So you managed to escape from thinking about work over Christmas and the New Year – well, almost.

Well done you!

Now you just have to muster the will to engineer the reverse exercise. This is when you find out whether you are, what some people refer to as, a ’self-starter’. The magic property which enables you to get on with it all by yourself.

Me? I completely failed to start learning to touch type and I am now having to resort to the loser’s tool of choice: the New Year’s Resolution. My current excuse for five-finger-typing-whilst-watching-the-keyboard-and-still-misspelling-every-third-word is that my friend Tom who promised me a superb, ‘best in class’ book on the topic has not delivered, and frankly, until he can, I’m stuck. Job done. No need to continue with that one.

Part of the problem for me of course is that there’s no one giving me stress about my productivity; I just type, work and play at my own pace. I turn up to work when I feel like it and stop when I like. But, alas, like any company owner/diligent employee, I do far too little skiving/goofing off/resting. I don’t take breaks much, I often forget to have lunch, consider train journeys to be golden times to work on things and have to make conscious and specific efforts to stop having ‘brilliant ideas’ at weekends. But then, I’m lucky. Very, very lucky. I really like my job. So the most damaging aspect of not having a constant boss (I have as many transient ones as I have clients) is that when it comes to something that isn’t important to me, or at least important/urgent enough, I delay or just drop it from the list. So, I seem to have it taped. Lucky me. Well not quite actually. My self-starter approach has come with a high price: there are many things that I just haven’t stretched myself to do. I could say that I haven’t, until now, been very brave and so have played things rather safely. Here is where mentors come along.

I, like everyone else, need someone sometimes to chivvy me along; to help me to get into a difficult, higher gear. Some people depend on their manager to help more than others in this respect either because of the way they are or because of the circumstances in which they live and work. Many of us would show up to work only reluctantly if things were going wrong at home or if work was getting on top of us; repetitious or stressful jobs exact a personal toll which I can only guess at. In these circumstances we positively need leadership. And people who want to be stars at anything (think: athlete, ace pilot, politician, top academic etc.) also need some sort of leadership or at least people around them who perform elements of leadership on them – even when not requested.

We need to know there is someone there looking out for us, giving us an outlet for discussing work-based problems and the occasional home-side catastrophe. We also need someone to give us feedback (a nudge, or stronger) when we are about to take a backward step. So some of us need a leader to get us out of bed, others need one so that they can excel and still others need a leader for self-preservation: because of what the job takes out of them.

So what do we need this precious leader to provide us with under any of these circumstances?

Many things, but a few critical ones are:

1. Set the vision and communicate it to us
2. Determine direction and strategy and pass it on
3. Facilitate progress – make it as easy as possible
4. Provide consequences

Were you expecting number 4?

If you stumble across a poor performing team or a place where morale really stinks it will almost certainly be because there are few consequences to either good performance or poor.

Just reflect upon how you feel when you’ve done something really difficult and no one says anything.

How does it feel, when a little while later, someone fails to do something or gets it wrong (the notion of ‘fault’ is not relevant here) and there is no response, no consequence?

Even those of us who profess to be utterly self-sufficient and to not require formal leadership need consequences to our own actions if we want to get anywhere special. And we want to see consequences for those around us whose actions affect us.

Without consequences events and outcomes just don’t make sense. Fulfilment is never achieved, the will to improve or alter something doesn’t materialise within us. The worst consequence of the lack of consequences is that we give up trying because, when things are really difficult, anything bearable will do. The consequences provide the point. No consequences; no point.

So, I still can’t type and it’s a big waste of time and energy; I get tired and frustrated. I get documents done but without the satisfaction of doing it quickly. I waste brain power on doing corrections instead of using it to be creative, to write better. So the lack of external consequence for me not learning to type, far from freeing me up to remain a free agent, binds me to a situation I don’t like. It’s not big, but then again, it is a bloody pain. My only hope is that Dr Bill Baker will call me to embarrass me about his virtuoso Ukulele playing. At lunch, a few weeks ago, the deal struck between us was: “you learn to play and I learn to type”.

So what does all this mean to you and your team?

You might give them 1-3 as above and much besides. But if you don’t provide consequences for good and poor performance they will never, ever perform anywhere near their best, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, they may give a lot less than that because they will assume that it really doesn’t matter to you. And if it doesn’t matter to you, they will find a way to cope: making it not matter to themselves (cognitive dissonance).

