Led by coaches with good industry experience, this exclusive series of workshops are aimed at the more experienced managers and executives. They run every for half a day per week for six successive weeks.CertaintyOne’s core EFP programme covers ten key elements:

1. Assessing status and setting objectives.
2. LIFO behavioural style profiling and career re-assessment.
3. CV re-building.
4. Sharing experiences and building on career successes.
5. Job Searching and handling of recruitment agencies.
6. Using social networks in job-hunting.
7. Interview coaching and handling difficult questions.
8. Coping with stress and finanical planning in redundancy.
9. Initial LIFO profiling  compared with dynamic 360 feedback.
10. Personal action plans and accountability.

Led by coaches with good industry experience, it is aimed at the more experienced manager and executive and it runs every Thursday morning between 10am and 1pm in St Albans and covers

• Stress/anxiety/wellbeing
• Wealth management and cash flow issues
• Pyschometric assessment to identify strengths
• Career transitions
• CV improvement
• Job searching techniques and the use of social networks
• Handling recruitment agencies
• Verbal and non-verbal communications
• Rehearsals for interviews – many are out of practice

Staring at the news
Dog at your feet
Pleading for you

To put on his lead !

 At the computer
Surfing the web
You search for emails
Then go back to bed!

Familiar?
Staying indoors- no air, no sun, no contact, no activity. No good for our wellbeing!
We must GET UP, GET OUT and GET ACTIVE!

GETTING UP will make us feel we still have a job to do. It will, also, stop us being amongst the 61.3% who are overweight/obese (HSE, 2009) because we spend our life on our bottoms and not on our feet!

GETTING OUT will move us into the air, into the sun, out of the house and into the world. Green spaces improve our wellbeing and mental health (NICE, 2009). Sunlight raises endorphin/serotonin levels and vitamin D.

GETTING ACTIVE (swinging a golf ball, doing the housework or walking) is ‘’nature’s cure’’ (Chief Medical Officer, 2009) producing numerous health benefits. It’s a natural anti-depressant; reducing anxiety and helping us sleep, burn energy, relax, raise self-esteem and makes us fit, strong, healthy and agile.

Action Plan
1- GET UP!
Find a reason to get out of bed! Every day make a list of jobs to do and set an early alarm call!

2- GET OUT
Find a reason to get out. Go to the library or meet someone who has a positive spirit.

3- GET ACTIVE
Try and walk or cycle as often as possible.
• Remember feeling invigorated after your last walk, enjoying being out and about.
• See if you need a reason to walk or can you walk further or a bit faster next time?
• Wear comfortable clothing.
You will become pleasantly surprised how well you feel after getting up, out and active!

References:

Health Survey for England (2009), NHS Information Centre, 2010

NICE (2009) Depression: the treatment and management of depression in adults. http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/pdf/Depression_Update_FULL_GUIDELINE.pdf

On the state of public health: Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer 2009. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/AnnualReports/DH_11391

Led by coaches with good industry experience, it is aimed at the more experienced manager and executive and it runs every Thursday morning between 10am and 1pm in Welwyn and covers

• Stress/anxiety/wellbeing
• Wealth management and cash flow issues
• Pyschometric assessment to identify strengths
• Career transitions
• CV improvement
• Job searching techniques and the use of social networks
• Handling recruitment agencies
• Verbal and non-verbal communications
• Rehearsals for interviews – many are out of practice

Over the last 2 years, we have helped create small closely managed groups of redundant people, brought together by a common purpose.  That is to :

1. Share the pain of being laid off in groups of up to 15 at a time
2. Make new friends – there is always someone worse off than you ( health/wealth/family pressure/large mortgages/school fees/difficult cash flow/ industry sector opportunities drying up/hard career transitions / ageism problems )
3. Learn how to build strength and resilience
4. Bring a good CV back to the market
5. Interview well
6. Use the latest Social Network job searching techniques
7. Volunteer to keep life in perspective
8. Help others……….always.
9. When back in work …look to remember those still out of work and try to find opportunities for them

So after the intensive initial support programmes provided by trained Certaintyone consultants – usually over a six week period –  we then support these CRC groups with advice and training services. Many now meet in regular forums – and some have chosen to form special interest groups across their sectors. Each group just needs a lead coordinator to take the initiative. Good leadership practice when you return to work !!!! Finally

How do others feel about creating local community groups for a self-help programme….we would welcome your feedback ? The green shoots of recovery emerge from local collaboration, and we would like to see if others have spotted this trend.

Peter McCann

Senior Partner 

Redundant.

Yesterday I was someone

Today,  I am no-one.

Waking up to silence….emptiness…..loss

Nothing to get up for

No-one to talk to…

Except the cat.

Where do I go?

What do I do?

Who do I speak to?

What if this goes on?

No-one calls…  No-one.

This personal reflection is no doubt familiar to many having experienced this sudden and dramatic life change.  Their ‘being’ no longer ‘well’ ricocheting from the effects of being blasted out of work.

