The Authority Series

‘The Authority Guides’ is a new series of pocket-sized books offering highly practical and accessible guidance on a wide variety of business matters. They are published by independent business publisher SRA Books under the imprint Authority Guides.

The books are aimed at the busy business professional and business owner; they are snappy and practical with absolutely no unnecessary padding and waffle.

Each book in the series has been written by an author who is not only an expert in their field but who is working today at the coalface of their specialism.

The first three books in the series are:

‘The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience in Business: Strategies to manage stress and weather storms in the workplace’ by Robin Hills

The emotional resilience of those involved in a business will contribute significantly to the organisation’s success. This Authority Guide from leading emotional intelligence expert, Robin Hills, will help you change the way you think about yourself and the way you approach potentially difficult situations. You will be able to develop your own personal resilience and understand how to develop resilience within the hearts and minds of your team and your organisation.

Robin Hills is the director of Ei4Change and is based in Greater Manchester. He has over 30 years’ commercial and leadership experience having worked in a variety of sales and marketing management roles. His special interest lies in emotional intelligence and linking together the outputs from assessments to give real practical relevance to improve effectiveness and productivity.

 

‘The Authority Guide to Marketing Your Business Book: 52 easy-to-follow tips from a book PR expert’ by Chantal Cooke

It’s never too soon to start thinking about how to market and promote your book. In this Authority Guide, leading book PR and marketing expert Chantal Cooke, presents 52 tips that will make your book stand out from the crowd, build your credibility as an author, and ensure you achieve those all-important sales.

 Chantal Cooke is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author. She has over 25 years’ experience as a columnist, broadcast and print journalist, and radio presenter for the BBC, commercial radio, national newspapers and magazines. Chantal has reported from Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and written travel articles for a variety of publications including the Independent on Sunday.

‘The Authority Guide to Financial Forecasting for SMEs: Pain-free financials for finance and planning’ by Simon Thompson

In this Authority Guide, forecasting guru Simon Thompson shows you how to build financial forecasts quickly, effectively and cheaply through his unique, proven and easy-to-follow 10-step process. By learning how to create effective forecasts you will master the ability to understand the potential financial outcomes for your business and be able to communicate financial information in order to successfully raise investment or loans.

Simon Thompson is a specialist in financial forecasting for small businesses. Established in 2011, his business ‘Edge Forecast’ has refined a unique combination of expertise, support and software, which has helped UK businesses raise millions of pounds of crowd-funded, angel and bank finance.

 

Each Authority Guide is packed full of useful information to help business leaders grow themselves, their teams and their business. 

For more information www.authorityguides.co.uk

Insights into Mindfulness Lightbulb Moments Cards

"Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment."  Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme  at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Ei4Change has available Lightbulb Moments cards giving insights into various aspects of emotional intelligence.  These have been well received as a valuable resource in education, training and coaching.  

A new set of 18 Lightbulb Moments cards - Insights into Mindfulness - has just been published.

Lightbulb Moments are free to download from the Ei4Change website.  You can  access to all the Lightbulb Moments series and other free resources by clicking on the button.

Emotional Intelligence Programmes for 2016

Ei4Change – Emotional Intelligence 4 Change - are pleased to announce that we have a number of emotional intelligence training initiatives starting in 2016. 

In April 2016, we are running an Introduction to Emotional Intelligence workshop and leading into our Advanced Emotional Intelligence Programme.  Both are endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management who provide a Certificate on satisfactory completion of the required assessments.

These programmes cover an in depth look at the role and function of emotions and how emotional competencies can be used and applied.  They provide a complete picture of emotional intelligence how these principles enable people and organisations to improve their performance.  The tools and techniques that participants will learn can be applied immediately.

Our programmes commence on April 4th at The Woodland Grange, Leamington Spa.

Ei4Change is also running the Introduction to Emotional Intelligence Programme via webinars over 8 weeks starting on 20th April 2016.  This programme is ideal for you if you live and work outside the UK or if you are unable to commit the time to attend workshops.

Graduates from the Ei4Change Advanced Emotional Intelligence Programme can cement their learning by enrolling on the Master Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence Programme.  Again, this programme is endorsed by the Institute of Leadership and Management who provide a Certificate on satisfactory completion of the required assessments.

We are running a Master Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence Programme commencing on the 20th June 2016 at The Woodland Grange, Leamington Spa.

