• Course Details
  • Admin & Secretarial
  • Communication
  • Customer Service
  • HR & I.R.
  • International Trade & Finance
  • Leadership & Management
  • Marketing & Sales
  • Team Building & Motivation
  • Personal Development & Effectiveness
  • Quality Management Systems
  • Safety, Health & Security
• Public Course Calendar
• Training Needs Form

• ILM
• City & Guilds

November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
Apr 2010
Mar 2010
Feb 2010
Jan 2010
Dec 2009
Nov 2009
Oct 2009
Sept 2009
Aug 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009

• “CLIMBING THE RUNGS OF THE LADDER TO THE TOP”
• LOOK AFTER YOUR SECRETARY
• MAKE YOUR CUSTOMER YOUR BEST SALES REP
• English with City & Guilds
• Assessment Tools for October 2009
• Article(s) from the Institute of Leadership & Management: How Are We Managing?
• Bite Size: 10 Steps to Success
• Online Training
• Public Training Courses
• Hospitality Skills Training Scheme
• Transformational Leadership

LOOK AFTER YOUR SECRETARY
“Your personal assistant plays an important role in your job, so give credit where it is due.”

“ENGLISH” has been widely used since the term “Globalisation” was introduced. However, in the London Academy’s perspective, English is more than just a communication tool.
People judge you by your usage of the English language – how well you speak it and how fluent you are. People even get promoted because of their ability to speak. If that is the case why not start now and develop yourself in the use of proper and meaningful English.
Realising this TNI is providing working adults who are poor in the English language an opportunity to improve their skills in spoken and written English so that they will be able to communicate with their superiors and others in English confidently.
There are values that can be achieved through learning and mastering the English language. Values such as self-confidence, self-expression, creative thinking, team work and an enhanced IQ would serve you well in an environment where English is predominantly used to perform your work.

TNI in collaboration with City & Guilds have structured an English course for people who want to learn and master this language. So visit our website for the details.

DON’T WASTE TIME WITH WORKPLACE DISPUTES?
“Make the time to talk to us for a Training/Coaching solution”
Training Network Inc. at your service!!

Back to Top

ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR OCTOBER 2009.
HERE IS A GUIDE WHICH EXPLAINS SIX PRINCIPLES FOR MOTIVATING OTHERS FOR YOUR PERUSAL AND USE.

Introduction
Motivation generates success. Therefore we pay attention to motivation. If you are in a leadership role as a manager, chances are you’re preoccupied with how to motivate others.
Can we motivate others? The answer seems to be that we cannot motivate others, but we can create conditions for people to motivate themselves.

What is Motivation?
Motivation, according to the dictionary, is a noun under the word ‘motivate’. If you look up ‘motivate’ you will discover it means “to stir to action; to provide with a motive.” Motive is defined as “impulse that causes one to act in a particular manner.” What is that ‘impulse’ and how do we get it to work for us? Why do some people work harder than other people? Why do some strive for promotions and others reject them? What motivates people?.
Many things influence our behavior and our motivation. Some of those things are: current personal situation, past experiences, present work situation, the reward system, the managerial system, group relationships, the company culture, perception, and personal values. Each of us is motivated by different things at different times.

Motivation Comes from Within
The most important thing to keep in mind about motivation is that we cannot motivate others. Motivation comes from within – people motivate themselves. The only thing a supervisor, a committee chairperson, an instructor, or anyone else can do is to create the condition for people to motivate themselves.

Six Principles for Motivating Others

What can you do as a leader to create situations that motivates?

There’s nothing earth-shattering in our six principles of motivation. But how do you put them to work? The following table suggests common-sense ways for leaders to use the six principles. What you do in your particular situation will depend on your creativity

What can everyone do to create situations that motivate?
If you are not in a formal leadership position there is still plenty you can do to heighten motivation among colleagues and fellow participants in a training session. In our increasingly participative workplace, opinions are sought. If you identify what motivates you personally and share your thoughts with an enlightened team leader, committee chairperson, or supervisor, chances are they will respond positively.

