http://www.apterinternational.com All the latest from Apter International en-us Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:37:10 -0800 Leadership is often thought of in terms of the leader themselves; are they charismatic, are they decisive, how intelligent are they etc. But is that the right starting point for understanding leadership and how we develop it?


How about we turn it all on it’s head. If leadership is about generating high performance in others, shouldn’t we look at leaders in terms of the impact they have those they lead?


There is lots of evidence now that the biggest lever on performance in an organisation is the climate – and that leaders have the biggest impact on this. So, within a leader’s sphere of influence, the sort of ‘micro-climate’ they create is perhaps a key issue to understand. How does their behaviour reward and encourage the behaviour in others, and are they getting the behaviours they want from their followers?


To really harness the ‘micro-climate’ a leader first needs to understand the motivational realities of what make each of us tick. And it’s not easy. People are human after all and they are changeable and inconsistent – a moving target really.


The most successful leaders vary their focus, behaviour and style to meet the demands of the organisation alongside the motivational demands of their followers. They are able to give people the opportunities to meet their motivational needs in a positive way that benefits both themselves and the organisation. That is what creating a successful performance climate is all about. Leaders need to ensure that opportunities exist for their followers to:


Know the longer term direction and have clear goals
Be enthusiastic about the job and be interested in it
Know the rules and what is expected of them
Question the status quo, be critical, make suggestions
Take responsibly and be accountable for what they do
Co-operate and help others
Feel safe and values as an individual
Enjoy a ‘team spirit’


It’s a tall order, but one worth striving for.


The Apter Leadership Profiling System measures the micro climate that leaders create by asking the leader about the climate they are trying to create and by asking their followers about the climate they experience. Only once you have measured these eight ‘climate conditions’ can you start to prioritise what is most important given the particular challenge the leader faces. Then you can work with the leader to help them ease off on some ‘conditions’ they may be over playing (eg, over focus on goals whilst trying to enhance the creativity in the team) and start to develop the leader towards filling the gaps where they are underplaying a condition.


Visit our leadership and management development pages.


 

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/72 Marie Shelton Sat, 04 Aug 2007 02:07:12 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/72  


Employee Engagement is widely acknowledge as being more than a passing fad, and something that has real impact on the performance of your organisation.


But what is it? There is no definitive definition, but according to the CIPD engagement “involves feeling positive about your job, as well as being prepared to go the extra mile to make sure you do your job to the best of your ability.”


The Institute of Employment Studies, meanwhile, describes it as “a positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation.”


So there is an emotional or motivational element to it, which goes beyond feeling good about work, but is aligned to the goals of the organisation. It also suggests that there is a related, behavioural component, but I would suggest that these are a product of engagement rather than a component of it.


Whether you agree with this or not, engagement is clearly a multidimensional experience. The problem is engagement surveys tend to be pretty one-dimensional. They are all about the employee and their opinion. These surveys ask things like “does your organisation make you feel…..?” or “Do you intend to be here in x years time”.


The issue that we have with these surveys isn’t a technical one, however: They just don’t tell you that much, and they certainly don’t give you a lot to work with (and not doing anything with your data can be a source of disengagement in itself). We know that because we’ve been asked to come in and dig deeper to make sense of engagement scores.


Let’s see if we can be a bit more precise about engagement.


Feeling good about work is important, but in itself not that useful without knowing what an employee really cares about. They could be satisfied because they have very low expectations! That’s why we ask employees what they feel is important and whether they get enough of these things at work.


But that’s not enough either. We need to know if employees care about the same things as their employer (and vice versa).


What if you and the organisation believe in the same things, but these are some how not being put into practice. Does your employer deliver on its values? Surely that will affect ‘engagement’?


While we are at it, what if employees and management agree have totally different ideas on what the employees actually experience? For example, in one businesses, the most important thing to employees was that they worked with their friends. Managers didn’t see it, and were about to embark on change that would split social groups and take away just about the only source of employee satisfaction!


