0861 247 328

Listen to Dave Ulrich on the Business of Business podcast

/in , ,

In his latest podcast, Chris Gibbons talks to Dave Ulrich, the world’s most sought after researcher, academic and business advisor in the field of human resources, human capital and leadership.

The conversation starts with the question: “Does HR really add value to an organisation, specifically its customers and shareholders? And if so, why do many people within an organisation still view the HR function in such a negative light?”

Don’t miss the opportunity to see Dave Ulrich live in South Africa, hosted in Cape Town and Johannesburg by Business Results Group and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. Reserve your seat today.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Build Your Credibility as an HR Business Partner Consultant

/in

The HR Academy is proud to present the first in the our series of eight workshops targeted at raising the bar of the HR professional. HR Business Partner Consulting Skills is a 2-day programme being hosted in Cape Town and Johannesburg. With HR often participating in projects and programmes, spanning system changes to strategy, the skill of being a credible consultant becomes key. This training programme provides you with tools that enable you to facilitate processes and projects that address crucial business problems.

Building on the three critical components of consulting success: managing yourself, managing stakeholders, and managing the project, you will be taken through a series of video cases, practical applications, and skill-building exercises, designed to improve your ability to facilitate and support business leaders in solving problems and deliver business results.

As a participant you will be asked to bring or identify a consulting project that you are currently involved in. Throughout the training you will apply the tools and principles to ensure that your learning investment adds value to your business. The programme is designed to take you through an active learning process where you will apply the phases of professional consulting.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Learn and apply tools for understanding and managing stakeholders
  • Identify strategies and tactics for dealing with resistance that could affect project success
  • Build skills in scoping, diagnosing, and contracting projects with business leaders
  • Improve ability to set up project teams that will lead to successful project outcomes
  • Integrate change management principles to enable project completion and business impact

Click here to find out more and to reserve your seat.

HR Capability Development Programmes

/in ,

In 2015 Business Results Group sponsored South Africa’s participation in Prof. Dave Ulrich’s Global Research project to identify the core capabilities required for the HR Professional of the future. The results of this research have not only underpinned Dave’s latest HR Capability Model, but for the first time in history South Africa’s contribution played a significant role with our participation ranking 3rd in the world, behind China and the USA.

The research has unveiled the 8 core competencies that will underpin the future capability and credibility of HR, a function that is increasingly challenged by paradox and required to be a trusted advisor to boards, leaders and the business. The impact of people is evident on the bottom line, and HR as a function is now playing a pivotal role in determining business value.

Development programmes for each core capability have been designed and are exclusively available in South Africa under the auspices of Business Results Group.

As a leader and HR Professional, you now have access to a series of 2-day workshops, each one targeting a specific area of your professional development. In partnership with IPM, members will also receive 2 CPD points for each day of training, and participants completing more than 5 programmes will not only qualify for a discount but will also be issued with an International Certificate of Completion issued by The RBL Group in the United States.

Click here to find out more and to reserve your seat.

Why neuroscience matters for business

/in , , ,

It’s imperative that business leaders can create a lasting environment in which creativity, meaning and purpose can thrive. How and why does neuroscience come into this? Harnessing neuroscience lets us embed sustainable behaviour change in existing leadership patterns, in turn leading teams to be more innovative and allowing organisations to flourish within a culture of trust.

Our brains are by no means fixed or set in adulthood: we are all capable of neuroplasticity, changing the way with think and feel about things.  If we want to make a change, say from fixed to growth mindset, we have to do it consciously and deliberately with awareness, focus and attention. In applying ourselves to a new skill or activity in this way, we can retain the capacity for the brain to change, reformat and potentially grow well into our 60s.

We can of course also help the brain by ensuring that we care for it. When working with new clients, the first thing we tackle is not just their surrounding environment, but their internal environment. Sleep is one of the key factors in neurological health that cannot be ignored. Many executives survive on far too little. What they don’t realise is that lack of sleep can have the same effect on your decision-making ability as being drunk. This is not what executives are hired and paid for. Seven to nine hours of sleep is key for the cerebrospinal fluid that sits around your brain and spinal cord to filter through the brain.  We can also help the brain by resting during the day (short naps, for example) if we want to and are able to.

What we put in our bodies as fuel also has a huge impact on how our brain works. Our body is not just a convenient vehicle for moving the brain from meeting to meeting. We receive a lot of information and input from our bodies. In the stomach and gut, you find almost all of the neurotransmitters – such as serotonin and dopamine – that are also active in the brain, and help us make decisions and function in everyday life.The gut is often referred to as the other brain. Caring for both body and brain with a healthy diet, we can improve our brain’s effectiveness at work. Good hydration is equally important; likewise, cutting back on alcohol and caffeine is ideal.