The major trauma of losing a job, income, sense of accomplishment and purpose, human contact, and the anxiety of not being able to earn a living or support a family has significant impact on a person’s physical, mental, social and emotional wellbeing. All are affected by the parallel pressures on cash flow and wealth management – time to reassess how best to manage your financial assets and if necessary release cash.

Physically, people may lose or gain weight or become ill; their physical stature or prowess diminishing.  Mentally cognition, knowledge and skills may suffer.  Socially, daily human contact and friends disappear and emotionally, self-esteem and confidence plummet.  Anxiety spirals over never-ending uncertainty.

Thus redundancy is certainly NOT ‘’ a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing,’ (World Health Organisation, 2011) or ‘’a contented state of being happy, healthy and prosperous!’’ American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2009).

Foresight (2008), in his report on Mental Capital and Wellbeing has identified social and personal behaviours that can pick us up and help revive the old mojo!   ‘’ That positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts on the inside and radiates to the outside,’’ Marshall Goldsmith (2009).

In surviving redundancy we can take these FIVE STEPS TO HAPPINESS which focus on feeling good and functioning well.

1.     Connect with Others

Make friends, build relationships.  Helps you to find fun, enrichment and support.

2.     Keep Active

Walk, cycle, garden, dance, play tennis and do the housework!   Makes you feel good and keeps you mobile, fit and strong!

3.     Live and Love!

Live for now and savour every moment.   Helps you appreciate what matters.

4.     Learn something new

Instruments, cooking, climb Everest!  Eventually, you will enjoy the challenge and satisfaction and will build heaps of confidence.

5.     Give 

Help others.  There is nothing more fulfilling and rewarding.  It’s fun; you make more friends and it gives you a sense of purpose.

These are a very good starting point for anyone managing redundancy.

Now to your Plan of Action

• Write each step on a ‘post-it’
• Stick it on your kitchen wall
• Look at them every day
• Think how you can build each one into your life
• Plan how you will achieve this and when
• Then reflect and see how well you did.

This has certainly helped me on my way back to work!

Liz Prosser  M.Sc

Health and Physical Activity Consultant

BACK ACTIVE LTD.

REFERENCES:

World Health Organisation (2011), Mental health: a state of well-being

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (2009). Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009.   Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project (2008).  Final Project report – Executive summary.  The Government Office for Science, London.

Marshall Goldsmith (May, 2009), Are You Full of Mojo or Nojo? What is your attitude toward what you do? Is it positive or negative? What do you radiate to people? MarshallGoldsmith.com

If  you are growing your business – you must start with your people ! Because unless you have fully motivated people, doing jobs that fit their talents and being well managed, you can never grow your business to its true potential.

Every stakeholder in a business wants to be part of a successful and growing enterprise. For many, this is all about developing the best product or service and making sure that through good sales and marketing, new clients and revenues soar.

Studies in the USA have shown that there is a very close correlation between customer satisfaction and employee morale. Many companies have excellent customer service as one of their key objectives. But sadly, far fewer have high employee morale on that same priority list.

It makes good business sense to invest in different ways of helping the employees make their best possible contribution to growing the organisation.

That process has to begin with a meaningful assessment of the capabilities of each person in the organisation. It is not just about the skills and experience each person has, although that is very important. In addition, the personal characteristics and behaviour of each person and the way in which they operate best in a collegiate environment can aid the allocation of the most appropriate roles. Then management can best motivate them to deliver exceptional contributions.

None of this is rocket science but it does require an investment of time and some external consultancy by people whose job it is to provide insight into your staff’s capabilities and personal styles. We are forced to test our cars annually, so how much more important is it to assess  ourselves and our behaviour?  Only when you have all the information can key decisions be taken to optimise the people, the management structure and establish the incentives to drive the business forward.

Does it matter if you are getting by without investing in your people ?

When external investors or potential acquirers look at any business, their first analysis will be of the financial position of the company and its position within the marketplace. Only if that looks attractive, will they look beyond the pure numbers. The second will be the quality and motivation of the management and staff and this will be a deep analysis. If their assessment is that these areas of the business are weak, this would seriously lessen their interest in investing or acquiring the company.

That’s  how important having motivated and well managed people has become –  if you have high ambitions for your business. Whether starting up or developing through growth phases, it is vital to :

• identify your winners, those who make the biggest contribution
• develop those with potential, creating more winners
• replace those who are unwilling or incapable of making a difference in your organisation, even after you have given them additional support

For me, the formula was simple. It was ….

• Reputation - delivering business benefits, providing quality products and services and adhering to high ethical standards.
• Respect - treating customers fairly, managing staff consistently and fighting competitors honourably.
• References - demonstrating that we exceeded customer expectations, publicised project successes and retained long-term customer loyalty.

Whatever your formula is, make sure that you can communicate it succinctly and passionately to anyone who enquires.

