Whether you are a student, a homemaker, an entrepreneur or the CEO of a large corporation, there will be days (we all have them) where the answer to a burning question escapes you. It may have to do with personal performance anxiety, social skills and relationships, idea generation, career transition, or building the next strategic positioning plan. You may feel an uneasiness that you can’t name or feel overwhelmed and unproductive. There is a solution…

Solution-focused, FeedForward coaching can help you get unstuck, make a plan, generate the next fresh ideas, make a decision, or guide you through a life changing event. Rather than moving back in time and creating negative feedback, the FeedForward approach moves you ahead in time to a place where the desired outcome is already achieved and recognition of the steps necessary for success are clear. The solution-focused approach finds it more useful to focus attention directly on building solutions for problems than on analysing causes of problems and making a diagnosis. The coach brings process rich solution-focused questions, and experiential exercises that help the client create action steps and commitment. The coachee (client) brings their experience, skills, and content to the session.

I have worked with clients living in unhealthy relationships who discovered and acted on the necessary steps with only one 30 minute telephone session. Coachees have been guided over five or six sessions from dismissals, layoffs, and unsatisfying employment, to work that provides autonomy, mastery and purpose with a significant total compensation package. One client who was facing discipline for a performance issue was able to create a plan to improve and exceed standards with a monthly 40 minute session.

A typical phone session – if there is anything that is truly typical – would include:

1. Ice breaking/check-in/follow-up
2. A contracting exercise to ensure that the session will be the best and highest use
3. Development of positive outcomes and commitment
4. Experience
5. Action Steps and commitment
6. Value Creation Assessment

During the first few minutes, the coach asks open ended light questions to re-establish rapport and pulse check with the client. In most cases, an important concern or issue arises and the coach checks if this should be the area of focus for this session or if necessary the next few sessions. An agreement to move forward is reached and a metric that is positive and within the client’s span of control. I always do a check-in here to see how satisfied the client is today with the current state that we have agreed to work on, and what level they want to be at by the end of 30 minutes.

The majority of the time is spent in the experience portion where the coach guides the client through an activity or exercise to help pull out the content that the client brings and any requirements for further information. As the client creates value for themself through the experience, the coach celebrates, acknowledges and reinforces the landmarks.

At the end of the experience the client should have two or three action steps to take – actions that they are fully committed to take – with timelines, criteria and success measurements. I make sure to once again ask if the client realises the value they have created. This is a great reminder for the coachee and an accurate measurement of the coach’s performance.

I hold a deep belief that all people are far more capable, resilient and resourceful than they are given credit for. Helping unlock the gifts, build confidence and actively find solutions is as rewarding for me as it has been for my clients.

Follow the Twitter interview with Bob McInnis at #HRin140 at 28th of May 13:00 BST

Written by Bob McInnis

The post How to unlock your inner gift through an alternative approach to coaching appeared first on WTG BLOG.

Bob McInnis is a member of ICF and was trained in solution-focused coaching by Erickson Coaching International. He resides in Calgary, Alberta and has worked in the charitable and public sectors for more than 30 years. Spending time outdoors exploring the amazing Rocky Mountains and fly fishing the rivers and streams with his children and grandchildren is his favorite way to spend a day.

Read all his posts here

The post Bob McInnis appeared first on WTG BLOG.

By Kate Marston

The good, the bad and the ugly of webinar presenting…

A webinar doesn’t happen overnight. It’s hard work! It takes careful planning, extensive marketing and collects a number of people (some rather reluctantly) into the process along the way. And, that’s not even considering post event activities. Someone’s got to turn those leads into business haven’t they, or what’s it all been for?

So, picture the scene. It’s event day… you generated a healthy number of registrants which have converted into a reasonable attendance rate, but you need to engage these attendees to get any sort of ROI from your hard work.

In an in-person event setting, those who are surreptitiously looking at their phones, answering emails, or staring out of the window, might receive a stern look. However, with a webinar you can’t make eye contact with your audience. It makes for a strange presenting experience, even for the most seasoned summit speakers amongst us – Even harder for those first timers cutting their ‘speaking teeth’ on a webinar.