Does your employee engagement survey tell you these things?


Many survey providers claim to have figure out the smallest number of questions that best predict business performance, but they kind of assume that all businesses are alike and engagement can be reduced to a “best” set of questions.


Others simply have no guiding framework. This means that most employee engagement surveys fail to measure a number of potentially important motivators that can have real impact on your business and provide satisfaction to employees. For example:


Fun and enjoyment is important to creativity and productivity.
Consideration for others is the bedrock of customer service.
The freedom to challenge and suggest new ideas is the source of innovation.


We can be confident that our employee survey, the Apter Work Impact System (AWIS) is motivationally comprehensive, because it is based on a theory of motivation that has been developed over 30 years of research and application across many domains of life including business, sport, education, clinical psychology and counselling, and health.


By measuring how employees feel, in relation to what they care about, in the context of the organisation’s goals, across the eight values of Reversal Theory, the AWIS provides a powerful insight into the motivational landscape of your organisation.


That inevitably creates a great deal of output, but the AWIS does not simply spit out a report for you to make sense of. At Apter International we have many years of Organisational Development experience and we use that to highlight what’s really important for your business and, importantly, what you can do about it.


 View our Employee Research pages.


 

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/74 Rob Robson Sat, 04 Aug 2007 08:54:35 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/74 Undoubtedly the focus on individual excellence is an important lever of organisational performance yet is the current obsession with the attraction and retention of key staff just a remnant of the great leader warrior obsession that has dominated the corporate culture and business bookshelves of the last decade or more? In contrast to the mythological status of extraordinary individual heroes and their transformational powers, many great organisations that have grown rapidly over the last twenty years can attribute their success as much to the close and effective relationships between a group managers and the good sense of the CEO to recognise and nurture this. This is surely a form of social capital - what could be termed ‘leadership capital.’ Social Capital is increasingly recognised, including by the World Bank, as an important asset. Social Capital sees economic performance and value creation as the function of quality of a set of relationships rather than the attributes of particular individual.


It’s like Greece winning the European football cup- many nations had on paper players with greater individual talent yet they failed and some failed spectacularly. Or alternatively the continuing failure of the Washington Redskins!


What’s this to do with talent management? There are several issues here not the least of which is how you define ‘talent’ in times of high volatility. But perhaps the core problem is the impact defining and rewarding people on the basis of individual achievement. So much work in the global market place depends upon responding to emerging opportunities and threats in ways that have little regard for formal roles and performance targets. Instead what is required is: trust, mutual understanding and a willingness on occasion to put others before yourself. Could formal talent processes and frameworks actually undermine this making an organisation increasingly rigid and unable to respond?


I am at present writing a series of articles on this subject and would be very interested in hearing your comments and views.

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/81 Steve Carter Wed, 15 Aug 2007 03:31:41 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/81 If you are considering
implementing any large-scale programme of investment – for example major
business change – ask yourself the following:


Would you build a house
without surveying the land?

Would you drill for oil
without knowing what lies below the ground?

 


Why, then, do people embark on massive programmes of investment and
change without knowing what impact it is likely to have on its people, and what
motivational and emotional drivers or barriers are likely to affect it?


That’s what happens, though. The vision is developed, the business
agreed, so on goes planning and implementation. Sometimes “readiness for change
is assessed”, but that tends to be based not on the reality of today – but the
experiences of the past. That’s better than nothing, but can lead to some
pretty inaccurate assumptions being made.


If you built your house without surveying the land, you couldn’t really
complain if your house started to collapse due to subsidence. If you started
drilling without a geological survey, you couldn’t complain if you didn’t
strike oil.


Why not survey the
motivational landscape of your organisation before you embark on a major
programme? You’ll reduce the risk of waste and failure, by identifying
potential sources of conflict and barriers to change, and weaknesses in your
capability to deliver; as well as strengths and potential drivers of success
that you can build your communication and engagement strategies around.


