During the management education course I was running today at the fabulous training centre at the Institute of Director hub at Old Broad Street House, we spent some time contemplating good management (which is not the same as good leadership) and considered a number of interesting issues.
Amongst them was the finding from the Centre of Creative Management which shows the differences between the success factors for early management positions and those of more senior leadership positions and reflected on how many in the professions have stuck with those factors which were only appropriate at relatively junior levels.
There’s more about motivation here
We then worked through the ten components of a thinking environment (Nancy Kline) and observed that the negative “male conditioning” factors must be the main inhibitor to greater involvement in many professional firms.
The other ideas that really got us thinking was the observation from personal relationship academics that a good relationship has a ratio of five good pieces of feedback for every one negative. Good feedback is like a beefburger – the “meat” of the feedback cushioned into two softer and more positive observations.
A core idea of Ken Blanchard’s “One Minute Manager” was the need for both one minute praisings as well as one minute reprimands – catch people doing something right.
Perhaps if we were just to increase the amount of positive feedback within the professions a little bit…
