Be inspired

You don’t tend to act unless you’re inspired. And time is precious. So here are ideas and thoughts worth making a little time for.

Guide

Understanding and overcoming procrastination

Fuschia Sirois is a professor at Durham University’s Department of Psychology. She is particularly interested in how procrastination, perfectionism, loneliness and traits linked to negative mood adversely affect health, and the qualities that play a role in improving well-being.

Estimates suggest that anywhere between 15% and 25% of the adult population procrastinate regularly. So what this means is that about one in five members of your team are going to be prone to procrastination.

Fuschia Sirois, Professor at Durham University’s Department of Psychology

I get much more satisfaction personally - which makes me more resilient - if I'm present in that moment, in every single meeting, in every single discussion, in every single debate. I just want to be present there.

Taylan Turan, CEO, Retail Banking, HSBC Wealth & Personal Banking

Conversations

Taylan Turan, CEO, Retail Banking, HSBC Wealth & Personal Banking

Are you fully present in every meeting?

Guide

The importance of being cognitively flexible in a world full of distractions

Naomi de Barra is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist who is excited about bringing great psychology to the workplace, to make businesses and people more productive. She has almost 20 years of business experience in FMCG, Pharmaceuticals, Recruitment and Healthcare. Her areas of interest are Neurodiversity, Leadership and Selection and Assessment.

Conversations

Brigitte West, Executive Director of Product at DrDoctor

Brigitte West is Executive Director of Product at DrDoctor and Co-Founder of Health Tech Hive, a network of change-makers who are building technology solutions to the world’s biggest health challenges.

Articles

How well are you harnessing complexity?

Now more than ever, firms need agility to navigate challenges. Tim Sullivan, former editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press, talks about complex adaptive systems, which are characterised by the relationship between heterogeneous agents making decisions, interaction between these agents, and the emergence of a global system. Organisations are examples of this.

ARTICLEs

Beyond Just Borrowed Logic: Why Frameworks Alone Can't Build Company Culture

The messiness of growth, change, and human dynamics makes leaders long for clean solutions—answers with structure, process, and predictability. That’s when the consulting frameworks roll in. And with them, something the learning strategist Dwayne Britton calls becoming McKinzered — borrowing off-the-shelf methodologies. Usually from the McKinseys, Deloittes, and Ernst & Youngs of the world—without asking whether these frameworks actually fit their people, culture, or context. As Dwayne puts it, “It’s this over-reliance on really kind of buttoned-up consultant speak, which I think can be like snake oil.”Manageable spoke to Dwayne Britton – a leadership and learning expert known for his candid, human-centered approach to organizational development – about frameworks that offer the illusion of control and how to build a company culture that doesn’t become a straightjacket.

“At the end of the day, there are just human variables that you're not going to be able to count on,” Dwayne says.

Dwayne Britton, Learning Strategist and founder of DAY|WON, former Head of L&D at On

Articles

Been a victim of the great training robbery?

Harvard Professor Michael Beer and his colleagues used the 'great training robbery' phrase around five years ago. Despite huge amounts being spent on learning and development globally ($370bn in 2019 alone), they said companies

Articles

Four reasons CEOs don't act to improve people management

A question cropped up for me while pondering the very high levels of employee engagement enjoyed by some firms but not others. According to Gallup's assessment of exceptional workplaces, they enjoy employee engagement levels of 70% compared with the global average of 21% and still quite impressive relative to the US average of 35%. This means that such firms with the highest engagement levels have 14 engaged employees for every actively disengaged employee, or over 13x the global average.

Articles

Leaders as inclusive Connectors

Great leaders throughout organisations have certain superpowers, one of which I call Connectivity.

Articles

Three secret reasons every manager can be a great coach to the team

Coaching works really well to boost well-being and performance. No question. A study of coaching of female leaders within GSK published in 2017 concluded as follows:

Articles

Are you coachable? The answer will affect your career and legacy

Coachability is going to become the key factor when it comes to hiring, keeping and promoting talent. If you're not coachable, then you aren't learning, you're atrophying or, at best, staying where you are. Who wants that?

