It has been great to be in Gibraltar having some time to chill and catch up with candidates. Yesterday I went to the Gibraltar CIPD Branch Meeting. It was a really practical session facilitated by Sylvia Kenna who is on the committee and leads a consultancy called TheHRDept
Sylvia gave us a quick introduction to Marshall Goldsmith’s concept of FeedForward instead of Feedback. The basic tenet being that we can change the future but can do little about what has happened. This positive outlook definitely rang a chord with me as I have always believed that we can learn from mistakes by looking forward to what we will do differently in the future.
We then went on to discussing in small groups the benefits of Appraisals or Performance Reviews. It was great to share good practice and learn from each other. It made me realise how dependent organisations are on the calibre of their leaders and managers. It also made me wonder whether we do enough to develop leaders and managers, I don’t think we do.
Since I have had the luxury of some time on my hands this week, I have been playing with a number of things and whilst playing I came across an interesting point of view about a manager who was on the surface all the things we look for – charismatic, a coach, likeable, caring, hardworking but … the download goes on to explore his Achilles heel.
He does not really understand the business as a whole and works in isolation. Yes, it is our old friend ”silo mentality”.
It was also interesting to read about Andy Lancaster’s session at the CIPD Learning & Development (L&D) Conference last week, Bringing the Learning & Development (L&D) Profession into the Future. He has identified 10 top learning shifts for L&D professionals and the first one was Look at business need not L&D priorities. Helen Mayson at ILM gave a good summary.
So here we have three separate events but all coming back to the same theme – quality of leaders and managers combined with the need to look at the organisation as a whole, in other words to scan the environment. I urge you to do this, as being run over by a 10 ton truck called Change could get messy!