There is a 20% Earlybird discount on all courses at Woodland Grange up until 31st January 2016.

For more information on our emotional intelligence training, see our website www.ei4change.com or contact Robin Hills at Ei4Change via email robin@ei4change.org.uk

Introduction to DISC Personality Assessments

Everyone should be treated with care and respect. Whilst people are different, everyone has a value with special strengths and qualities. People very rarely set out to cause upset - they just behave differently. That’s because they are different.

Personality assessments are useful tools that can give some interesting insights into these differences around motivation, management style, communication, relationship building, etc.

The theories that underpin personality assessments are surprisingly easy to understand at a basic level. There are many different personality and motivational models and theories, and each one offers a different perspective.

One of the most widely used, well respected and highly developed models is based on the theories of Dr William Moulton Marston, from his book Emotions of Normal People (1928). His ideas have been developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota into a robust, validated assessment tool known as DISC.

The DISC model presents a series of four main descriptions (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance).

Dominance = Results driven - strategic planning and action towards identified aims - tends to be outspoken.

Influence = Influence, persuasion, affability - communication and people skills - tends to be extraverted.

Steadiness = Steadiness and process - routine, dependability, reliability, credibility, trustworthy - tends to be team-orientated.

Compliance = Compliant with rules, proven principles, detail, accuracy - tends to be introverted.

Most people have a dominant or preferred main type, plus one or two supporting types in different degrees, which are dependent upon the individual and the situation.  The main characteristics of their dominant or preferred type are displayed allowing for recognition of a broad range of generalised behaviours.

DISC testing instruments assess people's strongest or preferred type and their supporting types from the four available.   The results are represented on a series of graphs and personality descriptions based upon the mixture of the types.

Once identified and recognised, each type can be seen to react differently in a given situation, to work with tasks in their own way and to engage with people in different ways.  There is no right or wrong type, the important point is that each type has differing strengths and liabilities.

The research and development over the years means that DISC can give valuable insights into predicting behaviour in the workplace and behaviour under pressure. In recruitment, DISC can provide very valuable compliment to the interview process.

This article can only give a very quick overview of the tool. To find out more you can enrol for free in my class Behavioural Styles and Teamwork on Skillshare using this link - http://skl.sh/1OVbIF2

The best way to get a clear understanding of your own profile is to take the assessment provided by a reputable, respected company. From this you can see what the assessment shows and how it can support you as part of a recruitment process or in your personal and management development. If this is of interest to you, please get in touch at robin@ei4change.org.uk

The importance of testing for clear thinking in recruitment

Neuroscience is rapidly changing our understanding of how human memory works.  For many years it was widely believed that the human brain recorded events like a video camera and that events that had been completely forgotten could be could be retrieved and played back given the right set of circumstances.

We now know that the memory does not work in that way at all.  In fact the human brain reassembles and reorders various parts of an event when retrieving a memory.  It, in effect, creates a completely new memory, often including details that seem very real but which turn out later not to have taken place.

The same process takes place when the brain remembers words and orders them together either to think analytically or attempt to express thoughts.  Rather than having a dictionary-like definition, words in the brain are stored as an ever-changing set of connections that constantly update their meanings.

When people are reading, writing, listening or speaking, their brains create new connections and hence new definitions for many of the words, statement or phrases that it is processing.  This phenomenon manifests itself in the tendency of business discussions to devolve into dialogues around semantics rather than address the actual issues in question.

The brain’s inherent plasticity when using words greatly increases the value of business communications that are clear and precise.  That clarity and precision (or lack of it) is simultaneously rewiring the word connections and definitions both in the brain of somebody who is writing and speaking as well as the person who is listening or reading.

Fuzzy wording creates fuzzy thinking

Unlike communications that are clear and precise, business communications that are fuzzy and imprecise generate connections between words that are similarly ambiguous and unclear.  In other words, a feedback loop is taking place: fuzzy thinking creates fuzzy wording which in turn creates fuzzier thinking. 

Many organisations tolerate, indeed encourage, the use of fuzzy and imprecise wording in the form of acronyms, buzzwords and jargon.  The culture created is one where fast communication can appear to occur so that anyone who uses the key words feels as if they are an integral part of the organisation. 

