A fun week for me so far over on the lovely Isle of Man speaking at the CIPD Branch Conference this year. The theme was Building Success through Employee Engagement – I was in excellent company:
- Cathy Brown, Executive Director, Engage for Success
- Christine Amyes, Executive Director People, New Charter Housing
- Lindsey Finnie, Head of HR, KPMG
- Christine Sutton
- Justin Tipper, Head of Engagement, Rational Group
- Kim Paterson and Ian Goddard
- Barry Winbolt
A number of things struck me:
- If you speak you should Tweet – star of this was definitely Cathy Brown who also took photos!
- My topic of Values Based Recruitment was allocated to me by the mischievous John McChesney of Manx Telcom. A nice challenge – how well he knows me!
- It is good to know that it can be done! Christine Amyes had a truly GREAT tale to tell with impressive metrics to back it up. The video at the end was perfect, so good that I found it on You Tube for you to see.
- As you would expect from KPMG an excellent presentation from Lindsey on Reward and Engagement – just to keep us focused on the numbers.
- A case study from Christine Sutton – always good to hear about others doing it!
- The challenge of getting engagement going in different countries with different cultures Justin Tipper shared his thoughts.
- Then from Never Never Land Tinkerbell aka Kim Paterson and Prince Charming aka Ian Goddard got us up clapping to Happy and enthralled us with a snakes and ladders story – you had to be there… But story telling is so effective!!
- Then a very practical session on having those difficult conversations by Barry Winbolt. How can you keep engagement going if poor performance or behaviour are tolerated. Easy to say but so hard for managers to do.
So a day spent with stimulating people and catching up with old friends some of whom were on our first programme on the Isle of Man in 2000! It was great to see how they have developed and evolved.
My presentation challenged the status quo on recruitment so it was interesting to come across a report from Cirrus and Ipsos MORI about Connected Leadership. This recent research was conducted with over one hundred captains of industry and a wide cross section of senior HR and business professionals. It is UK centric but gives an excellent picture of how we have come out of what has to be one of the longest recessions where the carnage has been very visible and potentially will continue to affect how we can meet the demands and challenges now facing leaders in the run up to 2020 and beyond.
Key messages from this research are
- SHARED DIRECTION – Creating a shared direction and purpose across your business
- SHARED VALUES – Being authentic and creating a shared values-based culture across your business
- SHARED DECISION MAKING – Involving colleagues across the business in shared decision making
- COLLABORATION – Building teams that collaborate effectively across the business
- BEING AGILE – Being agile in the face of changing circumstances facing your business
My key thought was all of our presentations and this research are all saying the same thing – we have to aspire to be a TEAL organisation – if you don’t know what this means – hit your CURIOUS button and click on TEAL I promise you a riveting read!!