Senior leaders also need to understand the effect that stress hormones – cortisol and adrenaline – can have on our bodies and on those around us. What’s even more interesting is that cortisol can spread around an office. That’s right. It hangs around the body and can be absorbed by others through the skin; this effect is even stronger is if it is the leader that is stressed. Reducing cortisol and adrenaline are key to a happy and creative work environment. It can be sweated out through exercise. Other things that help include mindfulness, meditation, journaling and coaching – where you can release tension and worrisome thoughts onto paper or to another person.

Sometimes it’s not possible to remove the stressors from our lives. In these cases resilience, or an ability to deal with stress, is key. If we are able to use our brain plasticity to reframe and rethink the stress we’re feeling, we will be more resilient to its negative effects.

In sum, neuroscience turns out to be far more important for business than we might first imagine. Neuroscience-based coaching, and drawing on the remarkable plasticity of the brain, helps create the ideal environment and mindset in which business leaders can thrive, enjoy their work, and build happier teams too.
Tara Swart, CEO of The Unlimited Mind, is a medical doctor and neuroscientist. She will be speaking at South Africa’s only ‘Happiness-at-Work’ event this December. Learn more here.

Leading Like a Multiplier

/in , , ,

As the knowledge economy takes hold, companies around the world are rapidly realizing that the future value of their business no longer lies in the ownership of infrastructure and technology, but in intangible assets such as brand, intellectual property and people.  And those people all report to someone, a leader.  So how do leaders get more from their existing assets?

In 2013 Peter Bregman, a leadership development consultant writing for Forbes magazine, suggested that “there is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what we do as leaders”, adding that “I’ve never seen a leader fail because he or she didn’t know enough about leadership”.  Yet knowing, without doing, isn’t knowing.  

Leadership development is an industry in its own right, with numerous emerging development programmes punting their own unique formula about “what to do”.  There are many to choose from, and some fail dismally, leaving companies floundering about what to do next.  Yet some leadership development techniques stick and get traction – not just at a business level, but at a global level.  Liz Wiseman’s research on “Multipliers” exemplifies this kind of traction.

Listed on Thinkers 50 as one of the top 10 leadership thinkers in the world, Wiseman reflected on her 17 years of experience at Oracle and embarked on a research project focusing on the question, “How do some leaders seem to get more out of their teams than their counterparts?”.  The global project was conducted across 4 continents and 120 companies.  The result was astonishing and yet simple: great leaders do 5 things well, so well that they double their access to their team’s intelligence than their diminishing counterparts.

Every company out there would be thrilled to get double the value from their existing assets.  Wiseman’s research demonstrates that leaders who act as “multipliers” are not only successful, but they have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation.  Most importantly, multiplier skills can be learned and developed. Quite simply, Wiseman’s Multipliers approach tells leaders what to do to get more intelligence out of their existing teams.  Here in South Africa, companies like SAB, SAsol, Atlas Copco, Old Mutual and Standard Bank are already putting multiplier theory into practice, with good effect.

5 Secrets of Leading like a Multiplier

Multiplying leaders do 5 things: they act as talent magnets, liberators, challengers, debate makers and investors.

Talent Magnets don’t have a shortage of talent, quite the opposite – people line up to work for them.  They have an innate ability to identify what Wiseman calls the “native genius” in each member of their team, naming the talent and then putting it to work for them.  They are not constrained by traditional job descriptions, but rather seek to apply the talent of their team to the job at hand.  

Liberators free people up to do their best thinking.  Instead of providing all the answers, liberators have learned the art of asking the question, facilitating conversations that encourage people to find their own answers.  Multiplying leaders encourage people to think for themselves instead; those employees quite literally report that they become smarter.

Challengers are up for precisely that – a challenge.  The have the ability to stretch people beyond their current capability, thrusting people out of their comfort zones in such a way that the “stretch is met”. As people step into their new zone, they discover a level of capability that they never knew existed.

Debate Makers create the ultimate democracy, convinced that the best answers will come from the group. Instead of setting teams up to fail and fight, Multipliers who facilitate debate give their teams time to research their position, clearly define the parameters and goals, and then “pit their wits against each other” to unleash the potential of what lies in the realm of possibility.

Investors answer the biggest question of all: how do we get people in the business to be accountable for the outcome?  Investors know that real ownership and accountability only comes when the individual or team have made the decision themselves, what Wiseman terms “giving them 51% of the vote”.  A courageous act?  Maybe, but one that will forever change the landscape of your business. 

Written by Nicola Tyler