Your attendees, (the majority of them anyway) are sat at their desks in front of their computers with an infinitesimal number of distractions at their finger tips. Colleagues, the internet, emails, Facebook, Twitter, what’s for dinner? All vying for their attention at the very moment you’re giving an Oscar winning webinar. Rudimentary platform analytics will let you know how long someone has had the event ‘full screen’, but there’s no way of measuring if they left halfway through to make coffee, got distracted and didn’t return. So how do you achieve the elusive “lean forward experience” for your passive webinar audience?

I don’t have the definitive answer as there are too many variables, but having produced over 300 of them, I’ve a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Here is the good, the bad and the downright ugly of webinar presenting:

Short and sweet

Your speakers may be the world’s expert on your topic, but if it’s not fact packed and fast moving your audience will check out fairly quickly. It is VERY obvious when someone is simply reading off their slides.

We recommend 30-40 minutes of presentation, followed by a live Q&A session – in total no longer than an hour.

Tone

Nobody wants to hear a speaker drone on. You can have the best content in the world but if the delivery is a flat monotone, monologue, no one is going to invest their precious time in it.

However… don’t rush. Your audience may not be native speakers, so take them into consideration and don’t forget you always speak faster when you’re nervous.

Make every word count 

The webinar takes place on screen and spoken – be economical with what you say. Don’t feel you need to pad your presentation out. Good benefits driven content will stand up on its own.

An image can speak a thousand words  

Text full, diagram heavy slides, simply don’t work. What do you want your attendee to do, read the slides or listen to you? My money is on the latter. You can always add in the text heavy slides to send out post-event. That way you aren’t diluting your message or distracting from the live experience.

However, one very important point to make: PLEASE make sure you have the rights to use an image. Googling images and saving them to your desktop is at best immoral (they belong to someone else) at worst illegal (they belong to someone else!). There are many free image libraries on the internet. Sites like Fotolia are relatively cheap to purchase from and what’s more, you will OWN that image to use again and again!

Interactivity

1. It always works best if there are two or more speakers. You can interact with each other, bounce ideas off each other, disagree, argue… just make it ‘human’ and an interesting listening experience.

2. Your attendees need something to do. People have short attention spans these days. Prod them to make sure they are engaged, build in a quiz, poll question, a round on sport spot the difference… whatever is relevant for your audience.

Release the poll answers during the event and talk about them. Consider how these reflect to your previous conceptions. Do they cement what you’re saying or refute it?

Make sure you close properly

Finish with a last ‘contact us’ slide. Make sure that this is on screen whilst you are answering questions. Remind people with something like, ‘if we don’t get round to answering you, please email us direct – our email addresses’ are on screen’. You’ve worked hard to get them there, so don’t waste the opportunity!

And I think that’s where I will leave it for this week…. I’d love to hear your experiences as an attendee or speaker. What worked for you and what didn’t?

Next week we will delve into the murky world of slide design, I think… or perhaps conversion strategies…ooooh the suspense!

Thank you for reading.

The post I’m talking to you…LISTEN! appeared first on WTG BLOG.

By Ben Quarless

Corporate value statements, company ethics, codes of conduct…the list goes on. At best, an invaluable business tool, at worse a meaningless, superfluous byword.

Some are poorly defined and open to interpretation, while some simply paint an idealistic image based on a predetermined set of ideals a company believes its customers and employees would like to see.

But for many these statements act as a fantastic catalyst to help a company grow. Top companies around the world such as Sainsbury’s, Virgin and Enron swear by them, attributing customer satisfaction, high levels of retention and successful recruitment, to their corporate value statements.

So do they matter, or they just a buzzword to help the executives feel better about themselves?

Last year an article from the Harvard Business Review suggested the idea that consumers want to have a relationship with a brand is more fiction than it is reality. Yet in a world where reputation and trust are generally considered great drivers of corporate value, surely a shared set of values between brand and consumer can play a major role.

