The Importance of Self-Awareness for Leaders
Self-Awareness is essential for anyone aspiring to be an effective leader because it is our awareness of the way we Are and the way we Behave that allows us to understand how we can change and develop. The ability to recognise and understand personal moods, emotions and drives as well as their effects on others is a key aspect of Emotional Intelligence but Self-Awareness needs to be more than that for leaders. It is also important to understand our strengths, talents, preferences, habits, values, beliefs and how we make decisions to be able to gain a rounded view of how [...]
Don’t Leave Value For Money to the Beancounters
In Social Housing the essential concept of ‘Value For Money’ has been distorted and rendered no more than a bean counting exercise. How could we possibly expect anything different when responsibility for monitoring and regulation on value for money was left to the bean counters. The Homes and Communities Agency has warned that Housing Associations must improve their performance on value for money evidence or the regulator will step in. The HCA regulators want to see: Social landlords providing a common framework with value for money metrics against which to measure their performance. Transparency in value for money statements. Boards [...]
TLC for Middle Managers
Let’s be honest, we don’t take enough care of our middle managers. We expect them to lead their teams and get the job done but usually they have been promoted to manager on the strength of their ‘technical’ skills. They will have had precious little training or support to develop the skills they need to manage people. They end up being the ‘squeezed middle’. Junior staff get training so they can deliver better for customers. Senior managers get support to make sure there is effective leadership of the organisation often in the form of personal coaching. For senior managers, coaching [...]
The Secret to a Fulfilling Third Life
The Third Life is that period in our lives when we are free from the need to drive a career and still healthy enough to do the things we want to do. It used to be said that there were three ages: Growing Up, Working and Retirement and the University of the Third Age was founded on the premise of catering for people in their Third Age. People would expect to work until they retired and lived a life of leisure for what time they had left. Today, we can say that there are four ages in our life: Growing Up, [...]
REAL Leaders are Made not Born
“The true measure of leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less” - John C. Maxwell There are possibly as many definitions of Leadership as there are HR professionals and a search in the Amazon books store on ‘Leadership’ would give you 98,089 results. Most of those books would probably say that the job of Leadership is about: Articulating a vision Inspiring, engaging and motivating people Creating the right culture Getting the right people on board To achieve all of that, the Leader will need to have a range of highly tuned skills and Leadership Development usually focuses on skills, [...]
The Importance of Value for Money
The ability of a social landlord to deliver Value for Money is arguably the single most important factor in measuring its success and yet the social housing sector still has not been able to give the issue the attention it deserves. The debate recently has centred round the HCAs action in downgrading a small group of landlords for failing to publish a transparent, robust and timely value for money self-assessment as required under the regulator’s rules. The HCA also warned a further larger group of landlords that they hadn’t met all of the requirements and must do better next time. [...]