Category: Leadership

Business, Leadership, Personal Management

You hired good people so let them get on with it!

As a manager or business owner, one of the biggest responsibilities you have is to assemble a team of skilled and capable employees who can work together to achieve the goals of the organization. But sometimes, as the boss, it can be tempting to micromanage and control every aspect of your team’s work. However, this can actually be counterproductive and limit the potential of your employees.

When you hire good people, it’s important to trust that they have the skills and expertise needed to do their job. By constantly checking in on them, second-guessing their decisions, and imposing unnecessary rules and restrictions, you risk sabotaging their creativity and motivation. This can lead to a decrease in productivity, disengagement, and eventually, high turnover.

So why not let your employees get on with their work and give them the space and resources they need to excel? Here are some reasons why it’s important to trust your team and let them take ownership of their work:

1. Fosters creativity and innovation: When you give your employees a sense of autonomy and ownership over their work, they are more likely to explore new ideas, take risks, and think outside the box. This can lead to innovative solutions and fresh perspectives that can help your business grow and thrive.

2. Builds trust and loyalty: By trusting your employees to do their job, you demonstrate your faith in their abilities and create a sense of mutual respect. This can build a culture of trust and loyalty that can motivate your team to go above and beyond for your company.

3. Increases job satisfaction: When employees feel like they have control over their work and are trusted to make important decisions, they are more likely to feel satisfied in their job. This can lead to higher engagement, better morale, and reduced turnover.

4. Improves productivity: Micromanaging can be a huge time-suck, taking up valuable hours and resources that could be better spent on more important tasks. By letting your employees take ownership of their work, you can free up your time to focus on bigger picture tasks and help your team become more efficient and productive.

In conclusion, hiring good people is only half the battle – you also need to give them the space and trust they need to do their job. By fostering a culture of autonomy, innovation, and mutual respect, you can build a stronger, more engaged team that is motivated to take your business to the next level. So next time you’re tempted to micromanage, remember: you hired good people, so let them get on with it! And you’re free to support the business growth 😉

Here to help you.
Business, Collaborating, Family, Leadership, partnership, Personal Management

No one is just TOO BUSY!

We hear it all the time, don’t we, and sometimes coming from our own mouths!


But what does it actually mean?

Life can be pretty hectic, with noise all around us and demands on our time and attention like never before. The digital world can become overwhelmingly distracting, with notifications pinging incessantly on our devices.

Ultimately though, we are in much greater control than we might think. It is also true that we make time for what is important to us. Or more accurately that which we believe should be important to us. After all, there is (for most of us anyway) nothing more important than our loved ones. But do we always make time for them, or do we succumb to the pings of our other attention seekers?
I often wonder if this is a self-induced state by building our importance so that we attract way more attention than is necessary. Should we instead, be ensuring that we are setting ourselves up better for getting out of the way, and reducing our personal involvement in matters that really do not need us?

It is worth asking yourself what you are currently involved in that you could easily step away from – you may just surprise yourself and your family and friends will thank you.

Business, Collaborating, Family, Leadership, partnership, Personal Management, Social

I haven’t made any New Years resolutions

No specific NY resolution from me

However…

> I will continue to work on personal growth every day.

> I will continue to challenge myself to be an outstanding human being every day.

> I will work diligently on my commitments every day: both business and personal.

> I will work on business development in Trust Partner Services Ltd every day.

> I will declutter my connections. Where I am no longer needed, I will disconnect, making room for fresh engagement.

Wishing everyone a very
rewarding and contentment filled 2023

Happy New Year

Business, Collaborating, Customer Focus, Leadership, Learning, partnership, Social

We’re in – are you? – Trust Partner Services Ltd

https://www.trustpartnerservices.com/trust-joins-the-chamber/

Trust partners with the Herts Chamber

Having watched from the sidelines for some time, we decided it was time to roll up our sleeves and join the fray.