Take Kellogg, for example, who recently produced their annual corporate responsibility report which focused on how the company is developing the marketplace, workplace, community and its environmental efforts.

The report outlines Kellogg’s ‘K Values’, a set of guidelines which form the basis of their corporate culture and helps to foster a sense of community among employees. They believe loyal consumers see brands as a reflection of themselves, and that in order to succeed in the marketplace their workforce should mirror the values of their customers – who they are and what they value.

The question is: do customers really care what a company believes?

A study by Harvard Business Review suggests they do. Of the 7000 consumers who were asked about their relationship with major companies, 64 percent cited shared values as the primary reason. This was by far the greatest driver, with only 13 percent citing frequent interactions with the brand as a reason for having a relationship.

Reputation is equally as important, and now that consumers have immediate access to a company’s lineage, they expect more and have no trouble boycotting those that fail to live up to their increasingly high standards. Last year, a survey from Weber Shandwick and KRC Research found more than two thirds of customers avoid buying a product if they dislike the parent company.

Evidently, values run deep and need to be translated efficiently into actions. More than just appearing to please customers, the way a company talks about them when they are not present, the level of service they provide and how they treat employees are all equally important. It’s about living the values you preach.

But if the corporate values are to serve as an adequate foundation from which an organisation can support and drive the long-term business strategy, they need to be embedded within the processes of the company and the behaviours of leaders and employees at all levels.

One way to do this is through workshops and surveys across the business to gauge consumer and employee perceptions about the company’s current values and behaviours, with the goal of determining if those values are still relevant and durable.

More than simply being something both parties can agree on, the act of a company living out the values it preaches can act as a great motivator to employees.

Numerous studies have shown a direct correlation between workplace morale and corporate results, revealing that employees who feel more engaged with their company generally deliver better performance and stay in their roles longer. This goes back to ensuring a company’s actions are in line with its value statements. If a company isn’t serious about living out its own value statement, there’s little point in having one.

On Thursday 16^th May, Serene Communications will present a free online presentation for WTG Webinars which will explore the positive affects a values-based approach can have on business.

The post Why a values-based approach to business helps accelerate growth appeared first on WTG BLOG.

Finding the right web host can be just the savings your IT budget needs, but why should you be looking into this opportunity and how can you best take advantage of it? It’s actually very simple…

In the beginning, companies relied on their local IT department to develop and maintain servers for their website and ordering needs. There are many costs incurred by this older approach. The initial cost of server hardware is just the down payment. Other business costs include site maintenance and constant upgrades, along with taking up a large portion of your power bill. You may even have hired a dedicated full-time team just for server maintenance when your business was particularly flush. Now the time has come to look for new ideas and increase reliability while decreasing costs.

An online presence is the backbone of any modern business; with a hosting service you are always online and customer-facing. Having an off-site host keeps your business on the forefront no matter what occurs. No longer are your earnings hampered by moving or long-term power outages. Every business faces bumps in the road, but there’s no reason to let that show to your potential clients.

Offerings from top tier providers will often include unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, email hosting and other domain services. However, when looking for a web hosting company, there are several things you should consider and discuss with your IT department or web design team. Is your website compatible with their offerings? For example, does your website require special scripts? Can the host offer the proper size and volume you need for your business? Do you require dedicated hosting or can you get away with sharing your server with other small needs businesses? Lastly, make sure the company offers up time guarantees so you are always on.
In conclusion, finding the right hosting is a balancing act between price, offerings and service level. Changing to a hosting service can be cost effective, easier and better maintained. A dedicated server plan from the right company is every bit as controlled and reliable as local hosting, if not more so. The savings in personnel, hardware, network usage and power consumption are just the beginning. Do the research and I’m sure you’ll agree that off-site web hosting is a great cost cutting measure for your business.Customer service is the barometer by which you should judge any provider. You can pay for all the hosting and space you’ll ever need, but efficient communication is a key component. Look for providers who offer 24/7 service and have e-mail and phone support available. This is where a little research on your team’s part could go a long way. Luckily, we have an open forum for discussion on the internet. Scour the web for reviews, both positive and negative. Consider the size of your business in comparison to these reviews and weigh your options accordingly. One glowing (or less than stellar) review shouldn’t affect your taste for a provider, but a pattern of behaviours can be established from a handful.