So what are you going to do about it? That is up to you.

What am I going to do? Well, since my boss refuses to administer any consequences of note, I’m going to call Bill and get myself a consequence that I care about: his good opinion. That should nail it.

It will be interesting to see if you can actually stop working when the moment comes.

Let’s be honest now. You and I have struggled to keep going the last couple of weeks; a mixture of fatigue (why now?? see last post), social and environmental hypnotic suggestion (twinkly Christmas effect – technical term) and a raft of business reasons have made it very tricky to keep the productivity machine from stalling altogether. But the day is approaching when we are actually going to have to stop ourselves checking our various electronic devices for updates, actions and trouble; we are going to need to divert our attentions to our own, personal lives. But like a sick dog who isn’t permitted to eat but habitually sniffs it’s bowl anyway, we will both, you and I, have to find ways stop sniffing the empty work bowl for 10 days.

Habit is one thing and wish is quite another. A habit can dry up quite quickly, in the space of 40-50 experiences, even quite close together. So if you do glance at your Blackberry or iPhone and then realise that there is no real need, you may not have to go through this ritual many times before you notice that you are doing it less and less within a day or two. The point here is not so much can I stop the habit but do I have something better (more engaging) to do? Something that brings me a stronger (nicer) feeling than the little kick that I get from checking my mail/voicemail to see if I have received good news or a lack of bad. That part is of course a matter of personal choice. We can each choose to fill our heads with what is happening right now or to worry about what we left behind (unfinished tasks and troubles) and what is coming up next on the 3rd of January (more tasks and trouble).

The challenge for busy people is to exist in the present whilst creating outcomes for the future; to do what we are supposed to be doing now and not what we were supposed to be doing yesterday or what we should be doing tomorrow. Whenever you have decided to stop work, your new ‘To-do’ is to work at doing the present well – keeping your head in the now as the saying goes.

This thing about concentrating on living the day, the experience, the moment is the most obvious recipe for returning to work as happy and rested as possible. Not to mention the most obvious way to ensure that you have something to give, beyond your physical presence to the people around you during the few days that you have at your disposal.

Bottom line: just as you and I can choose how, when and how well to work, we can choose to make a really fine job of switching off and having a great holiday season – even if we must at first work at it.

My best wishes.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking to clients and clients-to-be about where we have found that PEC can add the most value: getting their C-suite population to have ‘real conversations’.

Meaning: looking at the tiny little behaviours that seem to amount to nothing at all but can make the difference between a decision that everybody goes for and therefore executes their piece of and one that is pushed forward by the ‘big voice’ and never gets full compliance and therefore execution. The exciting thing is that we are getting back lots of nods and examples.

Here is a tiny piece of a huge topic – emotions. In my experience it is the one topic amongst friends, acquaintances and business colleagues that has the power to divide. Divide because, as the title suggests, some people think that they don’t have much to do with the emotional side of life – by choice. Some believe that opting-out of considering the emotional component of dealing with people will make life simpler and more logical – more reliable. In the next few lines I want to explore why someone would want to change this part of their lives to become more emotionally engaged.

Advantages to keeping emotions out of play.

1. I don’t waste time worrying about the “what ifs?”. This means that I can make mistakes that affect other people and yet keep on acting decisively and with the self-assurance of the unencumbered. I can ‘crack on’ with my to do list and let someone else worry about the fluffy stuff.

2. It’s easy to focus on the task. So even if I upset someone, I find it easy and natural to turn a ‘blind eye’ and to get on with whatever I was trying to achieve knowing full well that if anyone does get ‘a bit offended’ they’ll soon get over it and the operational result will speak for itself – well, it’s all about cost/benefit isn’t it?

3. Not much can ruin my day (well not for very long). This means that I can keep going longer than anyone else in emotional situations – I have terrific stamina when the going gets tough. I come out of the other side of big arguments and negotiations in great shape and with some satisfaction because I have been able to stand back and not get involved when everybody else was becoming irrational.

The flip side.

When I opt out of ‘doing emotions’ I am not going it alone – I take you with me – to a place to which you perhaps don’t want to go. I take you to where emotions are managed by my agenda (emotions not welcome). Far from helping you to ‘get over’ your feelings, my seizing control of the whole situation only serves to magnify them, rendering you less rational, me even less involved and causing us both to have a more difficult conversation.

