Preparing for the return to work after the birth of your baby is often focused exclusively on your job and wider family needs. Paying attention to your personal needs and well-being often is overlooked. 

Preparations involving other people, and especially small people, have a habit of not always going as we'd like them to. It can be hard and stressful to get babies and small children out of the house in the morning (washed, fed and dressed) and into nursery on time so that you can catch the train. The same applies when you know you need to leave on time to go home but you're feeling bad about leaving before your colleagues, or one of them is being demanding. Many new parents quickly find themselves into a kind of relentless eat, sleep, work, repeat cycle when juggling work and small children. So this is where it's important to keep your plans and expectations under review and ensure that your personal needs are also being met.

Ask yourself: 

• Am I expecting too much of myself, my baby or my partner at this stage?
• Am I being sufficiently firm/flexible/assertive (as appropriate) with work?
• Am I placing unreasonable demands on my partner? Is s/he placing unreasonable demands on me?
• Am I getting enough rest and relaxation to maintain my health and well-being?
• Am I getting enough space and time to give my baby the attention s/he and I need?
• Is this arrangement working well enough for us as a family? If not, what needs to change?

In our ongoing maternity leave survey we have gathered lots of excellent advice and information from mums about their parental leave and going back to work. (We'd love your advice and thoughts too - see here for the short survey). Their responses are overwhelmingly consistent:

1. Take care of yourself - don't worry about being super mum/housewife/partner/employee. In other words - good enough is good enough.

2. Manage your work-life balance boundaries - set these clearly and firmly from the beginning of your leave period and on the return to work, and stick to them.

3. Maintain your self-confidence - keep mindful of who you are, what you do and the value you add.

To achieve these you need to take consistent, planned action.  

Your plan should include the what, when, how and who questions, for example:

• how your baby's care needs will be consistently and well met
• what will happen when your baby is unwell or otherwise unable to go to nursery/day care
• how domestic and family activities and chores will be carried out, when, and by whom
• how you will ensure rest and relaxation time with your family, partner and friends gets the space and time it needs

Keeping arrangements under review enables you to be flexible in making changes when required. Remember that babies aren't babies for long, they change and develop very quickly. Just as time at each stage is special and fleeting, so their demands on you change as their capabilities grow. If times are difficult remember, "this too will pass".

​Periodically, take a wider view and "check in" with yourself - is this working/living arrangement working for you and your family? Does it need amending to ensure that you are all happy and fulfilled?

Our parental leave coaching programmes provide structured support and development for mums and dads about to go on parental leave. To discuss how we can support parents-to-be in your organisation, get in touch - enquiries@managingchange.org.uk or call 01223 655667. 

​The psychometric industry in the UK is worth many millions of pounds and it continues to grow. It is big business. The majority of FTSE 250 companies and over 80% of the public sector regularly use personality assessments for recruitment, selection and development purposes.

Personality assessments typically fall into two sorts - Type  and Trait measures. Type measures consider that personality can be grouped into discrete categories (e.g. extrovert or introvert). These include MBTI, Insights Discovery and DISC. Trait measures consider that these characteristics can be placed on a continuum (e.g. in a middling position on the introvert/extrovert continuum). These include 'Big Five' tools such as NEO PI, Hogan and OPQ. Type measures allow for a limited number of personality characteristic combinations. In contrast, Trait measures allow for a potentially infinite number of trait variations on the continuum basis.  They are fundamentally different.

​Tools which categorise personality into types are considered the least valid way of measuring personality and produce inaccurate and misleading assessments. As a consequence they are not very effective in achieving the two primary purposes of using them:
​1.  Raising self-awareness (for development purposes)
2. Predicting future behaviour (for recruitment and selection purposes)​

​Trait measures on the other hand have a considerable weight of evidence to support them. There is plenty of evidence that personality is structured around traits and not types. For a particular trait we may 'sit' somewhere on a continuum between very low and very high but we would all score somewhere on that trait. Person A might be a bit more extrovert than Person B but that doesn't mean they have a different personality type, or that they might not flex that extroversion up or down a little in different situations or moods. Type labels essentially box people into a tight space which allows little room for that flexing.​

Why does this matter?

Because tools which are invalid and inaccurate will not only to fail to achieve their purpose but in the process will mislead, waste money and may cause harm. Surely, that's unethical?

Yet while Trait-based assessments are gaining significant ground in the psychometric market, Type-based assessments are still prominent and widely used.

We think there are many reasons for this, not least because accreditation training is expensive and knowledge about different tools is patchy. These are also some of the common reasons psychologists, academics and evidenced-based coaches put forward to explain this. But we think there is also another reason and this view is based on our anecdotal experience. It concerns the reports.