Article inspired by Ninefold

The post How to find the right hosting service and lower business costs appeared first on WTG BLOG.

Ahead of his session at the World Drug Manufacturing Summit in November, the head of the Research Center of Bioprocess Engineering and Analytical Techniques at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences gives his perspective on the role of Quality by Design (QBD) in the pharmaceutical industry.

What do you think are the biggest challenges today for drug manufacturers and developers?

The biggest challenge is in bioprocess engineering and is something which hasn’t changed in years. It’s about finding the tools and procedures to expediate fast process development in downstream processing.

Companies who are both brave and strong enough to apply Multivariate Data Processing will benefit in a number of ways. However, the implementation of such tools to online applications can very hard and expensive.

The newest ideas which help develop continuous processes also represents a huge challenge. This will be a long lasting process until reliable strategies have been proved and installed.

Do you think Quality by Design (QBD) is being taken seriously by the pharma industry?

This is a very delicate question. Many large pharma companies are using QBD with demonstrable success, but for smaller companies who may not have the manpower to use this method it’s business as usual.

This will change when the production cost of pharmaceutical products are no longer one percent of the market price.

What is your biggest achievement in your professional life and why?

I have studied electrical and control engineering and worked for several years as a provider of ideas for Biochemical Engineers. My biggest achievements have been to build integrated bioplants, develop fully automated processes and apply design of experiments (DOE) as an optimisation tool.

What is the proudest moment of your career?

In my younger years I was proud to build up mathematical models for the whole bioprocess, starting with the final control element, followed by the description of the plant, the microbial and molecular reaction processes up to the measurement devices. Nowadays I am proud that my research engineers, my Ph.D. students and I are able to build fully automated and optimised bioplants which are unique to the world.

What should attendees hope to gain from your session at the World Drug Manufacturing Summit?

The aim of my session is to explain how to optimise production processes of recombinant proteins. The upstream will be demonstrated by an intracellular production of human receptor tyrosine kinase hEphB2 with E. coli and by the expression and secretion of potential Malaria vaccines, investigated in Pichia pastoris processes. Therefore a multi-bioreactor plant was developed for fully automated DoE – Design of Experiments.

The optimisation of purification is explained at a chromatography system ÄKTA^TM avant, especially developed for DoE applications.

This QBD investigation ends up in a fully automated production plant, where upstream and downstream unit operations are combined and all processes are running in series, but also, timely shifted in parallel. These strategies were also used for online optimisation of integrated production processes.

Prof. Dr.-Ing.  Reiner Luttmann heads up day two World Drug Manufacturing Summit in Dusseldorf this November. His session, ‘Successfully Moving Towards Continuous Manufacturing’, will compare the implementation of process intensification vs. batch processing to achieve quasi continuous manufacturing and efficiency gains.

This year’s summit focuses on achieving process and manufacturing excellence, process re-engineering, six sigma tools to reduce variability, with specific case studies on continuous improvement, successful QbD implementations, real time data collection, analysis, knowledge management and much more. For more information visit the website.

The post Speaker Interview: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Reiner Luttmann appeared first on WTG BLOG.

A good selection process is characterised by assessing candidates’ qualities that are related to job performance. This implies that all criteria not related to job performance are excluded from decision making. This is exactly what characterises fair testing in the selection context: not systematically disadvantaging certain groups, but instead selecting those individuals that have the qualities the job requires.

