Influencing the people we work with to do things our way is one of the biggest challenges we face in business. Getting your boss, peers, clients or suppliers to buy into your ideas can be critical to success. But most people we want to influence have their own priorities and ways of doing things, with no desire to change if they don’t have to. To bring them round to our way of thinking we usually try to sell the benefits ...

Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats has been around a long time now and, in my experience of facilitating tough team discussions, its longevity is well deserved. If you aren’t familiar with it, I’d recommend you give it a try the next time you take part in a discussion where different viewpoints are likely to lead to conflict. The Six Thinking Hats is a structured system of (literal or metaphorical) coloured hats. Putting on a ‘hat’ of a certain colour ...

One of the things that has struck me most when working with organisations and individuals going through change is that change is always personal. Change happens when each individual moves – literally or metaphorically – from position A to position B. When enough individuals make this move, the change becomes organisation-wide. Too many change leaders forget this and plan their communications from the organisation-wide perspective. This means that they mistakenly: Plan blanket communications – one message that is meant to ...

Gordon Ramsay and Alan Sugar are famous for it. EastEnders soap stories convey it with delight. And Jeremy Paxman seems convinced it’s the only way to get information during a political interview. Wherever you look on TV, business people, interviewers and characters in dramas run around shouting, swearing and arguing like children. It makes interesting TV but how would you react to Gordon Ramsey or Lord Sugar if you had to work with them? Is a whole new generation growing ...