Monthly Archives: March, 2010

One of John Kay’s columns in the FT  (March 24 2010)  tells the story of Nobel prize winner James Black, who was responsible for the development of highly successful drugs which made massive profits for the pharma industry, including ICI.  He had joined ICI because it offered a ‘stimulating and well-funded research environment’. For Black [...]

Questionnaire from Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc) ISBN 978-1-57675-557-0. Adapted and reproduced by permission of the authors. Learn more by visiting their website www.keepem.com.

So, how do you score? Here is how to make sense of the test and decide what to do next.

I want to bring to your attention a national scandal that you’re probably not aware of. That around a quarter of all employees in the UK are disengaged from their jobs, meaning that they have no interest in their work and even hate it. They make little or no contribution to the enterprises they work [...]

The words, coach and mentor, and their derivatives, are used interchangeably in this article.
Discussions on coaching and mentoring usually throw up at some point the question whose benefit is it for? Is it for the coaching client or for the sponsoring organisation or for the coach? This is not a trivial question. Whether or [...]

The reform of corporate governance from Cadbury (1992) to Higgs (2003) was strongly influenced by agency theory. The reformers’ solution to perceived agency problems in countries with unitary boards was to prescribe rules for board structure, in particular by specifying the number and roles of non-executive directors (NEDs), and requiring the separation of the chairman [...]

Important Aspects of the Social Climate That Act As Antecedents to Employee Engagement.
Reproduced from Engaged to Perform: A new perspective on employee engagement. Lancaster University Management School White Paper 09/04, May 2009.
Shashi Balain and Paul Sparrow
1. The perception that the organization’s systems, procedures and ways of allocating resources (financial and non-financial) are fair [...]

The power of coaching to bring about employee engagement and a big profit improvement was reported in the magazine Coaching at Work (vol 5/2). The Solaglas company said that their return on investment (ROI) on the coaching programme was   490 per cent, and that the project made overall savings of almost £800,000, including lower recruitment [...]

 97% of respondents believe that coaching enhances the ease with which
changes are accepted and implemented.
 Individual and/or team performance improvement was rated as the main
business benefit observed from executive coaching.
 Over 70% of organisations surveyed offer coaching to employees at all levels
– this has increased by 24% since 2008. Where coaching is offered only [...]

Over 20 years ago a group of friends of which I was one founded a completely new company. We did so not only because we wanted to be millionaires, but because we were fed up with our existing employers. We made a list of all the things we disliked about companies we had worked for [...]