Blog posts of '2025' 'October'

In this final blog of 4 I’m going to cover how the design of the online assessments and the workshop has developed over the years, together with some of the key Beliefs, Behaviours and Building Blocks that we all need to manage ourselves through the maze that is workplace politics. We have been using what we call the Universal Assessment for several years which was designed for the general population. It works well, as measured by feedback from users and clients. I’ve always been intrigued however, as to the need for a specific assessment for different genders.

In this third blog I'm going to cover some of the interesting findings from the delivery of the one day workshop and also some fascinating insights into the marketing once we had what we thought was a market ready product. Workshop Findings: I'm going to restrict myself to covering off the top 2 findings because in reality there were many! Number 1….

You may recall from the previous blog that I had promised a new client an influencing skills workshop which was to include a session on the subject of ‘Workplace politics’. After the trip south on the train where my business partner has accused me of lying (remember the ‘intention’ response – more later) I set about finding out what materials were out there and what we could usefully buy (or borrow) to include into the workshop. In a nutshell, there was very little. Most if not all materials that appeared were related to Politics with a BIG P – the politics within a Country/Party/Council but very little on the topic of politics in the workplace – politics with a small ‘p’.

The challenge……. Twenty years ago I started my own training business and the dream was to deliver Leadership Development that made a difference. By that I mean practical stuff, based on real people and what they did and how they did it and what actually worked in the workplace. I was younger then, enthusiastic and having spent 20 years in 2 enormous organisations in Banking and Insurance, was relatively wise to how organisations got things done...