I’m really pleased to be able to share our first business newsletter with you.  I’ve been meaning to create one for such a long time but never had the skill nor the opportunity to do so.  However, I’ve been galvanised into learning this new skill as we’ve been so busy at Developing Your Potential and I wanted a way of sharing all our good news with you!  What better way to let you know about all our new products and services than in a lovely newsletter?!

I hope you enjoy reading it.  Please send me any feedback so that I can continue to improve.  And anyway …. it’s always great to hear from you!

Linking culture to strategy

With all the talks of credit crunches and companies tightening their belts, you may be deciding that you need to alter your business strategy.  But will changing your strategy be the answer?  Wouldn’t it be better to look at the culture that currently exists in your business?  After all, your culture really is the only true differentiator between you and your competition.  It’s been proven that the culture of your organisation does impact on the bottom line.  The higher your staff satisfaction, the better results in terms of business performance, customer satisfaction and profit margins.

Even if you have the greatest strategy in the world, you still need to engage the hearts and minds of your staff to bring it alive and make it work for you.  So what better way of achieving this than linking the two together?

I’ve been working with a profiling tool that enables you to do just that.  It ensures that the strategy you agree determines the culture which in turn drives your desired results.  As someone who has always been interested in creating healthy and energised cultures in organisations, I find the framework fascinating.  It helps you to determine where you are now and where you want to be in the future and it highlights the gaps where you need to focus your time and energy.  It uses a process that examines the key elements of your strategy, selecting priority areas for culture development.  If you have business values, these can be aligned during the process.  The priorities that you choose are then used to create a ‘culture gauge’.  Research is then carried out to define the true picture of your culture.  From the results you receive, you will get a uniquely tailored action plan that helps you to address the gaps and business issues, you currently experience.

If you’d like to find out more, please contact me.  I’d be delighted to come along and demonstrate how it all works.  I’m sure you’ll be as intrigued as I was to learn more about the five main types of corporate cultures as well as understand the fundamental qualities that underpin great cultures.

Learning in bite size chunks

Again with the market in mind, we’ve recognised that budgets are becoming tighter and time more scarce.  People have so much to do in their everyday jobs that there really isn’t the time anymore to take a full day out of the office to learn new skills.

With this in mind, we’ve developed a modular approach to learning that will allow your people to develop themselves over a period of time.  What better way to update their skills or learn new ones than by attending a two hour or a half day workshop where they develop their knowledge about a specific subject, go away and put their new found skills into practice before coming back to absorb some more?

As the learning is carried out in bite size chunks, your member of staff has chance to reflect on the models used, try out their new skills and find out what works for them i.e. what produces the best results.  The modules can be interlinked which means that your people can have a continuous learning development plan that takes place over a period of time.  We can also help to embed these skills by providing additional coaching support either over the phone or in person.

Below are a sample of the modules that have been produced, but there are many more …

• essential time management
• organisation skills
• effective delegation
• facilitating meetings
• handling change positively
• problem solving
• customer care
• communicating in plain English
• performance management
• interviewing skills

If you’re interested in some other topic, please let us know as we’re bound to have the materials … and if not, I’m sure one of us will have the skills and expertise to do so!

As you will see below, we are running a special offer on any of the modules booked before the end of September, so please contact me to discuss your requirements.

As you can imagine, we are very excited about these new services and hope that you are too!  We feel that they enhance as well as complement our current offerings and give you additional ways to help you develop your people.

I look forward to catching up with you again very soon.