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

Has 'Leader as Coach' got lost in translation?‍

The winner of the 2020 Warren Bennis Prize—for the top leadership article published in Harvard Business Review—was The Leader as Coach. When I first read it, I felt validated. I didn't wonder then why the article wasn't called The Manager as Coach. It felt great to see illustrious people eloquently capturing an idea I’d also been championing for years: a coaching style of leadership is the main driver of performance and well-being over the long term.That belief had already shaped my work with CEOs and their teams across industries. It inspired me to co-found Manageable (coincidentally) in 2020, with the aim of giving everyone at work the gift of a great manager—rather than the accidental variety. How? By inspiring managers to confidently practise a coaching style of leadership.

Articles

Why Coach Your Team?

Most management advice focuses on what you should do—set clear expectations, drive results, build processes. But what if the most impactful thing you could do as a manager isn't what you do, but how you do it? Both Google and Gallup—organizations obsessed with measuring what works—have independently arrived at the same conclusion: The best managers aren't bosses. They're coaches.

Articles

Is it stress or microstress that you need to manage?

When it comes to stress, we tend to think about big challenges and setbacks. However, managing microstress is just as - if not more - important. These are small, difficult bumps in the road that we often dismiss as trivial, but they may be more significant than we think.

Articles

Bothered about the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting? Help your managers to use the human touch.

"A company is not really much more than the people that make up that company" says Ambre Soubiran, CEO of Kaiko, in the Manageable Conversations podcast, where leaders talk frankly about themselves and organisational issues.

Articles

Are you holding yourself back?

"The day you decide to stop learning, you will start dying" says Richard di Benedetto, President of Aetna International, in an early episode of Manageable Conversations, the podcast featuring leaders who talk frankly about managers, teams, themselves and organisational issues they face.

Articles

Preventing burnout: managers in the frame again

Gallup’s State of Global Workplace 2022 Report has just been published, along with a letter from Gallup’s CEO, Jim Clifton. He writes about one of the largest studies on burnout which finds that 76% of us at work will suffer burnout at some point.

Articles

Coachmania and Tulipmania

Over the past few years I've had the opportunity to speak to a large number of executives transitioning from corporate life to the gig economy. They were eager to pivot from being a leader or manager in an organisation to an external coach to organisations. They wanted to pick my brain and our discussions made me wonder about the parallel with Tulipmania.

Articles

Evaluating your next big career move

When you have a choice, how do you evaluate that next move? I've enjoyed talking about this issue with a few CEOs recently. After exploring some potential impediments to making the right move, I conclude below with a five-factor approach to evaluating it.

Articles

ESG progress demands great managers

What on earth am I talking about, connecting progress with Environmental, Social and Governance issues with having great leaders and managers in your organisation? For each of the three domains of ESG, investing in managers will be critical to success.

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

Brigitte West, Executive Director of Product at DrDoctor

Conversations

Natasha Frangos, Managing Partner at haysmacintyre

Natasha Frangos is Managing Partner at haysmacintyre. She specialises in advising ambitious, scaling businesses operating in the UK and globally in the creative, media and technology industries.

Conversations

Ian Constance, CEO of the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK

Are you comfortable challenging others and being challenged in return? Ian Constance, CEO of Advanced Propulsion Centre UK, talks about this motto of his and why it's easy to say and hard to implement.

Conversations

James Hollow, CEO and Founder of Fabric

James Hollow is the Founder and CEO of Fabric, a Strategic Design and Sustainability consultancy based in Japan.

Conversations

Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark

Chia-Lin Simmons is the CEO of LogicMark and an early leader in AI and IoT.

Conversations

Tony Jamous, CEO & Founder of Oyster

Tony Jamous is the CEO and Founder of Osyter, the automated global employment platform that removes barriers to remote work and distributed hiring. Oyster is the second Unicorn that Tony has founded.

Conversations

Jennifer Nuckles, CEO at R-Zero

Jennifer Nuckles is Chairperson & CEO at R-Zero, the biosafety technology company dedicated to making indoor spaces safer, healthier and more productive.

Conversations

Petr Baron, CEO of tbi bank

Petr Baron is CEO of tbi, the challenger bank that is one of the most profitable in Southeastern Europe. In this episode, Petr talks about:

Conversations

Luca Schnettler, CEO of Qumata

In this episode of Manageable Conversations, Luca Schnettler, CEO of Qumata, the Insurtech scaleup, talks about:

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

Having greater impact on screen in virtual meetings

Edie Lush is a journalist and communication trainer. She's also an expert in digital communication. This is a very practical guide outlining how to best meet over the screen, so important these days. She helps you find out more about what the best set-up is, what physical and vocal techniques are most helpful, and how to communicate in a way that is memorable. Whether you need to inspire your team or a client, this guide will help you.

Guide

Five dilemmas with one common denominator: knowing when to stop

Simon Devonshire is a serial entrepreneur, investor, NED and chair. He has worked in very big corporates like O2 and for start-ups. His career has given him the chance to observe the repeat behaviours common to successful entrepreneurs and leaders. In this guide, he shares some of these observations, with an emphasis on knowing when to stop.

Guide

Identifying and acting on your priority values as a team

Dr Mandeep Rai is the author of The Values Compass: What 101 Countries Teach Us About Purpose, Life and Leadership. She is a global authority on values, working with companies, institutions, and individuals around the world. She has travelled to more than 150 countries and reported as a journalist for the BBC World Service Reuters, amongst others.

Guide

Using Purpose, Authenticity and Delivery in leadership

James Ashton is an author, podcaster and speaker. He writes and speaks on business and leadership. He's spent years interviewing leaders across sectors and continues to discuss the art of leadership. In this guide, he outlines how you combine Purpose, Authenticity and Delivery in order to become an effective leader.

Guide

Navigating challenging times using your North Star

Minter Dial is a thought-leader, author, consultant and professional speaker on topics such as leadership, brand and digital strategy with a specialisation in digital transformation. Prior to this, he had an international career at L'Oréal, including being head of Redken Worldwide and on the Executive Committee worldwide of the L'Oréal Professional Products Division.

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.