Doing the minimum – it can work.

Acknowledgement changes us. Even if I cannot bring myself to buy-in to the whole emotions piece, for whatever reason I might harbour, being able to notice when I am opting out of other peoples’ feelings feeling gives me the chance to remind myself to join in again and to help in some small way. For example, if I see that a person with whom I am arguing is getting beyond their comfortable state then I can at least choose to keep my mouth shut; I can withdraw gracefully from the interaction to prevent further stoking up their negative state. That constitutes helpful action. It’s something. But if I then decide that I really want to take things a step further in helping the conversation back onto the tracks, I might decide to let them know that I have noticed their state – “you seem… annoyed…”.

What could be easier?

No matter where you and I are on the continuum of emotionality, we can both do something to help – even if it is to stay quiet whilst the other person gets on with handling what is happening to them. To deny ourselves the opportunity to make use of our innate capacity to pick up on emotions in daily events, is of course, a completely OK thing to do – it’s our choice. We just need to be careful not to stop others around us from taking their own emotions into account. Paradoxically though, by choosing to opt-out of the emotional dimension whilst at the same time trying not to be actively obstructive might turn out to be harder work than opting-in completely.

This month, and for the next couple, I will be exploring not only what keeps us from changing but what questions we need to ask ourselves if we are serious about adopting new ways.

Quick and gone

Speed is seemingly a characteristic of many habits; by definition, habits produce action that happens quickly and without conscious thought. Many of our habits are sparked off by, and happen in, social situations that are fast-moving such as not joining in with a conversation, missing opportunities to give praise or reacting defensively to feedback. All of these happen in quick-time. OK, but what about something like smoking? That doesn’t.

Smoking is an interesting habit because it does indeed, happen relatively slowly, and you would think that we would get plenty of warning when we were about to do the damaging behaviour. As it happens (you may know this already) the urge to smoke can be based on one or a mixture of two elements: chemical addiction and ritual addiction. The chemical element speaks for itself; the ritual element is the one which fulfils the need for a structured activity that brings some pleasure or relief. Pipe smokers and cigarette smokers who roll their own are a great illustration of this. They choose to go through a long ritual to get to the bit where they actually get to smoke. This suggests that they probably derive as much ‘benefit’ from the routine as they do from the intake of nicotine. Does this mean that we can get addicted to routine itself? More likely that what we are becoming hooked on is the feelings of calm and safety that a routine can provide us with. Performing routine behaviours gives us time to contemplate, to rest our minds, to celebrate our abilities like rolling the perfect cigarette, splitting the log perfectly down the middle, mixing the perfect drink or laying the perfect log fire.

So, on one hand, the speed at which some habits happen make them tricky to change because we have to be super-alert to stop ourselves in time and yet other habits, that occur at a snail’s pace, are hard to change because of the feelings of comfort and wellbeing that they afford us.

Sell it to me!

Leaving tobacco and log fires behind, there are of course other powerful characteristics of our psyche that make it difficult for us to change the way we behave. One of the most potent would seem to be our ability to justify, to sell a concept to ourselves as a way of releasing us from the need to do the difficult thing – changing. Rather than stand up to our compulsion we devise elaborate explanations to justify our U-turn. We literally sell the old, undesirable habit back to ourselves because we don’t want to admit that we have decided to go against our previous good decision (“shouting at people is OK because at least it gets things done around here!)”. That sounds harsh doesn’t it? It is but it’s not the whole story. If you want the truth, step this way down the dark corridor of your personal feelings and hidden desires.

The truth is that we are driven by fear and pleasure. That’s it. Fear and pleasure, fear and pleasure; day in day out. When we are trying to break a habit we are fighting against the primitive drives of escape and attraction. The rest is window dressing.

Some examples: If I find it hard to delegate it’s probably because I fear being let down and looking stupid. People who find it hard to stop arguing are often worried about what might happen to them if they appeared weak, left out or not in charge. To cite a particularly common example: those of us who find it hard to prioritise don’t lack organisation ability, we probably get hijacked by our fears and desires:

• Fear of not being able to do the difficult task (so we ignore it)
• Fear of losing control on the appearance of too many tasks
• The pleasure that comes from doing ‘this’ but not ‘that’
• Fear of running out of time and getting into trouble (so we do a bit of everything, in the wrong order, badly)

So, it seems at first glance that we have to tell stories to ourselves to cover up the fact that we haven’t stuck to a promise to change. In reality we are probably being hassled by our fears around negative outcomes but then rather than facing those fears and talking them through (even with ourselves) we make excuses for why we back-tracked and all is well again. Except that we haven’t changed.