People love their Insights Discovery (and similar) reports. They are energised by the findings, will proactively send us (as coaches) their prior reports, and report finding them very useful. With high face validity, these reports also look great, they are simple and quick to understand and they lend themselves to immediate action. In contrast many of the trait-based assessment reports do few of these things. They're accurate and comprehensive but also lengthy and complicated at first sight and there is more reading to do.

Most people we work with have no idea of the relative merits of these tools but will take them on trust and at face value. In a busy schedule who wouldn't prefer the report which looks right and is easy to use? So, our message to the developers of those preferred Trait assessments, please look again at your reports - further enhancement would make our work promoting accurate information much easier!

We'd love to know your views and experiences on personality assessment, Please do share any comments below. If you'd like to discuss the use of psychometrics in your team or organisation do get in touch. ​

If you have ever made the move from an operational, management role to a more strategic, leadership one, or know someone who has, you'll know that this can be a challenging and stressful time. Not least because the context and expectations are new and there is a strong desire to be successful. 

One of the most common challenges involves getting to grips with the new role (and everything that entails) with a lack of resources and time. These two factors are commonly cited as key pinch points and they frequently result in heightened stress and poor work-home balance. A senior executive recently promoted to a Board level position described the feeling as being like trying to cling onto a bucking bronco without falling off. It's not a fun position to be in and when the situation continues for some time it starts to take its toll on health, family and general performance.

One senior leader told me that he was seriously starting to question whether he should even be in the role as he felt so out of control, and another said that she was thinking of resigning before others started to realise she wasn't up to the job. Confidence takes a severe knock when this starts to happen and can be slow to rebuild. 

In the examples given all three leaders were aware that they were stressed and struggling and this had led to their request for coaching. Sometimes leaders lack that self-awareness but their behaviour  indicates to others that an intervention would be helpful. Unfortunately these behaviours are sometimes self-destructive and/or harmful to others. 

Stress is considered to come from the interaction between the person's environment or situation and their response to it, and usually results in a feeling of an inability to cope.  ​As coaching psychologists and coaches with appropriate psychological training, we are able to apply a sound assessment of executive stress using established protocols. This quickly enables the coach and executive to understand the degree and nature of stress being experienced and to assess its change over time. If you, or someone you know, is in this situation you might, for example, experience changes in sleep or eating patterns, changes in concentration and memory, feeling flat or over-emotional, or becoming detached from people around you. Assessing these signs can provide a good baseline from which to begin steps to address the situation.

Coaching to address executive (and other forms of) stress will seek to explore both the situation (what is going on) and the person's response to, or perception of, it. This helps them make changes to their situation, adjust their responses to it, and usually do both. The wider goal, to regain a reasonable sense of control and perspective of the situation, helps to alleviate stress and rebuild confidence.

​Lack of resources and limited time are, unfortunately, increasingly common features of organisational life. Yet interestingly, on average, levels of stress decrease the more senior you are. This is thought to be largely because these more senior positions involve greater control, which is associated with reduced stress. So a key part of the transition into a more senior role is getting the right perspective and skills in appraising your situation and responding to it.  This might include looking at skills and attitudes to work and workload, managing time, planning and prioritisation, assertiveness, structured thinking skills, and so on.

​Anticipating and preparing for that promotion might be the best time to acquire the skills and insights to avoid these traps ahead. For example those whose previous careers have been defined by working very long hours can quickly find that they've reached the limit of hours available; those who have prospered by being willing and saying yes to every opportunity now find that that overwhelming desire to please is unsustainable; those who have enjoyed firefighting and reacting quickly to events now find that they need to delegate those bits of the job they enjoyed most. These features are often tied in with core values such as working hard, a need to be liked and fear of failure. An effective coaching programme will often involve exploring these values and core beliefs and identifying where they are now outdated or unhelpful and in need of updating.

Changing perspectives in this way can be a difficult but valuable component of the work involved in developing a clear and successful leader identity. Developing our own strategies to mitigate stress can be hugely valuable in creating a flourishing and sustainable career.

#NewLeaders

Every year around November, a news item pops up on most UK media platforms saying that from this day until the end of the year, women are working for nothing. This is presented as an illustration of the gender pay gap, the discrepancy between what men and women earn in the UK.

The gender pay gap has become another fact that is promoted widely, including by respectable publications. Earlier this year the Financial Times (April 23, 2019) reported that "there are still no sectors in the UK economy where women are paid the same as men" and that "the median pay gap this year [2018] was 11.9%". These are shocking facts. This suggests that women in UK workplaces are being actively discriminated against by employers. It might therefore be considered perfectly reasonable for women to assume that such discrimination does apply to them and that their contribution will not be fairly valued. It might also be reasonable to demand that companies and government develop further policies to correct this inequality.

