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Gower author Sharon De Mascia will be speaking on Effectively Managing Stress in the Workplace at the Health & Safety: Changing Perceptions Exhibition and Conference in Manchester 6-7 March. It is organised by IOSH the Chartered body for health and safety professionals. Sharon De Mascia is a Chartered Business Psychologist and an HR/HRD professional. She is Prince2 qualified and has 20 years experience of delivering change management and other organisational initiatives across both public and private sectors. She is the author of Project Psychology: Using Psychological Models and Techniques to Create a Successful Project.
You are lucky if you’re the HR practitioner whose advice is followed without challenge and who is consulted oracle-like before any action is taken toward change. More often, change is already underway by the time HR is first involved: thought processes gone through; decisions have been made; perhaps even action taken.
Entering the change process at this stage, HR must be able to assess how sound the reasoning is, how much the readiness has been examined, how robust the plans for solutions are and how much attention is being paid to the effect on the people. Any weaknesses or gaps found in the assessment put HR in the position of needing to slow things down and get their clients to re-examine earlier decisions, assumptions or actions. It is impossible to do this without strong influencing skills.
Influence is underpinned by credibility and made easier through relationship and HR practitioners must devote energy to establishing their credibility and building their relationships widely so that when the time comes to need to influence, the ground will be fertile. The art of influence is knowing when to push and when to pull; when to ask and when to tell; when to pace the client and when to lead. It is knowing how to insist without dogmatism; how to compromise without folding; and how to withdraw leaving the way open for future progress.
Without influence, the HR practitioner is confined to executing the will of the leaders and cannot add true value to the direction and management of change.
This article (found on their website) is written by Jan Hills who is the partner at Orion Partners and responsible for the HR strategy and HR capability service lines. Jan co-wrote the Gower book Developing HR Talent which is part of the Gower HR Transformation Series.
Most projects have two factors in common i.e. they involve people and they bring about change. These two factors are fundamental to the success of any project yet they are given only scant reference in the ‘models’ of project management.
The psychology of managing people and change is increasingly emerging as a significant success factor in project management. In Wellingtone’s Project Management Blog Sharon De Mascia offers a plan to ensure you pay these factors sufficient attention.
Sharon De Mascia is the Director of a business psychology consultancy by the name of ‘Cognoscenti’. She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and a member of the Chartered Institute of People and Development. She is also Prince2 qualified. She is a visiting Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University and a Supervisor on the global MBA at Manchester Business School. De Mascia is the author of Project Psychology published by Gower.
“Innovation is not a process, but an outcome.”
The Forbes Leadership Forum brings renowned speakers and thought leaders who discuss their leadership strategies. As a speaker at the Forum, Gower Author Alexander Manu was interviewed by Shaku Selvakumar for the IBM Impact 2011 Blog. In this interview Manu discusses in-depth the concepts of Imagination and Innovation in business Extract:
The redefinition of innovation as a human behaviour outcome, a dynamic in constant change, requires the shaping of new responses in business and the economy.
The past understanding of what innovation “is”, was generally connected with a breakthrough in technology – some new tool being employed in some new way. This understanding limits the potential of innovation as bound by the tools employed, instead of the imagination employing them. The latent imagination triggered by an innovation outcome is the true goal of innovation. It is not what “I can do with this now”? but “what can I become doing this in the future”? The tool is not a response, but a question. Every innovation is a question. The truly important innovations are a series of questions.
A few definitions: Innovation is an outcome, a new behaviour, a new way of doing things. Disruption is a behavior – an outcome involving a media and a user – changed by invention. Invention is a moment of discovery or creation of something new. Disruptive Business means the sum of new behaviours and their support models. Innovation is a moment of use, a manifest behaviour that engages an innovation object into new uses, and modifies the habitual conditions of the present.
This position challenges the current understanding of innovation, and some of the labels applied to innovation typologies, such as the label “disruptive innovation”. In general, the current discourse around innovation addresses competently the technology side of an invention, at the expense of the motivational side of the user, the human motivation which leads in the behaviour of use.
Alexander Manu is Chief Imaginator and Senior Partner at InnoSpa. He is the author of Distruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-design of Business published by Gower.
For anyone unfamiliar with the process of business wargaming, Daniel Oriesek’s series of slides provides a very helpful definition as well as a number of pointers to help you reflect on whether this is something of value for your organization. With an increasing focus on the using scenarios for future planning, helping with risk management and the development of new product and service offerings, I anticipate that the use of these techniques will spread significantly over the next five years. Daniel Oriesek is Principal with A.T. Kearney in Switzerland and co-author of Business Wargaming: Securing Corporate Value.
Sadly, in a number of companies, there is still something of a gap between the rhetoric around developing employees and the reality. Stuart Emmett’s refreshing article on the subject, ‘Learning in Companies’, offers you a mirror to hold up to your own organization’s performance in this area. Stuart Emmett is co-author of The Relationship-Driven Supply Chain.
You may remember in February we gave you the link to Susan Walker’s blog where she is outlining the trials and tribulations of writing a book. Well if you have been following you will see that she has finished the first draft. Best Value from Measurement is currently due to be published October 2010.