Personalised Motivation
Each of us has motivational hot spots. We need to this in mind when we try to create situations that motivate others. What motivates you or me may be different from what motivates someone else. If you are motivated by clarity, you might assume that it would motivate someone else. Be careful. Don’t force your motivation preferences on someone else. The safest way is to include all six motivational elements in your undertakings. That way you will connect with everyone’s motivational hot spots.

Different Strokes…
This guide is like a tool box. The tools or ideas you find inside have to be selected – the right one for each situation. You need to learn to use these tools. How? Through structured practice. Set goals. Select techniques. Use them. Assess the results. Determine whether you hit the targets you set. If you missed a target identify why – maybe you should consider changing tools. Give yourself feedback about how well you created conditions to motivate others. Identify what you did well and what you can improve, and map out a plan for improvements. This personal feedback will help you develop motivational techniques that energise apathetic, bored, and unmotivated colleagues, course participants or anyone else.

A final word about your success
We said at the outset that motivation comes from within. People motivate themselves. Since motivation comes from within, supervisors, committee chairpeople, instructors, for that matter all of us, are limited in our power to motivate someone else.

Back to Top

ARTICLE(S) FROM THE INSTITUTE OF LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT,

HOW ARE WE MANAGING?

Sitting in the world’s fifth largest economy surrounded by many of its most successful and respected businesses, you’d be forgiven for assuming we Brits are pretty good when it comes to management. But you’d be wrong. For all the brilliance of our top performing firms, a quick look at the statistics is all it takes to see that good management is surprisingly scarce in the average UK organisation.
Over the course of 2005, a succession of separate surveys highlighted serious managerial shortcomings across British business. In March, an Investors in People (IIP) report warned that too many managers were failing to inspire their staff. Researchers found almost a quarter of UK employees felt their manager took little or no account of their views – and that this lack of involvement was a definite demotivator.
These findings were backed up by the Work Foundation’s November Workers Index, which reportrecorded a similar level of staff dissatisfaction across British firms. Of the 1000 workers surveyed in this joint study with MORI, 24% said they felt failed by their immediate boss. Crucially, 60% of those who were critical of their organisation saw improving poor management as the single biggest challenge facing their employer.

An Open Secret
But it’s not just front line staff concerned by the abundance of bad management. In August 2005, the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) surveyed 1,200 UK managers for its From Bottlenecks to Blackberries report and found that a whopping 30% described the management skills of their own company as ‘poor’. And the higher you look up the organizational structure, the greater the awareness of these managerial failings – and their impact on the business bottom line. Back in 2004 the HP reported that over half (56%) of British bosses felt low management skills were a major factor in the nation’s productivity gap.
While business experts are quick to argue that it is difficult – and potentially dangerous – to read too much into such opinion based surveys, they are also the first to admit there are significant and longstanding problems with UK management practice. ‘The issues about UK management go back to the late Eighties when the Thomson and Mabey report and the McCormick report said that UK management wasn’t really up to scratch – British managers were undereducated, they didn’t really engage in learning and training to anything like the degree they should when compared to other countries,’ explains Penny Tamkin, associate director of the Institute of Employment Studies. In 2000, Penny was one several organizational experts called on by the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership (CEML) to investigate the factors impeding UK management capability. Unfortunately, she admits, the key problem areas they highlighted back then remain as visible today. ‘UK managers still don’t receive anything like the amount of training and development that they do in other countries,’ explains Penny. ‘UK companies are also a lot less strategic about management development, less thoughtful about the career development of managers. Our training is a bit more ad hoc, less aligned to business objectives, to where the individual manager wants to go or the potential they’ve shown.’
The problem, argues Penny, lies not with our managers themselves, but with the many UK employers taking a slapdash and tight fisted approach to management development. There are two key issues here, the opportunities that UK managers get and the culture of the organisiations they are operating in. It doesn’t necessarily mean that our managers are naturally less able, that we ended up with all the duffers.’ She points to the results of a recent study carried out for the Sector Skills Development Agency, which compared how British managers and their overseas counterparts were perceived across a range of industries. ‘UK managers  are often thought to be better than foreign nationals in dynamic entrepreneurial environments,’ explains Penny. ‘Take telecoms as a sector.
Telecommunication companies are seen to be at the forefront and UK managers in these firms are seen to be as good as, if not better than, other nationals. But the problem with the UK is that an awful lot of our firms don’t operate in an entrepreneurial environment, so where our managers are seen to struggle is in companies that are a bit stuck, a bit staid, that have been around for a long time and have a lot of transformations to undergo.’
The idea that less adventurous elements of the UK business community are failing to tap into British manager’s natural talents would go some way to explaining our underperformance in certain sectors. Manufacturing, for example, has been in steady decline in the UK for several years, and outdated management practices have long been mooted as a possible factor behind this slump. Recently, a study by the LSE and Mckinsey went one step further and actually proved this link by comparing British manufacturers’with competitors from the US, France and Germany. ‘We looked at four baskets of practices – operations, monitoring, targets and incentives’ explains the Advanced Institute of Management’s Nick Bloom, who co-authored the research at the LSE.’ The average standards of management were lowest in the UK, and when we correlated our findings with profits, productivity, market share, growth rates and stock market value, we found a very significant positive correlation – meaning these management measures are very reliable indictors of firm performance.’
Thankfully, Britain’s below-average score is not a sign of general ineptitude among manufacturing managers. Like all countries surveyed, the UK showed a huge gulf between the best and worst managed firms. But, compared to its rivals, British manufacturing boasts an unusually large number of woeful managed companies that drag the UK average down. ‘There are some very good managers in the UK,’ assures Nick. ‘Proportionally, the US has roughly as many well-managed firms as the UK, it just doesn’t have this long tail of underperformers the UK has.