The impact of this information is significant: it is demoralising, divisive and harmful. In our coaching work we regularly encounter women and men concerned about this situation and struggling to know how to address it, both for themselves and their teams. For a woman to assume, based on the presentation of these facts, that her male counterparts are paid more, is corrosive.

So how would that look if we knew that that information was misleading?

In the 2018 figures reported by the FT, 10,428 employers disclosed what they paid per hour to their men and women. Of these, 1,421 companies pay women more than men, while 8,113 pay men more than women. That is the gender pay gap. Yet when you probe a little (but not much) deeper a rather different picture emerges. What the headlines don't state, and it seems they actively obscure, is that these figures are based on a comparison of hourly rates of pay across all jobs across the UK. As the Office for National Statistics (the government office which measures and provides gender pay gap data) states, the gender pay gap "is not a measure of the difference in pay between men and women for doing the same job". Therefore these are not comparable numbers - it's like comparing apples with oranges. Regardless of age, qualifications, type of job, full- or part-time, seniority and experience, all hourly rates are thrown in together. EasyJet provides a classic illustration of this - their gender pay gap for 2018 is reported as a whopping 54%. However this is because their pilots who are 94% male earn considerably more than their cabin crew who are 70% female. Their (then female) CEO and leadership team have set a target for 20% of pilots to be female by 2020 - a target they are struggling with as there are very few female pilots qualifying, despite targeted initiatives to encourage them to do so.

When you compare like with like (comparable jobs and comparable sectors) a very different picture emerges:

• For men and women between the ages of 18 and 39 the gender pay gap is virtually zero (it widens after the age of 40)
• For men and women in part time work aged between 30 and 39 there is a negative pay gap (i.e. women earn more than men)

This presents an entirely different picture to the emphasis touted by virtually all mainstream UK media. These figures are encouraging, suggesting that the 1970s Equal Pay legislation is working its way through the age range. They reveal a significantly improved - and improving - picture and that younger women are benefiting from it. 

Among older employees a greater number of men than women are in senior positions, partly through having better opportunities in earlier years, and therefore they earn more. Women tend to take more time out from their careers for family reasons and are more likely to work part-time, so they earn less. On average, men tend to work longer hours and are more likely to work in dangerous, high risk or unsocial roles which typically pay more. For a long time many women have been unfairly treated in the workplace and their careers and earnings have been significantly impacted (as many of us have experienced directly) but all of these factors notwithstanding, year-on-year the trend is for significant positive change.

The gender pay gap is yet another topic that seems to have become the cause de jour for those keen to virtue-signal their woke credentials. Weaponising this data to further such a political agenda actually harms women (and men) and creates yet more completely unnecessary tension and pessimism. In reality, there is more to do but also much to celebrate in this improving picture.

​We've been running our Employee Feedback Culture Survey for some time to help us gauge trends and needs. Over time, we have seen a general uplift both in capability and willingness to give and receive feedback at work. Our latest review supports these general trends but still reveals some difficulties.

For example, 40% of respondents disagreed with the statement "in my company we celebrate success and recognise people's achievements", with a further 13% neither agreeing or disagreeing. (On the positive side, just under half of those surveyed agreed with the statement).

The survey also found:

• 40% said that giving and receiving feedback was not valued, widely practiced or done well in their organisation
• 43% don't feel that they or their contribution is valued

Whilst it is clear that workplace ​coaching is effective, the features that make it so have proved incredibly difficult to assess.

Studies tend to involve very few people, tend not to have meaningful control groups (i.e. a replica group of people subject to the same conditions who don't get coaching, for comparison purposes), don't account for differences in coach style, approach and quality, or find companies willing to fund it. Added to this, coaching is still a relatively new area so there is limited solid information on effectiveness available (although many coach training programmes suggest otherwise by reporting on coaching studies most of which are not robust or authoritative).

​​So, it was good  to see a new analysis of 117 studies carried out in 2018 (by Bozer and Jones*) to identify those aspects that make a difference to coaching effectiveness. They found that coachee characteristics count enormously. Effective outcomes were linked to coachees:

• being interested in learning and improving (i.e. they did not have a fixed mindset and were not over-confident)
• having good levels of self-efficacy (i.e. had confidence in their ability to develop)
• being well motivated to take part
• trusting the coach and being comfortable to speak openly

​This supports the findings from other studies. In our one-to-one coaching programmes, coachees are invited to take a self-assessment to check their readiness for coaching. Our coaches all undertake a 'willingness and readiness for coaching' assessment as part of the initial engagement.

