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What IS Empathy? Put simply, empathy is understanding how someone else is feeling by putting yourself in their shoes, or more commonly by imagining being in their shoes. Not their actual shoes, we’re dealing in metaphors here. Relax, you don’t need to put Martin’s brogues on. Stand-up comic Ryan Niemiller’s routine about how ‘people su-ck at empathy’ is a funny take...

What causes stress at work and how can coaching help? In early April the CIPD, along with Simplyhealth, released a new report which showed that work related stress in the UK is on the rise, resulting in increased absences. In fact, on 28th April, ‘World Day for Safety and Health at Work’ (who knew?!), statistics showed that absence due to ‘stress,...

Mental health remains a taboo subject in many organisations. Be honest, do you find it easier to ask someone with a bad back or a mental health problem how they are and what you can do to help them? Every person and situation is different. For some people with poor mental health, the thought of a chat with their boss or...

Creative Facilitation means thinking differently about how to actively engage people in a meeting, training workshop or during a presentation. The aim is for those attending to get the most out of it and for your hard work be worthwhile. The neuroscience Psychology tells us we are all motivated by our feelings. Every interaction causes automatic thoughts influenced by our beliefs,...

Why is effective management important, and what are good management skills? There are few other roles as complex as the ones in which people manage other people. Partly this is because there are so many external influences on managers, such as organisational brand, culture and the expectations from teams and superiors. Where to begin? Those searching for the secrets of good...

Most organisations aspire to engage their employees and yet despite great investment in this area they aren’t always guaranteed success. But why?There are countless blogs that tell you what ‘The costs of poor employee engagement’ are Higher staff turnoverLower productivity and efficiencyIncreased sick daysImpact on profits To mention just a few and plenty more on how best to engage them… Whilst...

This month, we’ve been working with Chaucer Plc, a leading specialty insurance group, to help managers be more aware of unconscious bias. But can you really train people in unconscious bias awareness if it’s ‘unconscious’? To understand this, you must first understand what unconscious bias is. We all have it, it is a bias that happens automatically, is outside of our...

In 1968 a strike by 187 female workers at the Ford car factory in Dagenham was instrumental in the passing of the 1970 Equal Pay Act. The machinists walked out for three weeks in protest against their male colleagues earning 15 per cent more than them.A few years later the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made it illegal to discriminate against women...

If you meet a Year 6 teacher in January, the likelihood is that they are a shadow of their September selves. Gone are the dapper dress sense and the happy-go-lucky attitude. That feeling of easily ‘surviving SATS’ seemed a lifetime ago. Now, however, some are counting down the weeks, others the days, until that dreaded week in May. Headteachers have maniacal...