Sting in the Tail
The study identified two major reasons for this tail of poorly managed firms. A relative lack of product market competition meant mismanaged companies that would soon have gone under in the US were able to stay above water in the UK. Interestingly, Britain also boasted a higher proportion of family-run firms that historically handed ownership down to the eldest-born son. This practice of ‘primo geniture’, unheard of in the US, was linked to bad management and poor company performance, ‘Statistically, these firms are very badly managed,’ explains Nick. ‘And there are an awful lot of them in the UK.
Unfortunately, this millstone of woefully managed organizations is by no means exclusive to manufacturing. John Burgoyne, professor of management learning at both Henley Management College and Lancaster Business School, and another key contributor to the CEML research, is all too familiar with what he describes as ‘our long tail of substandard managers’. While he agrees that a shortage of competition has something to do with it, he argues that it is lack of ambition, among smaller firms in particular, that sustains this deadweight of mismanaged companies. ‘Something like 56% of the UK workforce is employed in small business – which means a lot of our management capability lies in small firms,’ explains John. Many of these SMEs will not have an expansionist agenda. They are what is known as lifestyle small businesses, companies that – as long as they remain economically viable – are happy to stay small and have no great desire to become the next IBM of Microsoft’. Without this drive to grow and improve, John argues, small firms have little incentive to invest in the selection, development and support of their managers.

