Blogs & Articles

For many of us, January can be extremely long and cold, causing low moods after the highs of the Christmas and New Year period. This is known as the January Blues. There is just something dreary about the constant grey sky and the knowledge that summer is a million miles away, there's just something about the post-Christmas period that puts us into a headspace that is unfortunately negative if we let it take control.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can be described as an umbrella of opportunities, they have hundreds of uses, needs and methods. It's not always easy to wrap your head around what a KPI should include and how you can make these useful for yourself and/or your team. There is a lot of information and varying opinions on how these should be used, and there is no right or wrong answer to this. To make it easier to understand, we have broken down the fundamentals of KPIs into 6 key points, therefore creating the acronym PAMELA to help you remember it.

During a coaching session recently a young, and recently promoted, first line manager posed the question, “What should I write into my business forecast and how can I be sure it’s going to happen?”. Well, as you might imagine, my immediate response to that was that if we knew that, then we’d all be lottery millionaires.

One of the key elements in business that always has our team arguing is writing skills. Not just the usual stuff like when to use and apostrophe and when not to, punctuation in general, grammar and spelling but also such things as general content and writing for the right audience.

There was something I witnessed recently that is worth recounting because it was an answer to a question that came from the voice of innocence, as it were. By that I mean, I was with a client in one of their management meetings recently, when the issue of what that company was going to do with their strategy going forward was raised. A junior manager then asked, “what’s the plan then?”. An honest enough question you might say, but then the young manager followed this up with “We don’t need a plan anyway as we’ll just fumble our way through it like we normally do”. Maybe it was an attempt at humour but his comments elicited a response from a a senior manager that I will try and recall as best I can, in essence at least.

We are very fortunate at Maguire Training to have an outstanding team whose main objective is to provide the highest level of service we can muster for our clients. As a consequence of that we are proud to say that we rarely receive complaints about our service, which means (happily) that we have no need for a ‘customer complaint line’ as such. That is not to say that things don’t occasionally go wrong, because they do of course, however, if a mishap occurs then we try to view this as an opportunity to delight our client rather than it be a challenge.

Everyone leads differently, depending on their industry, team and individual styles. However, there are certain qualities that a successful leader should show towards their team, that will get them on your side almost every time. There is no right or wrong way to lead as long as your method works for you and your team.

How often have you seen someone promoted to sales manager just because they were the best salesperson? It’s more common than you think and the best salespeople don’t always make the best sales managers. The result is that they end up failing, leaving, or both. This means the company loses two employees, needing to replace the great salesperson and find a new sales manager. Heres how to make sure that you don't fall into this catagory.

The majority of us will work for around 40 years, meaning being happy with our jobs and workplace is essential for confidence, positive mindsets and high levels of productivity. It will become very tiring doing something you don't enjoy day in and day out for all that time.

Anyone who has ever delivered training will be able to recall the look of shock coming from at least a few delegate's faces in the room after the suggestion of 'Role-Play' within the course. This is due to their fear of what they think a role-play is going to be when in reality it should be fun, informative and of course challenging.

Although the concept of communicating is easy, communicating well and in different forms takes skill and practice to master, and even then, there is always room for improvement. Different members of your team will need and prefer different kinds of communication depending on what works for them, the same goes for you so you must be adaptable when it comes to communication.

This is making huge waves at all levels of learning and development, and companies are also realising that what is really important is not that employees sit through training, but that they can do something useful at the end of it.