This has been compounded in recent years by the trend for people to express themselves using quotation marks or inverted commas in both writing and speech.  This is an expression of thought in its original form phrased by the communicator without clearly defining exactly what they mean.  Often the phrase is a metaphor and in most circumstances there is understanding.  Caution is advised as the rules around the use of quotation marks varies with language.   All too often, we know what we mean and think that we are communicating clearly but in reality this is often not the case.  As an illustration, we when we talk we think people “get it” but in reality they “switch off” when they hear something that isn’t meaningful “in their world” and so may appear to be somewhat “dumb”.

Clear thinking creates clear wording which in turn creates clearer thinking.

What this means when recruiting

From the perspective of recruitment, it is important to understand how your communication style reflects the fuzzy thinking and imprecise wording of the industry that you recruit for and the clients that you work with.  It is obviously necessary to assess your clients’ tolerance towards industry acronyms, buzzwords and jargon and imprecise wording and how ingrained it is in their culture.  How much are you contributing to this by your desire to be recognised as an experience professional?

For those organisations who recruit people who communicate in a similar way, this will contribute to the amount of ambiguous thinking, which is going to impact on the communication capabilities within the overall organisation. 

In the future, recruiters must put additional emphasis on a candidate’s ability to write and speak with precision and clarity.  As a result, the recruitment process will tend to make the overall organisation progressively better at communicating internally and externally and so appear to be “smarter”.

What can neuroscience tell recruiters?

There has been a lot of talk about neuroscience recently. It is the latest flavour of the month but what does it really mean in the field of recruitment?
Neuroscience is more than just an understanding of which parts of the brain become more active in certain situations. In fact, the more we find out about the workings of our most complex organ, the less we find that we truly understand. However, the research is uncovering new knowledge that can makes us better at recruiting to ensure that we place the right candidate in the right role at the right time.

The outputs from brain research, social science and psychology can help recruiters to attract and retain new candidates and clients by helping to understanding more about motivation, personalities and behaviour and what drives them. All this can play a part in improving performance.

A lot of the research is providing peer-reviewed evidence that supports many of the things that we have known or suspected for years. However, it is adding to our knowledge of what makes us tick as human beings. This means that we can now look at making changes in our behaviour that is proven to have more positive, sustainable outcomes in the long term.

Motivation

Motivation is vital in recruitment. However, it is not just about money. The motivation and reward systems in our brain drive us towards our goals with energy and enthusiasm.   Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in generating feelings of pleasure. In business, if a happy environment full of rewarding experiences is created, our brains produce dopamine in the right areas so that we become more motivated to push ourselves. So trying to find out what produces those dopamine responses for individuals will help to determine what motivates them.

Stress

Cortisol has been found to accumulate in parts of the brain when a person is feeling stressed. It has become widely known as the stress hormone. High levels of cortisol for extended periods lead to high blood pressure (with the associated health issues), memory loss and possible depression. All of these are costly to the individual and the organisation. Good businesses need a healthy workforce, which starts with performance management that is consistent and transparent to avoid stress in the workplace.

Recruiters may view a candidate’s history of working long hours as a positive indicator of commitment. In the future, however, recruiters may need to interpret a history of working long hours as a negative indicator suggesting a lack of balance and a consequent inability to think and perform effectively. This is, also, where consideration of a person’s motivational factors becomes critical. What is driving this behaviour?

Empathy and emotional involvement

Male and female brains are not only wired differently, they are infused with different combinations of neurotransmitters (such as oxytocin) and hormones (such as oestrogen, adrenaline, oxytocin). Oxytocin acts as a neurotransmitter and a hormone.

Women have been shown through studies to be better at intuitive thinking involving people. When you talk, women are more emotionally involved and will listen more. Women are more naturally empathetic.

Women’s ability to listen more effectively and read emotional cues has enormous implications for how businesses are run, especially in the crucial area of teamwork. According to recent studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is a positive correlation between the ability of teams to accomplish group tasks and the number of women on the team. The correlation between team success and gender was not the diversity of the team, but the actual percentage of women on the team. The more women on the team, the more effective the team, even when they worked online without face-to-face meetings.

From this, recruiters may need to view the recruitment of more women as a workable strategy for creating stronger, more effective teams. Such a strategy is likely to become more important as social networking increases the amount of team activity in the workplace.

Learning

Good leaders and managers ensure their people will be given opportunities to develop and grow. Synapses in the brain grow and strengthen with new information, referred to as plasticity. However, neuroplasticity takes time and the system can be overloaded if too much information is delivered all at once. Research shows that we retain information better when we learn in in small regular doses interspersed with good, quality sleep. Training that combines a mixture of theory, reflection and practical activity and will allow the brain to assimilate and use the information well. In order to embed in the learning, the training needs to be relevant and built into working practice over a period of time.