Quantity vs Quality
Even when you discount the long tail of poorly managed companies, John argues, UK firms have always taken a peculiarly laissez faire attitude to management, which has impeded their managers’ performance and development. With more managers per head of working population than any of our economic rivals – the UK boasts an estimated five million managers in a working population of roughly 30 million – British employers are decidedly liberal when it comes to promoting people to managerial positions. ‘In terms of management capability, we go more for quantity than we do for quality,’ warns John. ‘One in six of the UK workforce are managers, which sounds like a lot. And yet the UK management population is less well qualified than most or all of its competitors. ‘With as few as 12% of the UK’s five million managers possessing a formal managerial qualification, and only 8% belonging to a professional body, management in the UK suffers from not being a widely professionalized profession,’ explains John.
‘Essentially, we’ve got too many managers of not enough quality and it all stems from this British culture for over-reliance in the belief in the gifted amateur when compared with other nations.
The Work Foundation’s David Coats agrees there is a worrying tendency among UK firms to underestimate the importance of management skills and, crucially, the desire to manage. ‘You could simply say there are lots of people around who are not up to the job, but I think the problem is slightly more profound than that,’ explains David. ‘A lot of people find themselves in management roles who have never really wanted to be managers at any point in their working lives, and very often they are promoted for reasons other than their management capability.’ Not only do such people lack the skills and inclination to manage people well, warns David, more often than not they lack any structure or incentive to encourage them to do so. ‘First-line managers in particular are subject to intensifying pressures and competing priorities, and sometimes the management of people gets neglected in that. If managers are given, say, a specific sales target to deliver, without being given any particular objectives about motivating and managing people effectively, then it’s hardly surprising if they focus exclusively on volume of sales. That may be why so many staff feel failed by their managers.’
A former HR director of Cadbury-Schweppes and principal of Henly Management College, Chris Bones believes many organizations are now paying the price for their longstanding failure to invest in management skills at the first-line and middle management level, coupled with a drive towards flatter organizational structures. ’10 to 15 years ago an awful lot of companies got rid of what I would call their middle management development programmes,’ explains Chris. ‘Now the people who would have gone through those programmes are in management positions, where they are managing many more people than their predecessors and have their own job accountabilities on top. The jobs they are in are designed so badly that where people have an expectation that “my manager will listen to me”, or “my manager will take time out to coach or develop me”, well, my manager doesn’t have the bloody time, he is far too busy trying to do his own job.’
Chris agrees that the importance of management has been downgraded in UK organizations of late. Intriguingly, he argues its devaluation has owed much to our growing fascination with leadership. ‘Management has, for the last seven or eight years, been seen as a pejorative – you can’t just be a manager, you have to be a leader, “oh, that’s a management issue, that’s not important, what we need is leadership,” says Chris. ‘But a lot of people, if they look honestly at the leadership development programmes, they’re not looking at top-level strategic leadership, what they are talking about is how to motivate, how to communicate, how to get better performance out of people, and that’s what I think the job of the manager is.’ By rebranding them as ‘leadership skills’, Chris argues, organizations have attached an air of exclusivity to what are the fundamentals of good people management. ‘Effectively, we’re restricting what we now call leadership development to a smaller group of the population. But ultimately, if you think about it, good management skills are something you have to give to anybody who’s in the job of managing other people.’
To raise the average standard of management in the UK, argues Chris, employers have to get ‘back to basics’ and ensure that key leadership or people management skills are developed and delivered at all levels – and among first-line and middle managers in particular. And that means, first and foremost, a greater commitment to training. ‘Management is not something you can just learn on the job,’ asserts Chris. ‘You have to take some time away and reflect on yourself and your own abilities in order to build effective people management skills.’

No Holy Grail 
Organisations may argue they simply can’t afford to invest more heavily in management development but the truth is few can afford not to. Not only does improved management yield greater productivity and profits, it doesn’t take that much time or money to achieve. ‘Good management practice is relatively straightforward, it just requires effort’ asserts Nick. ‘It’s not some holy grail, it’s much more of a science than you might think. It’s as simple as reading a manual and working out what’s sensible – things like collecting information, having proper systems for promotion and recruitment, and effective targets and incentives can get you most of the way.  What is amazing is that a lot of firms don’t adopt these practices. It just comes down to desire.’
As the business landscape changes, management capabilities are only going to prove more critical to organizational performance. Which is why any firms yet to make better management a key strategic priority had better get a move on – or risk finding themselves mired amid the UK’s long tail of underachieving organizations. ‘The advent of digital technology has left most organizations with only one source of competitive advantage, which is how good their management is – because that’s the one thing you can’t replicate from another company,’ concludes Henley Management College’s Chris Bones. ‘The only person in an organisation who can impact engagement is the line manager. As an organisation, if you’re not investing in developing and creating time and space to improve line management then you are failing to invest in the one thing that can drive your business forward.’

Back to Top

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

This is a one day powerful work shop to be held at Sheraton Subang Hotel on 24th November 2009 (Tuesday) from 9.00am to 5.00pm

Hope this newsletter has benefitted you in some way or other.

End of News!
Cheers!
Jimmy ong