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Discover and debate opinions about what really matters in organisations.
Change
Digital & Technology
Innovation & Creativity
Leadership
Mastering AI: strategies for business innovation and success
Explore the transformative power of GenAI in business. Learn how to navigate challenges, foster an innovation culture, and confidently lead in the AI era.
Change
Innovation & Creativity
Leadership
C-level leaders on navigating complexity
Discover what it means to lead in today's global business environment through our insightful eBook.
Leadership
Lawnmower leadership
I had some thoughts whilst mowing the lawn this Saturday evening. I decided to share them in the hope that they might help us all spot leadership talent. I had four lawns to cut in the garden. LAWN...
Sustainable Innovation
Living wages: desirable, feasible, inevitable
Jo Appleby , Impact’s Head of Partnerships, recently attended Living Wages: Desirable, Feasible, Inevitable an event hosted by KPMG, Global Compact UK Network and the Ethical Trading Initiative. She...
Leadership
Leadership competencies are dead
You don’t have to look far to find the latest 'definitive' list of leadership competencies. Yet the more of these lists we see, and the longer they grow, the further away we get from any real sense of...
Talent
Top tips for public speaking
There you are – staring out at the mass of spectators before you. An eager audience waiting with bated breath and ready to hang on every word. This may be your first time; it may be your 50 th . Still...
Talent
5 lessons from...Talent is overrated
This week we're reading... Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
Teams
Is your team ready for success?
Six Key Questions You Should Ask Yourselves Based upon interest in our recent piece on Team Success , where we explored 6 questions related to team success and performance, we’re now going to take a...
Wellbeing & Personal Development
Getting your to-do list done
Impact’s Becky Foxen and the wider Business Support Coordinators team share their top tips on how to get things ticked off your to do list.
Wellbeing & Personal Development
Managing work
Forget time management, the key skill is managing your work. Impact’s Grahame Broadbelt shares some thoughts and some tools he uses every day. At this time of year we are assaulted by material that...
Change
I am me
When I was 16 years old, I was lucky enough to attend a four-week, residential, personal development programme. It completely changed my life and set me on a course of experiences and achievements...
Wellbeing & Personal Development
5 top tips for successful project management
Sarah Wragg , one of Impact's Client Managers, shares her top tips on how to be successful in the field of Project Management.
Wellbeing & Personal Development
The beauty of doing one thing at a time
I have always admired people who are able to work on more than one project at a time, the real multi-taskers. In fact I can remember times when, as a manager, I could be quite critical of people who...
Change
Wellbeing & Personal Development
3 ways to improve your emotional intelligence
Emotional Intelligence has a well-established seat at the development table these days, being widely accepted as one of the key differentiators and the foundation of building leadership capacity...
Teams
Is your team prepared for success?
Impact Americas' Senior Consultant, David Cooper , gives us 6 essential questions. This is a question you could well be asking yourself - whether you are joining a new team, leading a team, or an...
Teams
Teams need to bridge the action gap
At this time of year we work with a lot of companies who use these first few months to galvanise the performance of their key teams - learning lessons from the past year and planning ahead. One of the...
Teams
Me or we?
Do you prefer to work individually or as part of a team? It's a question I find quite hard to answer. Popular opinion has it that working in high performing teams with a common purpose enables us to...
Digital & Technology
Are we about to be outsmarted by artificial intelligence?
Since my recent post on the challenge of human jobs being rapidly replaced by robots ( Humans Need Not Apply ), there have been further developments. Eminent minds as diverse as Stephen Hawking and...
Change
Happy old year
I love the anticipation involved in a New Year. Making plans for the future, setting out to achieve new things and making commitments to myself and to Impact that I genuinely intend to keep. The...
Emerging Talent
Talent
Inspiring the next generation
Five years ago I had a life changing experience. I suddenly realised I had a responsibility that I hadn’t been aware of. It’s a responsibility that I now find hugely rewarding - helping to inspire...
Leadership
Remembering the Tsunami
Ten years ago Impact's Hannah Irwin experienced the Indian Ocean Tsunami first hand. This is her story. The Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 was the most devastating natural disaster in modern times...
Leadership
Are you afraid of making mistakes?
Don't be. If you really want to learn from your experience and become better at what you do, then embrace failure, learn from it and move on fast. There's too much procrastination around. Too many...
Leadership
Touching people's hearts
Isn't it strange how you often find something when you are not actually looking for it? Last Friday, I attended Connect at the Savoy in London and had a really productive day, meeting up with HR...
Leadership
An unexpected telephone call
In Washington, exactly one hundred years ago, a committee of Congress was convened to consider the then relatively new practice of ‘scientific management’. After hearing from dozens of witnesses...
Innovation & Creativity
Top tips for using humour
Impact Senior Facilitator, Simon Wheatley shares his top tips I think laughter is probably one of the few things that stops me from going completely round the bend. I use humour to please myself as...
Digital & Technology
Humans need not apply
Last week the CIPD ran a headline suggesting that ‘half of current occupations won’t exist by 2025’. This announcement follows a lot of recent talk proposing the idea that we are rapidly approaching a...
Leadership
Building desire
Why do organisations invest in people development, and what do they expect from their investment? Surely, the main reason is to achieve individual and organisational change in behaviour. Whether the...
Leadership
The difference between training and development
The difference between training and development has always intrigued me. During my training to become a school teacher, I soon became aware that teaching and learning are not the same thing. Creating...
Wellbeing & Personal Development
You on a 'good' day
Every company Impact works with expects a lot from their people. In turn people expect a lot from their company. One of the big issues confronting both employer and employee is the sheer volume of...
Leadership
Success needs a measure. What's yours?
Every organisation we have ever worked with has a plan. A plan that says something about their aspirations as a business. Some plans are pretty detailed and weighty - lots of graphs with lines...
Leadership
Who is more important, the customer or the boss?
Explore how fear and internal politics can trap companies in a cycle of stagnation and poor customer service. Learn how shifting focus to genuinely serving customers and breaking free from a self...
Leadership
Learning to Motivate Others
All organisations aim to create the conditions through which their employees can give of their best. Yet working out the best way to motivate performance is a challenge we see many constantly struggle...
Talent
Multi generational learning
We hear from Liz Wilson, Senior Consultant at Impact International... For a while now I’ve had the urge to mix people up – to have the long-serving, highly respected experts marvel at the bold ideas...
Innovation & Creativity
What do big established organisations have to learn from small start-ups?
When it comes to agility, it’s common practice to cast large organisations as being monolithic, unadaptable and slow-moving and smaller businesses as more nimble, fluid and responsive. One is an ocean...
Emerging Talent
Sustainable Innovation
Talent
From work experience to work inspiration
Back in 2010 I attended the BITC (Business in the Community) Work Inspiration launch and was struck by the realisation that it was time to make some serious changes to the way we engaged with local...
Innovation & Creativity
Leadership
Better together? Part 2
In part one of this blog entry on external collaboration we discussed whether it was possible to collaborate with competitors, what the risks are and how best to manage them. Here, in part two, I'll...
Leadership
Teams
Better Together?
Collaboration Part 1: Is it really possible to collaborate with competitors? Current economic conditions place huge pressure on organisations. We are required to constantly innovate ways to produce...
Leadership
Wellbeing & Personal Development
Personal resilience: Part II
Discover how managers can support team wellbeing by adopting a coaching mindset, fostering positive thinking, and encouraging ownership. Learn strategies to create a resilient and healthy work...