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10 Styles of Leadership – Part 2

In Leadership Styles Part 1 we looked at how both Ghandi and Churchill employed very different leadership styles to achieve success.  Moving on from servant and visionary leaders, here we explore three more contrasting approaches to leadership.

What kind of leadership path will you take?

Strategic Leader

Strategic leaders instinctively present a challenging vision in achievable steps, enabling the organisation to move forward with minimal disruption.

Whilst visions will compel action, unless people see progress toward the fulfilment of that vision they become disenchanted.  The strategic leader forms a game plan everyone can understand and participate in, one that will eventually lead to the achievement of the vision.  The strategic leader challenges the organisation to work to the plan, ignore distractions and do what needs to be done to achieve the next step, and then the next.  The strategic leader coordinates the various departments of an organisation so that the entire community is focused on the prize….

How innocent’s Richard Reed Leads his People

Starting on September 12th, Richard Reed the founder of innocent smoothies will front a new business show on BBC Three called “Be Your Own Boss”.

innocent’s success is largely down to the way they hire and lead their teams

Richard knows a thing or two about growing a business – innocent went from an idea to a £100 million business in just eight years, and we took a film crew behind the scenes to see how they did it.  Alongside great products, quirky marketing and a steely commercial edge, innocent’s success is largely down to the way they hire and lead their teams.

They recruit and manage against five critical behaviours no matter what the role:…

Case Study: Corporate Branding & Change Management Team Event

HSBC Merchant Services would be changing their name to Global Payments in line with their US parent company. The process was part of an internal campaign and a full day was set aside for a management team event for the whole company to get everyone involved, excited and motivated about the name change.

Feedback: “Thank you for your help with our Brand Day. Your team were highly efficient and everything ran perfectly on time and as we had hoped it would.”

Fresh Tracks was asked to develop a programme for this event, with content that reiterated the benefits of the name change and highlighted Global Payments’ mission and values. Above all it needed to be a fun activity that everyone would feel part of. This was a large scale programme with activities to run twice throughout the day, each time for over 200 participants….

Peak Performance Tuesdays

A poll carried out among British workers suggested that we are at our best at precisely 11.33am on a Tuesday.

Give your team a mid-week opportunity to celebrate

Mondays are spent recovering from the weekend and coping with the realisation that there is a full working week ahead, but by Tuesday morning most of us are into our stride and raring to go.

This can-do attitude reaches its peak at around 11.30am on Tuesday, by which time we’re enthusiastic, organised and feeling in control. Unfortunately this positive performance peak only lasts a day – come Wednesday afternoon the motivational heights have been scaled and we’re on the downward slope to the weekend with most of us easing off on the productivity and intensity of work so that by Friday, we’re ready for the weekend again.

If this sounds familiar, or explains working patterns in your own team throughout the week, there are two ways of dealing with it:…

It’s not Where or Who it’s How

Historically managers have segmented teams, clients and business units based on hard quantifiable factors such as industry sector and geography.  Having served us well for many years this practice may soon become outdated.

Communication has changed a lot since the 1870s when Bell invented the first telephone and how teams keep up with changes in communiition could effect how well they perform.

It’s common to meet a sales person whose role is defined by a very specific market sector, say hospital based healthcare in a geographical territory such as North West England.  Yet isn’t it more important that the salesperson can effectively communicate with the client?  …

Leading Academics say Tea Breaks make better Teams

There may be no ‘I’ in team but there is ‘tea’ and it turns out that tea (or coffee) could be the key to unlocking the potential of teams, with one US bank anticipating a staggering $15 million productivity increase as a result.

When teams take tea breaks they perform better according to MIT study

Back in 2004 the Oxford think tank Career Innovation published a paper entitled The Conversation Gap. The basis of their findings was that 4 out of every 10 high performers in several leading companies reported that they have an issue that they want to raise but feel unable to do so – the Conversation Gap of the title. Additionally the increase in electronic communication continues to rise. Average emails received and sent rose by over 30% from 2010 to 2011 despite spam dropping from 19% to 16% in the same period. One of the consequences of this increase is that those spontaneous conversations by the water cooler have reduced. Therefore employees feel less informed and there’s less likelihood that new ideas and opportunities will be discussed unless a formal meeting is convened.

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A Recipe for Successful Teams

Great chefs know that alongside the core ingredients it’s the careful use of seasoning that turns a mediocre meal into a something scrumptious.

What additional ingredients would make your team even more successful?

Here we offer some tips to help team leaders make their team rise:…

Management Training – The Moral of the Story

It could be said that those with the greatest influence on society are leading the nation astray. MPs cheat on their expenses, bankers alter the rules to suit themselves and journalists listen in on private voicemails to get a story.

The moral: The dishonest, if they act honestly, get no credit.

Business skeletons seem to be falling out of closets with increasing regularity and Wikipedia’s growing list of corporate scandals features many previously respected companies….

10 Styles of Leadership – Part 1

Leadership is often taught as a single skill whereas in fact the term ‘leadership‘ covers some very different and distinct characteristics. Churchill is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest leaders, his supreme confidence turning his country’s military approach from defensive to offensive.

Was Sir Winston Churchill a great leader? If so what type of leader was he?

Yet this same bombastic approach turned out to be his Achilles heel when, after the war, he failed as a peace time politician. Ghandi achieved similar notoriety yet was a very different character.

Just being a good leader is not always sufficient; here we’ll look at three very different sorts of leader, each uniquely equipped to lead in very different circumstances:…

Leading Gold Medal Teams

As London greets the world’s best teams there’s a great deal that leaders of workplace teams can learn from their example.

Here are three of the things leaders of workplace teams could learn:…