Blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

How effective is your coaching? Karen Jacques, Impact Executive Coach and Senior Consultant gives us her top 5 questions.

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...

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...

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...

“I’ll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die” Henry J. Waternoose III from the Disney movie Monsters Inc. One thing we hear too much and too often, is employees bad mouthing the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In my last blog post I put forward some thoughts on Personal Resilience and began to consider how can organisations can best support and encourage individual responsibility for wellbeing. This week I...

VUCA is an acronym which stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This terminology is resonating with an increasing number of CEOs as we try to make sense of the constantly changing...

The popularisation of remote and hybrid work has resulted in many more organisations operating through distributed teams, with some employees at home and some in the office ­– some even in different...