We are now officially members of the Hertfordshire Chamber of Commerce and it is our intention to be a fully active member of this illustrious group.

Our WHY for this is a strong desire to be a supportive local business for other local business and to investigate further ways of acting more local. For as long as I can remember, our approach has been international, and that will remain, but we would like to become way more active locally. This is therefore, the first step into understanding the local landscape. We want to listen and learn and support where we can, as we understand our role.

Looking forward to meeting other chamber members and learning about our local business eco-systems


© 2022 Trust Partner Services Ltd Trust Partner Services LTD

Business, Leadership, Learning, Personal Management

Why the right coach is an external coach

I’m not totally sure why we struggle with the notion of embracing coaching as a tool to develop top-quality performance outcomes from key business leaders and teams. It’s my belief that the role of coaching tends to fall to the line managers who generally speaking have little time for coaching and equally have not benefited from investment in personal development to enable them to become good or great coaches.

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

My assertion is borne out from personal experiences in both large and small businesses and teams with the emphasis on management over coaching. Too often the managers are wrapped up in the day to day management and they also become too close to the teams and lack objectivity.

The basic premise for coaching is that the coached party has all of the resources available themselves but need external reflection to unlock and enable.

Recent conversations with a current manager have added to my certainty on this issue and the necessity for external coaching to be a part of the support to the manager and the team, keeping the team dynamics intact and ensuring the building of togetherness and cohesion

Need coaching support? Here to help Contact me

Business, channel, Compliance, Customer Focus, Leadership, partnership, Sales

Accreditation – A burden or a blessing

Vendor accreditation programmes – who are they really for?

1. Customers?
2. Channel partners?
3. Vendors?
4. All three?

Why does a customer care if their supplier is accredited by the vendor of the product, solution or service?
Why does a channel partner care whether they are Bronze, Silver, or Gold certified?
Why does the vendor need to create training and certification material, courses, tests etc?

It all sounds a lot of work, so why does anyone bother?

There must be some significant value in order to motivate everyone to care enough to get engaged – so what is it?

Customers are what this is all about! Customers require good advice from well informed representatives from the channel community and the channel community cannot rely on the resources of the vendor at every engagement they have, so the channel partners need to become equally well informed – This requires training and testing, which is great for the vendor, because they end up with well informed channel partners representing them and provides the scale required to develop more market coverage. In addition, an accreditation programme usually has a volume\revenue related metric, which rewards the successful sales partner – more of a value component than a quality component and an often thorny topic for engineering heavy partners with lots of skills but not too many new sales. Customers are usually able to see for themselves what partner accreditations are for channels and select based on a value\quality blend. In reality most customers want to know they will be well looked after rather than well sold to.
For the vendor, an accreditation programme provides a sense for channel partner commitment levels and focus on their portfolio, and training enables current knowledge to be maintained and product knowledge to be broadly well ingrained. The more a channel partner commits to one vendor programme, the less time and resources they will have for competing offers – stands to reason. So vendors see this as an important dynamic for developing partner commitments. Ultimately this enables scale and quality delivery for the customers and commitment for the vendor, with the reseller having the ability to wrap services and complementary products to their solution.

Business, Leadership, Personal Management

Who is coaching you?

never quitWhether you are Jonny Wilkinson, Steph Houghton or Mo Farah, the one thing they all have in common is that they all had, and continue to have support to develop their skills and success – a sports coach – in fact probably several coaches with differing and complementary skills.

How about you? Are you so talented that you don’t need coaching? Maybe it’s more simple than that – you simply lack ambition?

No of course not, It’s none of the above is it….you just haven’t been thinking in these terms have you? But now that we are discussing it, it makes sense doesn’t it? In fact it’s rather more common than most of us might think.

So now you are thinking about it – what will you do differently?

Give me a call now – that’s right be a “do it now” person of action.

Success awaits you – the bold and audacious, I salute you.

Business, Customer Focus, Leadership

How agile is your business?

