daily routines that help 21 Executives (and me) succeed
I do not normally read lists in HR, management or leadership blogs. Which is ironic given that some of my blogs here appear to contain lists. However one caught my eye recently and I ended up reading it. It was ’21 executives share the daily routines that help them...