Too much, too long, too radical

And as if things aren’t already difficult enough we often make our own attempts at changing even more difficult by setting unattainable objectives in the first place. For example, I might decide that I’m going to get into really great shape this year. So I go out and buy a load of fruit and vegetables, a juicer, a gym membership and a tracksuit. And then, knowing me, I go to it really hard for a week, maybe two. I run every day until I feel sick, I have fruit for breakfast until I’m fainting for lack of carbohydrates; I cut out biscuits and chocolate completely, which makes me miserable, and then drink enough water to render my blood dangerously thin. Not surprisingly the excuses then begin: “I shan’t run today because my shoes are still drying out from yesterday. Oh and I’ve eaten all the bananas so I can’t do my 2 litre smoothie. I’ll have Coco Pops today as a special one-off treat to give me a bit of a boost and because I have been so good!”.

New habits don't come easy

There are two problems here. Most of us can’t voluntarily handle drastic change, be it in our personal or in our professional lives; physical, emotional or intellectual; the fact is that we really don’t need to because the stakes aren’t high enough – the consequences of giving up simply aren’t dire enough.

Secondly, when we set huge goals we may even only be doing so to impress ourselves. We perhaps try to give ourselves something really exciting to go for with the added safety net of having made the goal so unattainable that we can put our failure down to unforeseen circumstances.

So what do I have to do to change?

Setting out to change something about my behaviour is primarily about making change happen in my feelings and thinking. Because I can’t fool my feelings or my mind in the same way that they can fool me, I must ask probing questions of myself to get anything like a true picture of my start and end point. I have to think carefully about what exactly I am thinking of changing and for what reason. Most importantly of all, I can get valuable clues about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ by scrutinising my real end game:

1. What do I really want out of this?
2. Who am I doing this for?
3. Why does this need to happen now?
4. What has altered in me that makes lasting change at all likely?

Being successful at change is largely about choosing the right change for the right reason. Willpower may play a part but should not form the mainstay of your personal change strategy. And finally, whatever state you are aiming to achieve, it must be easier than where you are now, not just better.

7 golden possibilities (we don’t like rules).

1. Planning for success

What do you want? What do they want? These questions need to be answered in terms of emotional, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes. Try to wean yourself off purely business objectives because that’s rarely where your focus needs to be. Running meetings successfully is mostly about managing feelings, not facts.

2. Getting their minds on the right stuff

Sometimes a meeting can take a while to find its focus because people arrive from another meeting with their heads full of the old topic, unprepared, tired, under fed or caffeined up to the eyeballs. Consider some sort of transition device. One we use a lot is called ‘baggage check-in’. We go round the table and ask participants to check-in (mention/let go of) any distracting thoughts. All sorts of interesting things can turn up and people seem to enjoy the chance to decompress a little before being asked for more rigorous, intellectual engagement. All the leader needs to ask is “what’s on your mind?” or “what do you want to check in?”.

3. Handling the ‘big personalities’

We call these people: loud, pushy, talkative, chatty, bossy, show-boaters, big mouths etc. The trick (not really a trick, more of a point of recognition) is to involve these people as much as possible and at the same time to be prepared to protect the space of the less voluble participants ruthlessly. Golden rule: involve potential disrupters as you do your most co-operative participants. Keep everyone fully occupied. And the rationale for all this? People mostly kick up trouble when they feel left out or powerless. Kevin Holligan of Meeting Magic suggests partitioning time and attention by using devices such as sharing thoughts using Post-It Notes or giving the group other short tasks where everyone is allocated an equal voice. Probably most important of all – avoid the labels I’ve used – people aren’t born ‘pushy’ or ‘loud’ – we help to make them that way. And we can help them to not be that way too.

Inclusion not control

4. Keeping to time

Leaving a meeting on time is a rare event these days. People tend to put far too much on their agendas. Be sparing and respect your participant’s time boundaries. If you are realistic about how you plan the time slots within the meeting for each discussion point the people will be able to reward you with their attention. Meeting Magic suggest 12 minutes is the attention span for an adult. Sounds about right to me. To give yourself an even better chance of finishing on time… begin bang on time, do not wait for stragglers; they will soon get the message – even if you are as nice as pie when they come in late.