When a company is harnessing their employees’ individual personalities, goals, needs and abilities, in an employee-focused manner and communicate with them properly, the employees feel valued and valid, which helps to build a successful and intuitive working environment. This in turn empowers them and alleviates stressful situations reducing the levels of stress hormones such as cortisol, which can narrow their attention to any perceived threat, and opens them up to broader thinking, better problem solving and more creative thought.

All this is very interesting but what does it mean in practice? Certainly, from a recruitment perspective it means working with candidates in new ways to look at how they take in information, how they process information, how they work with emotions, what factors are motivators for them, how they interact with others, how they manage stress and their effective working practices.

Another way of looking at this conundrum is to start focusing on emotional intelligence. This is how a person combines their thinking with their feelings in order to build quality working relationships and to make more effective decisions. The evidence is mounting that emotional intelligence is a more effective measure of success in work and life that is bringing in the new understanding supported by the evidence from neuroscience.

TetraMap - a simple, yet effective, team building tool.

Within our workshops we help people to become more aware of their behaviours and how these impact upon other people.  We are accredited to use a wide variety of assessments, including Myers Briggs Type Indicator and DISC, but one is very quick to gain the insights in training workshops and is very straightforward to use.  It is called TetraMap; a tool for assessing behaviour that looks how you typically behave at work and how this is perceived by others.

TetraMap uses the metaphor of nature around four basic elements: Earth, Air, Water and Fire.  You have these four elements inside you, but one (sometimes two) is your preferred behaviour style.  Behaviour can change; you can adapt.  But do you know how you typically behave?

TetraMap is a very effective training tool.  Each person receives a booklet which contains a self-assessment exercise that helps identify which behaviours used most – and those used least.  Examples of these might be: decisiveness, generating ideas or looking for harmony.  You are asked to rank these in order, from those that represent you the most and those that represent you the least. 

Analysing your answers gives four different numbers or values that indicate your preferred elements.
This process only takes about 5 minutes.  In the workshops, people discover their own profile and those of their colleagues by everyone mapping their profiles onto one chart.  From this, it can be seen that there may be a high tendency in the group towards one element giving an indication of how the group behaves as a whole.  For example, planning and process driven ‘Air’may be high and enthusiastic, creative ‘Fire’ quite low and there may be a few ‘Earth’ dominant individuals who stand out.  The behaviour of the group may be due to do the industry / sector that they work in and the background of the participants.  This can be an eye opener for the group and we can explore the consequences that this can have on the performance of the group and the individuals involved.  Feedback from delegates is that this is really fascinating.

Next, we split the workshop into four groups according to their highest element to explore what the typical behaviours are of this element:

• What are the do’s and don’ts?
• How do you like to be communicated with?
• How do you not want to be approached?
• Which strengths do you bring to the team?
• How do you behave under pressure?

There is always a lot of fun and laughter during this exercise as people gain a better understanding of themselves and each other.

TetraMap is a good way of helping people to open up - especially for participants who may not have been enthusiastic about attending the workshop.  They see that the workshop is about them and their colleagues, and not about the trainer at the front of the room.

The main message is that behaviour is observed and that this behaviour can be changed; it is not about putting people into a box, giving them a label or a series of meaningless letters.  The beauty of TetraMap is that it is not about personality type or traits - it is focused around behaviour.  People grow within their business and in their positions and so their elements can change.

The TetraMap tool can be linked to Myers Briggs Type Indicator, DISC and to other psychometric assessments.  TetraMap is NOT a psychometric; it is a framework for exploring behaviour and communication.  We like it because it so easy use, easy to understand and easy to remember.

TetraMap can also be used on a large scale within a company, so that it becomes a common theme throughout the organisation.  We are involved in projects using TetraMap within the National Health Service involving senior managers, doctors, radiographers, learning and development managers, nursing staff, research workers, etc.  All report major benefits from its use, its application and its understanding within their daily work interactions and, also, outside of work.


Ei4Change are experts in providing TetraMap workshops so that you can easily understand your behaviour and that of your colleagues, which in turn leads to improved performance and better satisfaction.

If you want your teams to experience a really different style of workshop then talk to us.  For a case study from Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust click here