Mitchell Phoenix - Leadership and Management Training

You’ve decided to do some management training with your people. The business case is clear and the necessary budget has been secured. If you don’t spend the money in the next couple of months it will disappear, so you sit down to make your choice.

You think that with stronger management skills you and your people will behave more effectively on an individual, team and organizational basis. This would be a fantastic business result. You search the internet for management training companies which can deliver business results… and to your surprise, everyone can. Every provider you look at shouts back at you about the “results” they create for their clients, like a flock of parrots that has learned to say just one word.

In fact, in the world of management development “results” has a range of meanings:

1. At the basic level, the “result” is that everyone who attended a day of training rated it highly on a feedback sheet – eg. as “very good” or “outstanding”. People had a good time, nobody tried to climb out of the windows.

2. The next type of “result” is that everybody learned something on the course. They learned what personality type they are, or that they annoy a colleague when they don’t turn on their out of office message. The link between the learning and the workplace is hazy, or based on firm promises to put an action plan in place one delegates get back to the their desks. Six months down the line, people are still annoying their colleagues by not turning on their out of office messages. Perhaps unexpectedly, much of the input on MBA courses falls into this category: interesting but not used.

3. Short-term behavioural change is the next category of “result”. Here, people adopt a new behaviour and stick to it for a while. For situations where longevity of application is not a factor, “results” in this area are useful.

4. Long-term behavioural change is the pinnacle of “business results”. This is rare, requiring all of the other three preceding “results” to be in place (no one will change their behaviour if the course designed to do this is making them want to climb out of the window). Along with these, any course operating at this level will create a deep understanding of management principles, such that they can be applied to any situation a manager faces. Managers take decisions with this new frame of reference in mind, and choose new, more effective behaviour now and in the long-term.

Next month: the clues that show which of the four types of result above a provider can deliver.

In discussion with a client the other day, he remarked on how many of Mitchell Phoenix's long-standing relationships are with companies in high growth; some of which have become household names during the 20 years we have been doing business with them. What is it about our approach and the results we create that suits organizations experiencing rapid change so well? Here is the answer.... click to read on

Lord Davies' report, Women on Boards, has highlighted a growing body of evidence linking the number of women on the senior management team of an organization with the strength of its performance. The following article explores why this might be the case, and what the implications are for decision making.

If you are searching for factors that separate successful businesses from the herd, sooner or later you will seek out a meeting with a business transformation specialist. Business transformation specialists make their career in exactly that: they arrive at companies which are performing sub-optimally, and guide those businesses to greater profit and achievement. For organizations which are experiencing difficulties, transformation specialists are ambulance, fire service, analyst, strategist, psychologist and motivator, all rolled into one.

When Ross Stuart arrives at an assignment, what does he usually find? “Almost all of the problems I find in one business I will have seen before on other assignments,” says Ross, “in fact the pitfalls management fall into are the same both within and across industry sectors.”

Here are the ten management pitfalls Ross encounters most often: 

The Ten Most Common Pitfalls in Running a Business

1. Ineffectual, poorly trained senior management
2. Lack of leadership and robust governance: no clear direction and support from the top
3. Senior management in denial
4. Poor quality
5. Narrow customer base
6. Poor financial systems
7. Poor communication with the employees
8. Poor stock control
9. Little or no marketing expertise, a depleted and demotivated sales force
10. High overheads

Mitchell Phoenix' Managing Director Kevin Yates recently published the ebook, How to Build a Successful Leadership Development Project in which he outlines the central factors required if a leadership program is to yield real return on investment. In this extract, he explores who the sponsor of the project should be...


It is quite likely that an incoming senior executive has identified the opportunity for an improvement in the leadership skills of the management group. This may be a promoted MD, CEO or someone brought in with recent experience of greater leadership capability in another organisation (competitor perhaps?) This sponsorship is the best possible start point for gathering support from the board and will be a natural step to engage the wider management population. 

Three levels of management need to be converted for the culture change to take effect.  This means CEO, board and senior operational management.  In a large organisation you will also need to engage the best of the next tier down to make it complete and secure.  After that, leadership by example and sweeping demand for better practice will permeate the business.  In the longer term, standards of behaviour have to be rigorously applied and defended.  (This latter effect will be determined by the quality of leadership thinking delivered by the development project itself).

What happens when only HR or a more junior group have identified the need? Clearly we have to build more support into the senior operational areas and the CEO has to be sold on this need.  By highlighting concrete examples of sub-optimal behaviour; raising questions about succession, ownership of goals, poor meeting management, and crisis culture we can lay the groundwork for a decision to be made.  In addition, issues of falling standards of recruitment and greater attrition can be flagged.  Lack of choice and quality in promotions and honest performance review will further bring the messages home.  Leadership profiling tools can be brought to bear to display, empirically, the opportunities for personal growth.

There has to be acceptance of this need at the highest levels.  Ready & Conger, in their analysis of why leadership development projects fail, identify lack of ownership as the principle ‘pathology’.  Their solution, ‘everyone should own it’, is long on good advice but short on how to achieve it. In this article, I discuss the 5 steps necessary to build a successful leadership development project (click to read).