Is your organisation getting the returns it expects from corporate training? In the first episode of The Executive Central Podcast, Phil Dobbie talks to Rob Balmer about why companies are failing to achieve the outcomes they expect. Often, he suggests, it’s because the emphasis is on the wrong people. Attention is paid on developing senior executives, whilst under investing in front-line managers who are charged with putting strategies into action. The solution, says Rob, is to ensure you provide front-line staff with a coaching solution bespoke to your company and geared to their role. But how can you do that without costs spiraling out of control?

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Why training fails – could you be targeting the wrong people?

In this second edition of the Executive Central Podcast Rob Balmer talks to Phil Dobbie about controlling your corporate immune system. When we make big changes to our body – like a heart transplant, for example – our natural self defence system kicks in. The same thing happens in business when we try and improve on the way we do things. Rob suggests the problem is not that companies aren’t innovative, it’s that they haven’t prepared their organisations for change.

Is your immune system destroying your business?

To many people innovation relates to creating something new, such as a new product or a new way of promoting your services. In this edition of the Executive Central Podcast Rob Balmer, the Managing Director Executive Central, explains that innovation needs to relate to the three horizons of growth within your business. As he explains to Phil Dobbie, once you understand those horizons the opportunities for innovation become much clearer.

The Three Horizons to Innovation

Is it possible to coach your workforce into innovation? Can you actually teach people to come up with innovative ways of working? It’s a question Phil Dobbie puts to Rob Balmer, MD of Executive Central, in this latest edition of the Executive Central Podcast. Rob suggests that innovation comes through a blend of attitude, time and diversity. Coaching, and in particular its focus on the practical application of knowledge, can dramatically impact the degree to which both incremental and radical innovation is developed, survives and thrives in any organisation.

Coaching for an Innovative Culture

Every organisation needs a performance culture – achieving the best outcomes by having your team working well together and, importantly, focusing on what matters. In this podcast Phil Dobbie asks Rob Balmer, Managing Director at Executive Central, how you create a culture where the focus is on what counts, rather than what’s urgent.

Building a Performance Culture: Focus on What Matters

For many organisations the focus on developing leadership potential is focused entirely on the top rung of management. In this podcast Rob Balmer, Managing Director at Executive Central, explains how leadership needs to be developed throughout the company, with a different focus dependent on the role and the individual. It’s not something that can be effectively achieved with off-the-shelf training.

Building a Performance Culture: Leadership at all levels

Almost every company will say they support inclusion and diversity in their workforce, usually because it seems like the right thing to do. Many wouldn’t expect to see it drive productivity improvements. Yet, that’s exactly what can happen if the policy is implemented and supported in the right way. In this edition of the Executive Central podcast Phil Dobbie asks Rob Balmer, Managing Director at Executive Central, what makes a productive inclusion and diversity policy different to one that delivers no benefits to the company’s bottom line?

Building a Performance Culture: Inclusion and Diversity

It’s vital, if you are to build a performance culture, that you get that best of out everybody in the company. That means unlocking everyone’s full potential? So how do you achieve that. In this podcast Executive Central’s Rob Balmer explains to Phil Dobbie that there’s a very straight forward formula that all business leaders should follow. Leaders also need to look at themselves. Is their leadership style encourage or hindering the potential of people? Rob talks through the three types of leaders - I Leaders, We Leaders and You Leaders. Which one are you?

Building a Performance Culture: Unlocking the Full Potential of People

We’ve been looking at managing a performance culture in recent episodes of the Executive Central podcast. To move to a performance culture you, inevitably, must change how things are done. In this episode, Phil Dobbie asks Executive Central’s Rob Balmer about how, as a leader, you drive the change process, bringing people along and ensuring you maximise the outcome. Rob explains a process built around three crucial stages, each with their own leadership challenges.

Leading and Managing Change

In the last podcast Phil Dobbie spoke to Executive Central’s Rob Balmer about how leaders need to be constantly driving change in an organisation. Nothing stands still in the corporate world. In this episode, Rob explains how change can never be achieved without influencing the whole team to embrace the change. You need to consider the Stakeholder Value equation when selling the reasons for change.

Influencing Change

Lots of managers and leaders spend their time working on specific tasks, rather than coaching their staff. They work hard to avoid being with the people who work for them. Rob Balmer describes it as a destructive work environment, where staff quickly become disillusioned. It’s also, of course, hugely inefficient.  In this podcast he talks to Phil Dobbie about how to turn around your leadership style, so you spend more time managing people and the work they do, rather than doing the work yourself.

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Leaders and Managers as Coaches

We tend to assume that leaders need to come from a position of strength. After all, doesn’t their team want to feel reassured that someone is in charge with a vision and a clear understanding of what to do next? In this podcast, Rob Balmer suggests leaders need to be prepared to be a little vulnerable because only then will they open the workplace discussion to alternative approaches. Phil Dobbie asks him, ‘isn’t this all a bit touchy feely?’

Leaders embracing the power of vulnerability

There’s nothing less productive than a salesperson without any leads. They resort to inefficient cold calling. Yet your company is filled with people who could potentially identify new sales opportunities, if they only knew how. In this edition of the Executive Central podcast Rob Balmers talks to Phil Dobbie about how to generate new business throughout your company. The obstacle, he suggests, is overcoming peoples aversion to selling.

Selling – Everyone In Your Organisation Should Be Doing It

Have you planned your career, or have you just taken the easy path that was laid about before you? In this edition of the Executive Central Podcast, Rob Balmer talks to Phil Dobbie about the importance of owning your own career. That means understanding your key strengths, that make up your personal brand. You might know those strengths, but does everyone else appreciate them? If not, you could miss out on opportunities. And are you using your unique attributes to determine what path you take? In other words, do you own your own career?

Owning Your Own Career

From time to time companies need to make big changes to stay ahead of their game. It can be a risk – changing the way you do things – but not as risky as preserving the status quo, allowing nimble competitors to grab your market share. The problem is, these transformations often go badly wrong, creating poor results and demotivating staff. In this edition of the Executive Central Podcast Rob Balmer takes Phil Dobbie through three reasons why transformational change fails, and what to do to avoid that failure.

Why transformational change goes wrong

In this edition, Executive Central Managing Director Rob Balmer tells Phil Dobbie a his company’s new partnership with 4C Organisations. Together with 4C’s Prof Michael Anderson – author of ‘Transforming Organisation’ – they explain the benefits the partnership will provide, in helping companies to identify the shortfalls that prevent a truly innovative and productive workplace. The intelligence of 4C’s modelling with the coaching credentials of Executive Central provides a one-stop solution for any company ready to future proof their business by building a sustainable innovative culture.

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