Conversations

Taylan Turan, CEO, Retail Banking, HSBC Wealth & Personal Banking

Are you fully present in every meeting?

Taylan Turan, CEO, Retail Banking, HSBC Wealth & Personal Banking

Conversations

Janthana Kaenprakhamroy, Founder and CEO of Tapoly

Janthana Kaenprakhamroy is the Founder and CEO of Tapoly, the award-winning Insurtech business. Tapoly provides on-demand insurance for SMEs and freelancers. Prior to founding Tapoly in 2016, Janthana was Director, Internal Audit at UBS Investment Bank. During her banking career of 15 years, she also worked at J. P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank.

Conversations

Stuart Connolly, CEO of CloudMargin

Stuart Connolly is CEO of CloudMargin, a fast-growing FinTech founded in 2014 to enhance collateral management solutions for the financial services industry. Stuart was previously Group CEO for TriOptima and a Managing Director in the Securities Division of Goldman Sachs in London and New York.

Conversations

Ian Trenholm, CEO of Care Quality Commission

Ian Trenholm is CEO of the Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of health and social care in England. Ian emphasises the value of leading with curiosity, consistency and “relentless personal dissatisfaction”. He also talks about hiring people who scare him and the opportunity that comes from investing in those who aren’t performing as well as they could, rather than those who are already doing well.

Conversations

Mike Brennan, CEO of Tootoot & Stribe

Mike is Co-Founder and CEO of two organisations. The first is Tootoot, the world's first reporting app for young people in schools, enabling them to report on mental health or bullying concerns. The second organisation is Stribe, an employee engagement platform that enables organisations to connect with their people to make them feel happier and safer.

Conversations

Sabine VanderLinden, CEO of Alchemy Crew

Sabine is the Co-Founder and CEO of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab. They help global financial institutions unearth new sources of growth through partnerships with disruptive start-ups and growth ventures. They also help their ventures access growth funding from investors. Sabine is an expert in InsureTech and disruptive technologies, which she teaches at Bayes Business School.

Conversations

Neta Meidav, CEO of Vault Platform

Neta is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vault Platform, a pioneer of 'trust-tech', a new category of ethics-enabling workplace technology designed to foster trust. Google’s AI focused fund, Gradient Ventures, is a lead investor, along with Illuminate Financial, a VC firm backing companies that solve problems in financial services.

Conversations

Ambre Soubiran, CEO of Kaiko

Ambre is the CEO of Kaiko, a fast growing data provider in the blockchain space. She acquired the French start-up a few years ago and recently raised over $20m from investors to expand into North American and Asian markets. She has no doubt she and her team are building a billion dollar company, but only with the right culture and values.

Conversations

Tonner Jackson, CEO and Co-Founder of Course Studio

Tonner Jackson is CEO of Course Studio, which he co-founded in 2020. The business is on a mission to change the learning landscape by helping entrepreneurs and organisations design, launch, and scale high-impact online learning experiences. From locations across North America, Course Studio's teams have experience of designing some of the world’s most trafficked online classes for individuals like Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Hadfield, Steph Curry and Thomas Keller.

Conversations

Richard di Benedetto, President of Aetna International

Since 2013, Richard di Benedetto has been EVP of Aetna International, a health benefits business that's now part of one of the world's largest firms, CVS Health. His division serves 800,000 or so members in nearly every country in the world. He's passionate about making quality healthcare more accessible and empowering people to live healthier lives.

Guide

The benefits of being a connector within organisations

Martin Kilduff is a professor at UCL School of Management. In his research, he focusses on the importance of social network connections between people and the ways those connections help or hinder in their job performance, career, and their lives more generally.

