But we’re different….

Many times throughout my career, when investigating a particular problem, people have made comments along the lines of:

“But we’re the [Insert any industry name here] industry, our problems are unique, no-one has the same problems”

“The challenges of [Insert any job title] are different, no other role has these challenges”

Is this a valid assertion?

Does your organisation have a compliance culture?

In business situations a common frustration can be that staff do not follow the defined procedure, that data updates are not supplied correctly and that business change activities take more time and cost than expected.

These symptoms can indicate a deeper and more pervasive issue, namely whether your organisation has a compliance culture.

These cultural issues can result in poor business decisions, dissatisfied customers and potentially challenging questions from regulators. Above all, they can have a noticeable effect on profitability.

Cultural differences in teams

We recently hosted two US students visiting the UK on the “People to People” programme.  Our children’s school plays host to the “Homestay” section of the programme. The US students stay with a UK family with kids of around the same age, go to school with them and generally experience everyday life in the UK.

One of the fascinating thing as a parent is observing how the US and UK kids discover and then overcome their cultural differences. Our school uniform always causes comment, especially the blazer. The US kids get asked to say words like “awesome” and we normally are amused about our garden being called a backyard.

Observing this made me think of the differences I see in culture between teams when I’m facilitating.

And the winner is…..

As I write this post, the UK is in the middle of campaigning for the 2010 General Election. One feature of this election campaign has been the first televised debates between the leaders of the three main parties. The first of these debates has stirred up the campaign significantly as Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, by most accounts won the debate. This was an unexpected outcome as the Lib Dems have been the third party for many years.

This blog post is not a political post, but considers how winning may be assessed, particularly in a business context.

What does a facilitator do?

A question that regularly arises is “What does a facilitator do?” which is a very pertinent question, especially in a business context. I will now try and provide a little more clarity on what, in my experience, good facilitators should do.