What factors affect the agility of a business? Is it the simple case that if you are running a small business, then you are agile?
I don’t believe so, as there are other really critical factors that mean that a larger business can also be agile whereas a smaller business can also be slow and unresponsive.

For example, in order to be agile, a business needs to be able to make decisions rapidly and have an environment where staff are empowered. The culture needs to be one that focusses on the customer as their purpose, rather than the customer as an inconvenience and an interruption and a source of frustration. Believe me when I say that I have experienced senior business leaders speaking about their customers in very negative terms, and bemoaning their approach to suppliers.
Ownership of issues is also a factor that is critical in ensuring your business can be agile or not. Large or small, having simple processes that ensure that the business does not simply rely on people passing emails to each other and responding in a timely fashion, is critical. A customer with a requirement is only interested in a partnership with another organisation able to understand them and an ability to execute.
So in summary the following are necessary to enable your business to operate with agility:

> Customer focus
> Empowerment
> Decision making
> Process – simple and effective.
> Ownership

And an agile business, like a successful sports team, needs a high degree of collaboration and teamwork focus.

Leadership

Can your Leadership repertoire run to coaching too?

I was watching the TV earlier in the week – Vera was the name of the programme in question and for those not acquainted, it’s a police detective drama.

There is the usual hierarchy on display with a hard working sergeant who is smart and growing in confidence in his role and adding enormous value to the case currently under investigation. What struck me about this particular episode was the fact that the Inspector, whilst valuing the sergeant’s inputs, was not particularly OPEN with him, and in fact the communication was pretty one-way traffic, apart from the issuing of instructions and orders – sound familiar?

At the end of this episode, there is a moment where the inspector and her sergeant are sitting in a car and the conversation takes a turn to matters of a more “personal” nature, and the sergeant speaks up to say that he learns a lot from her, and he needs her to share more with him to help him to develop……how true this must be for organisations around the World! The old paradigm of “knowledge is power” still rings through the corporate corridors and business “leaders” are jealously guarding their knowledge for fear that giving it away makes them somehow impotent. The reality is that this very act is holding back the success of the “group” and ultimately the business. This outdated thinking is also creating a positive reason why those very individuals being starved of help and support will most likely entertain the call from the “head-hunter” when he comes knocking.

Don’t let your fear and neurosis halt your progress, as it is through the success and development of the people you are responsible for, that you will deliver the result that you and your business are seeking.

But hey – what do I know!

Leadership, Personal Management

Values and principles

Because we always see and experience 100% of the time through our own eyes, sometimes we may struggle to be truly objective on all issues.
I thought I would begin with that caveat, as I recognise that my rantings are entirely “as I see things” So to my post ……

Through innovation in technology and in how we communicate, we have never had more channels open to us through which to engage and communicate with other people, or not. This is coming to my point; despite the open ubiquitous nature of communications, I have found that rather than improving communications, it has stifled them. There may be many reasons for this and perhaps the very fact that we are spoilt for choice, may well be the issue – communications overload!!!; Perhaps responding to incoming “traffic” has become a firefighting exercise, and if you or your “message” are deemed unimportant to the recipient, then you are possibly going to the bottom of the queue; relegated to the “I’ll deal with it when can” group.
My personal experience of late is that I have seen a rapid surge in periods of deafening silence over not just days, but weeks following commitments to keep me updated. I’m not sure that anyone could argue that this could be viewed as either desirable, or indeed welcome.
Fast forward to some of the social media channels and again it’s a not uncommon experience for an individual or organisation to use, Twitter, for example as a broadcast; automating a series of outbound marketing messages in the hope of hooking some new customers. How they intend to do this is a little puzzling, as I’ve replied a few times to a feed and guess what? Yep, radio silence.
So why is this? Are people so ignorant that they can’t be bothered to respond, or are the tools not in place to support the meteoric growth in channels of communications….. Who knows?

Can I get off my soapbox now before I fall off…