5. Involving the quiet ones

People who don’t say much in meetings behave in that way for a number of reasons. The meeting leader, and the other participants, rarely get to find out those reasons. One result of letting things continue without finding out the causes is that you always end up with the same result: the same people talk and the same types of outcomes come to pass. Another result of not involving the whole group is that unhelpful group beliefs have an opportunity to take root: “She’s a bit quiet, a bit shy…not much help really.” “You’ll never get a word out of him in the first hour… he’s a bit lazy… takes him a while to get going.” and so on. We think the key here is to identify who is likely to stay quiet and then ask their advice, before the meeting, about how they would like to be involved. Get to know them and how they like to be managed before it becomes a distraction for the group. If this opportunity does not arise then it can be helpful to go around the table at the beginning asking people to say a few words about the minimum that they want to walk away with at the end. This then gives you the excuse to keep checking that each person is getting what they wanted.

6. Getting things done afterwards

Meetings often get a bad reputation not because of what happens within it but from what is expected from participants afterwards. You might run the greatest meetings but if you get the reputation for weighing people down with long lists of To Dos your meetings (and you) will lose popularity. Meeting Magic’s advice here, and we agree, is to force people to prioritise before the meeting ends – set a group rule for the number of take-outs and encourage people to stick to it. Kevin Holligan also suggests giving people the chance to make a group start on the critical tasks. That way when people leave they have a head start on the task.

7. Helping other people’s meetings go better

But what if it’s not your meeting that is going wrong – what then? Do you just have to grin and bear it? We don’t think so. Here are three common problems and our suggestions on what you can say to nudge things along:

1. Help the other participants to regain perspective when they are getting buried in endless detail. Consider saying: “I’m finding the level of detail informative but I am starting to get lost in it – is that a problem for anyone else?”
2. Help the chairman who is losing his/her grip regain control by saying: “As the outsider I’d be very interested to hear what you (indicating the chairman) has to say.”
3. When the meeting shows no sign of ending and you either need to get away for another meeting or for your own mental health. Consider saying: “I have found this meeting really useful but I have completely run out of time.” Then watch three other people sigh with relief as they start packing their papers!

I unearthed this short article yesterday – I wrote this some time ago.

Here is the updated version…

Most people know that at some point in their professional lives they will have to deliver a presentation. Whether the material is as dry as a tinderbox or whether it is just plain controversial, observing certain guidelines can really cut down on preparation time (and those nerves) as well as vastly improve the final effect that you create with the audience. Here are six simple things to consider before you start:

1. A clear objective. Most people start with a load of content and try to shoe-horn it into a PowerPoint show – instead start with the question: “What effect am I trying to achieve with their opinions and with their emotions?

2. Involvement. Plan to get your audience involved in the first 30 seconds – or less. They have to understand what is in it for them – why they should pay attention to you rather than their Blackberry or their own head noise?

3. Simplicity. Keep things as simple as you dare. Regardless of the IQ level of the audience, people are so poor at keeping things in their heads whilst trying to pay attention that most of what ends up on the screen or in a script might as well be in a handout for all the audience is able to retain. You will also be avoiding Murphy’s Law: ‘If it can go wrong it will go wrong’.

4. Relevance. Think carefully about what you keep in the presentation. Be brave about culling the material until you can cut out no more without the whole thing not making sense. It is great to watch a presentation that sticks to the point and it makes the content so much more memorable too.

5. Humour. Don’t feel pressured into having to be funny. Starting with a joke is not compulsory. Instead, consider beginning your presentation with a relevant observation about something that has happened to you on that very day. e.g. In a presentation about sales figures or targets you might start out with: “On my way here today I stopped off to buy a chocolate bar – I found they were on special offer. It made me wonder why the sales director for that company had done that…”

6. Personality. Something happens to people during the walk from their chair to the podium. They are transformed into people that their own families wouldn’t recognise. Since most people’s ultimate presentation need is to be believed, it is important to allow the authentic, real you to peep through the numbers and words.

Spending a few minutes thinking about each of those six tips will not only make preparing your next presentation quicker and more fun but it will also probably mean that you enjoy the experience of presenting so much more. Good luck.

