Involvement

We wish you all a Happy New Year! Here’s to wrapping up the year in style 🎉 We look forward to working with you in 2025.

🎄✨ Merry Christmas from all of us at Involvement ✨🎄 Wishing you all a joyful Christmas. Thank you to our clients, colleagues and partners for your support and collaboration. It’s been a pleasure working with you, and we’re excited for what’s ahead.

Being coached is hard work. Let’s have a think about what it means to be good at being coached.   In sport (ok, football) highly-paid coaches are always being sacked.   This gives us the impression that the coach is everything: Coaching equals success.   Involvement agrees that coaching is indeed fundamental to our DNA and of course we can develop our coaching skills    But our experience is that 80 per cent of success through coaching is down to the coachee. Not the coach or the tools they use.   Opening yourself up to coaching is a skill to be learned and a big commitment in time and energy.   A lot of people think it’s about being given advice, but that’s not the way it works.   It’s not being told what to do for an hour. It’s not managing someone.   On the other hand it’s not counselling and it’s not therapy.   Here’s some feedback we’ve received:   “I’m making bolder decisions” “I’m less stressed and more focussed” “It brought revelations about myself” “My confidence has improved from 4/10 to 9/10” “I’ve learned to trust my instincts, challenge where needed and take more leaps of faith”   To help you understand how to be coached, here’s a game you can play at home. We call it the A-Game. (Yes, another sporting term useful at work.)   Your A-Game is what you’re like when you’re on top form. When you are on fire. You know when this happens (hopefully, it does happen!). Your colleagues recognise it too.   Being on your A-Game is infectious. It inspires those around you.   Write down the behaviours you demonstrate when you are on your A-Game and the conditions you seem to need around you to make them happen.   Now, have a go at making it happen, not just leaving it to chance. Feeling “I was confident. I was prepared, It ended well”.   Hard work isn’t it ….   Your coach can certainly help you identify the components of your A-Game and help bring it out.   When it comes down to it though, you’re on your own.   In the meeting, on the production line, in the warehouse, in front of your customer …. Like the tennis player looking up at their coach in the stands, success is in your hands. You have to work it out.   Read more about our approach to coaching in The Book of Involvement, available free here

Roger braved the shave! There's still time to donate to The Christie Charity here: https://zurl.co/0lRz Thank you to Chip Hanson from Grahams Barbers, Dukinfield.

Their sacrifices help to keep us all safe. So that's why we pause. And say Thank you. https://zurl.co/E233

Roger is fundraising to support a fellow colleague's father in law on his mission to raise money for The Christie Charity. To help meet the fundraising target, Roger will be shaving off his beard in our Hyde depot if he can raise £1,500! Please click here to find out more: https://zurl.co/Tk4C Any donations, big or small, would be greatly appreciated.

Happy Halloween from Involvement! Everyone enjoyed getting dressed up today - (it's also Tommy's last day before retirement so everyone is wearing a Tommy mask!) #happyhalloween

The results are in for Involvement's pumpkin carving competition! #Halloween

Are you in a fake team?   Fake teams are everywhere. It’s a very serious problem in all kinds of businesses and organisations, I think.   It’s just something we say – I’m part of this Team, I work in the HR Team, the Sales Team, the such-and-such a Team or, my personal favourite, the Senior Leadership Team.   But a group of people working in the same place doesn’t make you a Team, let alone a High Performing one!   Research undertaken by Dr Michael West done in the NHS, where effective teamwork can be the difference between life and death, has rung true with our experience.   Dr West says ‘in the research we’ve conducted over the years in a variety of sectors and particularly in health and social care, we’ve come to see that people often call the group they work in a team, but very often those are not real teams - but what we call pseudo teams’.   He goes on to say that ‘what’s astonishing is to see the research evidence around the difference between those two types of teams. Real teams are much more effective in terms of delivering care, they are much more innovative and they are people who are working together in a way which ensures their well-being and flourishing’.   A way to find out if you are in a real, rather than a fake or pseudo team, according to Dr West, is that you must have:   1. A set of clear, compelling objectives that your team takes ownership for achieving.  2. Clarity about what activities need to be undertaken by whom, which are reviewed regularly.  3. The environment to regularly review performance.   The research concludes that increasing the percentage of staff working in ‘real teams’ in acute hospitals in England by just 5% is associated with a reduction of 3% in patient mortality.   Of course, the difference between the NHS and our business is that if we don’t get it right, nobody’s going to die.   But, with all the challenges coming at us these days, it isn’t half going to hurt!   I’ve been thinking we might need a new name for a ‘real team’. Any thoughts?   I’d love to hear what you think about the way we built our award winning teams. It’s all in our Book of Involvement, which you can order for free from https://zurl.co/Bk4n

Involvement is not a Team. And neither is Team GB. That’s a bit of a strong statement from someone who runs a proudly ‘team-led’ business! And no offence is intended to the people overseeing our efforts at the Paris Olympics. But, no. Teams are smaller groups, more agile things. Even an organisation of only 100 people, like Involvement, is a collection of teams. Team GB is a collection of teams. The NHS, with over 1 million employees, can never be a Team - it is a collection of ‘000s of teams. Which brings me to the point of this post, which is that in organisations larger than a football team, the way your teams work with other teams is as, if not more, important than the way they perform by themselves. I call this relationship the mortar being more important than the bricks. Here’s a picture of the Stockport Viaduct, the world’s largest brick construction when it was constructed. It’s not far from our HQ in Manchester and every time I drive under it, I think about how it’s famous for being made from 11 million bricks, but is held together by goodness knows how many buckets of mortar. Let’s hear it for the mortar! At a company Workshop we ran about Teams, we got each of our teams down on the floor plotting the strength of their relationships with the other teams. Some were measured in cotton thread, others in string, the strongest in steel chain. You can be the greatest sales department in the world, but if you don’t have what you are selling in stock, or easily available, your efforts will be in vain. Successful teams have strong internal bonds and a highly competitive streak. That’s great, but in a business they must also sync with other Teams. A strong case can be made that were the NHS’s teams made to sync better together, the organisation as a whole would perform better. As ever, find out more about how Involvement works together by ordering our Book of Involvement, the inside story of our business transformation, for free from https://zurl.co/Bk4n.