Continuing staff development is something I'm a great believer in and try and promote in the department as much as possible. Often it's easy to forget that senior managers need development as well, so each year we try and ensure that the exec team get a couple of days away together to work on plans, to reflect on the past year and look at how things have gone and how we can improve.
We've just had our two days, and it was very worthwhile - hard work as we had a facilitator who was excellent but believed in pushing us, as he should. Before the session he had conducted mini 360deg reviews of the whole team by interviewing all of us, and our direct reports, and had also attended meetings to see us in action and how we interact with each other. The information when fed back to us (all anonymously and aggregated of course), provided some some useful insights, and some areas where can take positive action to improve.
Communication is always an issue, and interestingly the feedback a few years ago was that we didn't communicate enough, now we do it too much, or at least in too many different ways :-). Something we were already aware of, and we do need to make sure we have focused and clearly explained channels of communication. We also looked at forward planning, decision making, management consistency, and of course did one or two exercises to look at our own team and communication skills. I have to say I was not very good at building a warehouse out of KNex - but then neither was my partner - we had nearly as many pieces left over as went into the actual construction!
1 comment:
I'm fairly happy with the comms in CiCS - much better than it used to be, although agree some rationalizing of channels would be a good thing. Would be nice if rest of managers were as forthcoming as you are. Any move on getting rest of them to have blogs? Would be great step forward.
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