Notion Blog and News

The Head of Fleet Maintenance at a leading logistics organisation explains how Notion’s executive coaching helped him to expertly navigate the challenges of stepping into the senior management team.

Following the arrest of Patisserie Valerie’s Financial Director, revelations about accounting irregularities, missing cash reserves and secret overdrafts have sent shockwaves across the business press and any number of boardrooms alike.  Whilst it’s still too early to speculate about the future trading situation of the company, or the outcome of any criminal investigation, it does raise a bigger question about how organisations end up in such dire straits and how potentially fraudulent behaviour can go unchecked.

Congratulations to Laura Ashley-Timms, Coaching Director at Notion on her 2018 Top 50 Coach award. This prestigious honour was presented by Corporate Vision Magazine for her services to the coaching industry. 

The World Economic Forum predicts that in the next two years, 5 million jobs will have been lost across 12 developed nations as a result of increased automation and robotisation. But, the International Labour Organisation is less conservative in their estimation; they state that across places like Cambodia, Indonesia, The Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand, 137 million jobs will be lost as a result of the robotisation of the garment industry alone. That equates to an epic 56% of the workforce.

Deloitte’s Global Trends research in 2017 identified that 80% of organisations recognise that they need to develop more agile and diverse leaders and managers.1 Indeed, ‘agile’ remains a much talked about topic well into 2018. Although it is a relatively new term for most, it was actually coined by a group of industry leaders in 2001 as part of their agile manifesto to make software development more responsive to business needs. Now, appropriated by mainstream management, the term has spread into almost every aspect of organisational life. Consequently, most managers have probably heard about it, many will incorporate the phraseology into their everyday language, but do managers really know how to be agile?

Everyone has heard the proverb ‘curiosity killed the cat’ which warns of the dangers of unnecessary investigation and experimentation. The phrase, despite being over a century old, is still commonly said and is often used to stop people from asking unwanted questions. Interestingly, this notion is reflected in the management models of many organisations across the globe, where information and instructions flow from top to bottom; managers are expected to hold all the knowledge and employees who ask too many questions can be perceived as an irritant.