Social network brokerage means connecting across people who are otherwise disconnected and looking for those ideas that are important in organisational life as well as in everyday life.

Martin Kilduff, Professor of Organisational Behavior at University College London

Guide

Understanding and overcoming procrastination

Guide

Celebrating neurodiversity and the power of small changes

Over the past decade Michael Barton has educated and inspired thousands of people on the power of neurodiversity. He is autistic himself and has written three books on the subject and contributed to numerous others. He focuses on the positive aspects of autism, relating its traits to those displayed by some of the most successful people in history.

Guide

The importance of being cognitively flexible in a world full of distractions

Guide

The power of unpredictable brilliance in leadership

Itay Talgam is an orchestral conductor who now teaches leadership to Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits and universities. He speaks at conferences around the world, including TED, Google's Zeitgeist, and the World Economic Forum at Davos. Drawing on his experience as a 'conductor of people' he strives to create human harmony through cooperation.

Guide

Understanding and bridging generational differences in teams

Dr Eliza Filby is a writer, speaker and researcher who specialises in what she calls 'Generational Intelligence', helping organisations understand generational shifts within politics, society and the workplace. Her writing has been published in The Times, The Mail Spectator, Guardian and the Financial Times. She published her first book 'God and Mrs Thatcher' in 2014 and is currently writing about ageing in the 21st century.

Guide

Exploring the nature and power of a coaching style

Farley Thomas is the Co-Founder of Manageable. He is also a CEO coach and adviser. He's run global business units and functions at one of the world's biggest banks. In this guide, he shares his views on why a coaching style is important, what it is and how to acquire it.

Guide

Measuring and fostering diversity in organisations

Suhair Khan works within the international creative industries to drive meaningful impact. In over a decade at Google, her work has spanned arts and culture, early stage product design, sustainability, strategy and innovation. She has led global projects with artists, cultural institutions, fashion brands and the creative sector for Google Arts & Culture. In 2020, she founded the non-profit platform openended.design to support artists, designers, and creative technologists.

Guide

Practical tips and techniques to thrive, rather than survive

Keith Goddard is an Occupational Psychologist and Sports & Exercise Psychologist. He uses his expertise to help people, teams and organisations achieve extraordinary things - be it in the boardroom or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He's regularly called upon to develop and deliver well-being, resilience and change programmes.

Guide

The three stages on the journey to becoming expert

Roger Kneebone is an author and Imperial College professor who directs its Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science. He researches what experts from different fields can learn from one another. His first career was as a surgeon. He then changed direction twice: he became a GP and then an academic.

Tools

Building Trust Quickly

The evidence suggests that the longer we know people or brands, the more we trust them. A study of the 100 most trusted brands in the USA found that only two were created in the past 20 years. Time is of the essence when it comes to trust, but what if we don’t have decades to build trust? We need hacks.

Tools

Learning Effectively

When you really need to learn, how do you go about this? And if you help others learn, what really helps?

Tools

Making Decisions

We’re all experienced decision makers. We make tens of thousands of decisions a day, often without thinking.

Tools

Correcting Predictions

The following four-step approach to correcting errors in prediction is proposed by experts in decision-making and judgement. The approach is illustrated with two examples.

Tools

Boosting Wisdom

This exercise will help you and your team think more wisely by using the power of psychological distance.

Tools

Fostering Healthy Dissent

Groups tend to make better decisions when people can express divergent views. When we don’t conform and choose to dissent, it’s usually not because we don’t care what others think or because we want to be difficult. We usually dissent because we want to be useful to the groups we belong to. It’s because we care a lot about the group.

Tools

Personal Growth Framework

This framework offers a way to clarify and manifest your ambitions. It helps you to say yes to the right things and no to the rest. It helps to create momentum to fulfil these ambitions and creates opportunities to celebrate your achievements.

Tools

Getting Ahead Of The Curve

Use a mathematical concept to get ahead of the curve.