​Many of our coachees tell us about regularly feeling stressed in their working lives. Many struggle to find good ways to address it. Very often it seems that the worse the problem is, the more complex and sophisticated the solution needs to be.

A study by King’s College London last year found that being among trees and hearing birdsong improved mental well-being, and the effect lasted for hours. Other studies suggest that a forest environment can lower blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol. Forty years ago the Japanese government initiated Shinrin-yoku, a 'woodland bathing' activity to help business people to de-stress.  

So, for a rapid and effective de-stressor, leave the phone behind (or in your pocket) and take a walk through the park, woods or other outdoor space and see how it benefits you... Let us know how you get on.

Leadership development is notoriously difficult to get right. For years consultants, business school gurus and other experts have created new trends as they have attempted to define what makes a good leader and how those characteristics can be developed. 

These trends have included authentic leadership, transformational leadership and emotionally intelligent leadership among others. Whilst it is likely that there is value in all of these there is no evidence at all to suggest that high authenticity or emotional intelligence for example, will cause a person to be a better leader. (Most of us probably know poor leaders who are very authentic or highly emotionally intelligent. If we are very unlucky we have also worked for one!) 

John Antonakis*, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the University of Lausanne, describes this as the classic problem when experts mix up correlation with causation. Most experts examine the top performing companies and then look to see what their CEOs have in common. They then determine that these are the essential characteristics of success and go on to promote developing those features in others.  Antonakis illustrates the problem: "it’s like studying the top CEOs in Switzerland and saying their names are Hans, Ulrich, Juergen, Joerg, and what have you. What do they have in common? They’re male. If the top 10 performing companies have a male with a Germanic name as CEO, does it mean that you need to have a Swiss German male to run a top performing company? No. Because the bottom performing companies probably also have Swiss German male CEOs running them". 

A very firm advocate of evidence-based practice, Antonakis outlines what the characteristics known to be important in good leaders are:

• personality traits such as emotional stability, extraversion, conscientiousness and open-mindedness
• intelligence - to be effective a leader must be smarter than the average in the group BUT not too much smarter as that risks the group not understanding or being left behind
• task-oriented leadership - having a good grasp of the system, the organisation and the strategy 

Once these essentials are in place, people and communication skills come to the fore (but without these essentials will remain ineffective). Other characteristics may well prove to be important, but the evidence isn't there yet. 

Good, effective assessments for these characteristics are readily available and can form a robust basis for selection and promotion decisions as well as underpinning leadership development programmes.  

To discuss how we can help you with these approaches for development and assessment, or our leadership development programmes generally, do get in touch.

Practicing some form of meditation, like mindfulness, is super fashionable now. It is considered by some to be as necessary to them as their daily workout. But is this yet another example of an over hyped trend or is there real benefit?

Mindfulness (and similar) meditation is a Buddhist-inspired practice that trains people to focus their mind on their experience (such as sounds, feelings, thoughts) in the current moment and to be fully present and aware. This usually involves a quiet space, breathing routines, relaxation and so on. People are often encouraged to develop a daily practice working either on their own or following guided meditations via phone apps or audio.

What is the evidence for the benefits and applications of meditation?

Practices such as mindfulness meditation have been found to provide moderate benefits in reducing pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia and stress in some studies. However many scientists remain concerned at what they consider to be the overblown hype around mindfulness given the limited studies and evidence to support it. In 2014 a group of scientists led by psychologist Nicholas Van Dam looked at these previous studies, collectively including over 3,500 participants, and found essentially no evidence for benefits related to enhancing attention, aiding sleep or controlling weight. This does not suggest that the practice is necessarily ineffective but that there is as yet little supporting evidence as to the benefits or applications.

Mindfulness in the workplace

Here’s where the effectiveness of the practice gets even more sketchy. The hype around it confidently says that mindfulness meditation will help with resilience, rational thinking, job satisfaction, clarity of thought, etc. It is hard to disassociate these claims with the increasingly lucrative market in promoting apps and books about it (a market valued in 2017 as worth $1 billion in the US alone). American behavioural scientists Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack recently wrote about the unintended negative consequences of mindfulness use in the workplace. Their studies suggest that the sense of calm achieved by mindfulness practice actually reduces motivation at work.   

Keep an open, but sceptical, mind

“Overall, I suspect that a large number of the health promises will not be fulfilled, mostly because therapies, phone apps and other interventions are being rushed to market without sufficiently rigorous testing and appropriate implementation,” Van Dam says. “But given what we’ve seen to date, I suspect evidence may accumulate supporting mindfulness practices for anxiety, depression and stress-related conditions.”

Many of us at Managing Change find mindfulness practice beneficial and will continue with it. We won't be recommending it for spurious purposes or overblown benefits though!