Why is fair testing important? It helps ensure that applicants from different groups have equal opportunities to be hired. Thus, the pool of potential candidates becomes bigger. Fair testing also contributes to promoting a positive image of the company in the public. This White Paper outlines how fair testing can be beneficial for organisational effectiveness by promoting diversity. Furthermore, it gives a guideline for valuing diversity and a checklist for testing in accordance with the General Equal Treatment Act.

Click to read the full white paper

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 It’s that age old debate that has been raging across marketing departments the world over since time began, What is better a webinar or a Pigeon? Well maybe not… but you can’t move in a marketing meeting without someone asking what you are doing about lead nurturing, ROI and content marketing at the moment. So that got me thinking is there a route to market that is an effective content communication channel that delivers measurable ROI and develops/establishes relastionships… all rolled into one?

Before you get your flat cap out I’m not suggesting we all become pigeon fanciers, disseminating your carefully crafted marketing messages via the little beauties. It’s just not practical; I mean how would you measure it?

So, does that mean we have a winner? Put out the bunting I think that The WEBINAR just clinched it.

But, what makes a webinar so special?

Buying behaviour has changed considerably and in a relatively short amount of time, the process now starts with an online search in the majority of cases, and that is the B2B and B2C markets. A webinar not only puts your content in their hands at the click of the search button (providing you have decent SEO… but that’s another post entirely!) it brings it to life. It is your story told by the people who tell it best. You. It allows you to develop your voice in the market, set yourself apart from your competitors and providing your content is great – can help in positioning you as a thought leader in your industry.

Over the coming weeks I will be posting a series of blogs which will aim to get to the nitty gritty of webinar-ing. What you can use them for, how to measure ROI, post event activities, converting your webinar attendees to sales. The do’s and don’ts of presenting, creating killer presentation slides – sorry couldn’t resist -  and chasing that illusive lean forward experience for your viewers – ENGAGEMENT.

But before we get to all that I’ll leave you with a few, perhaps painfully obvious reasons to hold a webinar…

• Low cost, efficient, sustainable
• Live and interactive
• Relationship building to increase wallet share
• Demand generation
• Lead nurturing
• Engage live with your market
• Demonstrate new products
• Grow your database
• Re-engage with current clients
• Content marketing
• Cost effective and convenient

So, and this is based on total scientific fact, that proves conclusively that a webinar is better than Pigeon.

Oh… and a webinar won’t poo on your car.

If you can’t wait until next week’s instalment, why not take a look at a recent case study from Sopheon – http://www.wtgblog.com/case-study-inside-wtg-webinars/

Until next time…

Kate Marston
Head of Webinar Marketing, WTG Webinars
kate.marston@wtgevents.com
www.wtgwebinars.com
+44 (0) 20 7202 7705

The post Is a webinar better than a pigeon? appeared first on WTG BLOG.

Time and again we see research that demonstrates the value of employee development as a motivation and retention tool.  Even before the ‘war for talent’ was first mooted, organisations were investing significant amounts in developing their current and potential senior managers. But let’s be honest with ourselves: How targeted was that development?  How much of candidate selection was based on ‘need’ and how much of it was based on ‘providing a reward’?  What proportion of the participants went back to work and applied what they had learned, as opposed to putting the ‘course trophy’ (i.e. the binder of materials) on their bookshelf?

In today’s economy, we have to make tough decisions about where to invest our development spend, and there is generally less of it to go around. That investment needs to produce a return for the business.

And there’s the problem. How do we identify the return? For sure, there are tools and models out there that can be applied – the Kirkpatrick and Phillips models being perhaps the best known and most widely quoted. But it is fiendishly difficult to disaggregate the data.  How can we say with confidence that participation on a programme, rather than chance, coincidence, or external drivers, achieved an actual change in behaviour or improvement in performance?  And even if it did, how much of the resulting business impact was down to the change from the programme, and how much from external forces?  If we were to go up in front of a tough CFO, would she believe our figures?

When we talk about ROI from development efforts, we are using a term that is loaded with meaning, and it sets an expectation for robust and unimpeachable numbers to support the claims we make. This is doubly frustrating, partly because if we’re honest, we know that those numbers are always subject to interpretation, and partly because the same people who criticise our interpretation have their own numbers that they produce that are just as open to criticism, but they have the protection of accounting standards and precedents to support the assumptions they make!