As I said, he was a bright guy and he soon realised (if my memory isn’t tricking me) that every piece of behaviour had a price for someone. And that, I suppose, is what this is about. What price I am prepared to pay, in terms of effort, to make life for the people around me more civilised, more palatable – nicer?  I am suggesting that whilst we don’t frequently go out of our way to make life worse for one another we don’t often take even small opportunities to make it even minutely more pleasant.

These small gestures, which can really make a difference to someone’s day, have somehow been factored out of business life as unecessary, idealistic, trivial and ‘soft’. So, if you have a moment right now for a little experiment, look around and think of something very small that you can do to make someone just a little happier. To misquote Clint – “Go on punk, make their day.”

Then post and let us all know – you may start something!

Many great companies start out as family concerns – yours might be one of them.

Mars, now Masterfoods, is a huge and successful example which grew out of a home-based sweet making buiness founded, in a small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington by Frank and Ethel Mars back in 1911. And S.C. Johnson, inventors of the Ziploc bag, Pledge, Glade and Windex were founded in 1886 by Samuel Johnson who invented a new floor polish to go on the parquet flooring he was installing in those days. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of Marsians over the years (I don’t know what the SCJ people call themselves – answers on a postcard) and they did stand out from the rest of my clients. More than any other group they seemed to be fiercely proud of their heritage and of the company’s products. No matter where the person worked they seemed to have a very detailed knowledge not only of  production methods but also of production values; to be let loose on the line as a young manager at Mars was to be trusted with the crown jewels – it certainly was not seen as lowly work.

And there are numerous other distinguishing features I could list which defined them as ‘different’ such as their unusual way of opening ‘product’ (Marsian for ‘sweets’) which was to peel the wrapper along the seem so as to reveal the production details (line number, date and time of manufacture, sell-by-date etc. etc.) Aside from all of this, the people from Mars seemed to act as a cohesive group, I hesitate to say for fear of sounding corny, as a ‘family’ group; there seemed to be an extra layer of fabric keeping everyone together.

But is it feasible to reproduce the kind of bonding fabric found in a company like Mars or cabury or in a well-functioning family, within an ordinary company manufacturing ball-bearings or tomato sandwiches? Or would it be found that the product was too mundane, the company too new, the people too ordinary? I suspect that those elements are really nothing to do with it. And I also suggest that there are proportionally just as many badly functioning families as there are badly functioning companies so that just trying to be more like a family probably won’t make a bad company, better. However, I do believe that there are some things that a well-functioning family can pass on to the leaders and members of a mediocre company; this view is in some way borne out by the words of a leading psychologist who was once asked at interview whether being a psychologist had made him a better father. He replied: “No, but being a father has certainly made me a better psychologist.”

So what is the definition of a psychologically healthy family? The literature on the subject suggests that it is one where the roles shift and swap according to what circumstances demand. Sometimes the father leads, sometimes the mother makes the first move. Sometimes the children are told what to do and other times the parents pay attention and act upon the children’s ideas and wishes. Sometimes the parents come up with the solutions, at other times the children spot the problem and the solution before the parents have even got out of bed. As the children grow in years so the relationships are allowed to move on; the children are encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their actions and the parents relinquish much of the control of the organisation and leadership of the unit in acknowledgment that the troops are now more than capable of organising and handling life’s events. By this point the parents have assumed a new role as mentors, advisers-in-the-wings whilst the children have gone on to create their own ‘companies’ with their own particular feel and collection of values and traditions. This all assumes, of course, that the parents have got their psychological act together in the first place, that is to say, that they, to some degree, understand themselves, their own insecurities and needs (especially in terms of needing to be needed) and that they have the courage and judgment to enable them to be flexible as well as consistent at enough of the right moments.

P.S Thanks to you Robert for the great cartoon you did for us. Click here to buy this very cartoon from him!

Getting caught up on the wrong side of a bad team dynamic can be hell – under normal circumstances it’s enough to get people to jump ship. But can the in-fighting and disagreements have a positive purpose?

Join us live at 9.30am on Tues 21st July and hear what Martin Down has to say on the subject. He specializes in helping teams to learn how to put conflict to their advantage – and he has done it for real too, skippering across the Atlantic in nasty weather!

Just send us an email at enquiries@pec.org.uk to reserve a place and visit http://www.pec.org.uk/events.asp for details of this and other past seminar recordings.