 

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/84 Rob Robson Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:58:19 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/84  

Change is now pretty much inevitable in work, whether that means responding to market volatility or implementing major change programmes.But businesses still struggle to manage change, and despite the all of the 'knowledge' that we not have about it - the methodologies, the models, the experiences - it still usually boils down to people.

But! Have you ever stopped to think that the same people that seem to resist (let's call it the "R" word) change at work might outside it be going through some incredible transformations of their own? People are incredibly adaptable and will even seek out change because they enjoy it - just try and get a picture of how many 'personal projects' your employees have on the go at any point in time.

So why does business change so often fail to deliver its intended benefits?

Many businesses start badly by trying to implement change in a culture that has been built around meeting objectives, following processes and generally trying to make life more predictable and less risky.

You can create conditions in which people are more likely to be open to change. It's just that most businesses choose not to, or don't realise.

Then, those senior managers that actually use some kind of methodology will probably create a "vision" but it will probably just talk their own language, about creating shareholder value and other meaninglessly rational business benefits. Meanwhile, employees are probably asking themselves, "will I still be able to work with my friends?", "will I lose that tiny bit of control that I currently have over my work?", or "just tell me what you expect from me".

Do you really understand your employees? Do you know what will turn them on or off? Do you try to communicate with them or just talk at them?

They may then pluck some unwitting "volunteers" from the business to be "change agents". These change agents are told that they should "champion" the change and tell everyone how great it is. Not that they really understand it, nor realise why they were nominated by their bosses.

Anyone and everyone can be a change agent. It is better to empower people to "champion" the change through their own volition than it is to have ineffective change agents that have been "selected" by the business.

Then comes the training. Many thousands of pounds are spent giving people the skills they need for their new role/to use the new system/to operate in the new organisation and no-one can figure why the learning is not applied.

Training an engaged workforce that is hungry to learn the skills they need is easy. Training a workforce that doesn't really get why they are there, or doesn't want to be there, is likely to be a massive waste of money.

Don't waste time pushing change from the top, using rational, process-driven methodologies and talking in rational 'business speak' at employees that you simply haven't taken the time to understand.

Understand your employees and what they really care about, and you'll find it all an awful lot easier. In fact, you might even stop using the "R" word....


Find out how by visiting our Employee Research pages, viewing our Case Studies or by calling +44 (0)1509 228896 for a no-strings conversation. 


 

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/100 Rob Robson Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:42:16 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/100 We are delighted to announce that, based upon qualitative research by Apter Development, The Orders of St John Care Trust has WON 1st Prize in the Personnel Today 'Hornet's Nest' competition, recognising their innovation and progressive thinking in HR.

The OSJCT developed a revolutionary recruitment process using insights gained by Apter Development's work. They produced a Realistic Job Preview (RJP), which they further developed into a DVD starring some of their team. This DVD is distributed to potential employees prior to interview so that they have a clear understanding of the role and expectations. Already OSJCT is seeing improvements within recruitment this year, which they predict will continue to rise.

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/107 Claire Winstanley Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:31:30 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/107 As you might remember last year we split the profiling business and our
consultancy business into two separate legal entities; Apter International
Ltd and Apter Development LLP respectively.

This was to enable us to bring greater focus and clearer investments leading to
greater values to the growing worldwide community of Qualified
Practitioners.

Following from this we are delighted to announce the appointment of Peter
Cash as Managing Director of Apter International Ltd, and Claire Winstanley
as Global QP Network Co-ordinator. This is an exciting new phase in the
development of the business and you will see lots of new things over the
coming weeks and months.

Rest assured as well the familiar faces of Gareth, Marie, Mitzi and Mike
Apter remain very much involved and keen to stay so. While Steve has moved
upstairs so he can do less damage as Executive Chairman!

Do keep in touch and let any of the team know how we can help you
in developing others.

]]> http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/108 Claire Winstanley Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:48:28 -0700 http://www.apterinternational.com/newsandviews/108