Perhaps there is another way to look at this. If we are providing customised development for our managers, perhaps we can build a pathway that enables us to identify and demonstrate ‘business impact’. We may not be able to agree specifically on the value of that impact to the business, but if we are careful it will be impossible to disagree that a positive impact has occurred. And with appropriate confidence intervals and assumptions, we should be able to demonstrate that there is real bottom line benefit to development efforts. This is especially important for customised development for managers and leaders, since by their nature, such programmes will generally run with few iterations, which makes it impossible to implement the feedback and improvement loops inherent in the development of the Kirkpatrick model. We believe there are ways to demonstrate impact with careful programme design:

-          By designing the programme around specific operational issues where knowledge and methods can be integrated with real work experience.  In this way, planned operational changes and improvements can be directly facilitated by programme design and delivery, reducing the time required to realise the benefits of such changes.

-          By integrating ‘academic’ project work with live business issues, enabling new insights, ideas and initiatives to be developed as a result of programme participation.

-          By engaging participants and their managers in strategic business issues, and enabling those participants to take a measure of ownership of the programme design and flow as it progresses, to enable targeted strategic imperatives to be addressed.

Additionally, there is always the possibility to conduct a post-hoc analysis of actions and decisions of participants to identify possible links back to programme materials, and thereby quantify the impact of the learning.

Developing current and future leaders is an imperative for all businesses. Without a strong case for the investment, it can always be ‘put off’ until it can be afforded more easily, especially in difficult business climates. But the longer we put off the investment, the longer we have to wait for the benefits.

Why wait?

Continued….

On Thursday 23^rd May, Aston Business School will present an hour long online presentation which will discuss the various was management development programmes can be designed to maximise business impact.

The session will look at three real-life case studies in which impact measurements were used to effectively demonstrate improvement opportunities and generate direct business impact from their development programmes.

To attend this free session, simply click the image below and follow the instructions.

The post How to demonstrate the business value of employee development and secure future investment without risking credibility appeared first on WTG BLOG.

A leap of faith occurs when companies outsource their manufacturing needs, similar to the one it takes to fall in love.

Profound, perhaps, but let me explain…whilst outsourcing reduces overheads and accelerates the time to market, companies must be able to unite design, quality and new product introduction (NPI) processes with the entire supply chain. This can now be a faceless, nameless operation, dispersed globally and many are daunted by this. But in order for a successful relationship to work, both parties must be fully open and vulnerable to one another.

Similarly, for companies to effectively collaborate, they must also be willing to share critical and sensitive information, including precious IP, that, if found in the wrong hands, could cripple a business…or break a heart.

Do you trust your supply chain partners enough to allow yourself to be vulnerable? This is the conundrum for many companies that outsource today, who must deliver their product in a highly competitive and fast moving product cycle market, all whilst maintaining ownership and control of their IP.

Today’s Operations/Supply Chain Executive is under extreme pressure to market and will often lose sleep worrying about their IP. So what’s the secret? How can a business outsource its manufacturing, collaborate with a large group of suppliers and still sleep soundly at night secure in the knowledge their IP is locked down?

On Wednesday 22^nd May, Steve Chalgren, VP of Product Management & Strategy at Arena Solutions, Michael D. Keer, Founder and CEO of the Product Realization Group, and Vivien Roduit, CFO at Selectron Systems AG, will present an hour long webinar which will reveal the secrets behind growing the supply chain economically, with minimum risk.

The experts will discuss security, speed, and collaboration, as they seek to provide attendees with insights on how to streamline supply chain management efficiently on a global scale.

The webinar will be of particular interest to companies who deliver their product in a highly competitive, quick product cycle market.

To attend this webinar free of charge, simply click the image below and follow the instructions.

The post The secrets to maximising your supply chain strategy appeared first on WTG BLOG.