If returning to full-time employment in a business similar to where you worked before is proving to be difficult, do consider a change of lifestyle and become a consultant.  This in turn could lead you into interim management or non-exec Director roles and then perhaps back into full time employment, if that is your goal.

The first step towards a consultancy career is to define what kind of consultancy you would be happy and confident to deliver. That involves your looking very carefully at what you believe you are very good at….and at your core strengths. We often  use  the LIFO methodology to identify strengths and preferred styles and have a full LIFO report produced to help redundant executives assess how best to sell to their strengths and build upon areas that need improvement.  Once you have defined these, write down all the ways in which you have demonstrated those capabilities over your career. Can you point to ways in which those activities delivered solid business benefits to the organisations for whom you were working? Equally importantly, are there colleagues who will sing your praises and be willing to act as references for ‘who you are’, your capabilities and the successes your work delivered?

With that work under your belt, the next step is to find your first consultancy project. Here, you have two routes to market.

Route 1.

You can take your consultancy offering directly to some prospect companies. Ideally, these would be companies where you have worked previously or where personal contacts enable you to get first meetings with key individuals. Personal referrals by colleagues gives you a significantly improved chance of early success, so maximise the use of your network. Make sure you bring your Linkedin profile up to date and be willing to put your consultancy offering out there for people to see. A good thing to do is to attend a training course on the use of LinkedIn, and the creation of key words which recruiters will scan for. If you can enhance your industry profile by speaking at conferences or workshops, do it whenever you get the opportunity.

Route 2.

If you are not sure that going directly to prospective clients is the route you feel comfortable pursuing, then try to identify consultancy companies who are winning assignments in your preferred space to see if they need additional consultancy resources. These could be full time jobs, part time or associate roles. By the latter, I mean that you would act as an overspill when their full time consultants are fully deployed. It would not be unusual to start as an associate with a company, establish your consulting credibility and move on to part or full time employment with that company.

Finally, let me highlight some key points that will help you become a consultant.

• Never underestimate how much you know after all those years of full time employment. There are many managers under tremendous pressure to deliver who would love to have your skills and experience in their team. They just need to know you exist and are currently available to help them.
• Even if you have worked for just one or two companies in your career, try to describe your capabilities in the most generic way possible. That will optimise the impact you can have as you publicise your consultancy skills and offerings.
• Always use your personal and business networks wisely. As long as you are confident that wherever you work as a consultant you would deliver real value to the business, don’t be shy about blowing your own trumpet. Even better if you can persuade colleagues to blow the trumpet for you to their network of contacts.
• Despite the redundancy, please portray yourself as having been largely successful in your career to date. Never seek to blame someone else for your current circumstances or describe yourself as any kind of victim. Even if you feel that way, get it out of your system in the privacy of your home  or an Executive Redundancy Forum and put a positive spin on it before you open your front door.
• Once you have completed your first consultancy contract and banked your first payment, you will wonder why you hadn’t chosen to do this years ago.

As one door closes, another opens.

Richard Goat

This is a question being asked by potential employers and candidates of all ages from the baby boomers to the Y generation of young people.

When job seeking, it is not enough that job candidates obtain degrees, certificates and apprenticeships that confirm their education and core skills. Employers are increasingly seeking to observe proof of employability. As a former Human Resources Executive with responsibilities for recruiting, assessment and now coaching a large span of Executives and young people, it appears increasingly evident that employability skills are essential for success in obtaining work experience and employment.

Positive attitude, manners, enthusiasm and strong core values are essential traits to show in an interview. In a market where there is an oversupply of people and fewer jobs available, over and above attitude is a need to show drive, persistency and an ability to relate and communicate verbally with others face to face. These skills can be developed outside or within educational establishments, corporations and through professional training, and hopefully have already been embedded through a home and community environment.

Employers are demanding more. This was highlighted in a recent article by the former Principal of Lambeth College, Richard Chambers entitled “What constitutes ‘employability’ and how do we address the challenge?” (Chambers, 2011)

In this case, “employability” is defined as the drive to succeed, persist until the job is completed and being able to relate well to other people.

With competition for jobs at an all-time high in a difficult economic climate, those candidates finding ways of meeting this challenge have the edge. Full engagement with the process as well as the employers is vital to success. There is evidence for this in the current case studies in my own practice, as well as that described in the Richard Chambers article relating to Lambeth College.

Achieving Employability…

In my view, it is the key qualities of employability that are essential to the process of securing a job:

•                Drive…Frederick Herzberg (Herzberg, 1987) identified three key factors in his research on motivation:  Achievement, Recognition and Reward. All involve taking responsibility for what Hertzberg calls your own “internal generator”.  I believe this is what gives each of us drive.  It is sustaining that drive or motivation that makes us stand out in our own minds as well as in those of our peers and potential employers.

Others can enable us, but only the individual can actually move forward by himself or herself. If we begin to build what we consider an achievement, it can light our “fire” or internal generator.

Engaging and creating generates our “fires”.  For those of us, who remember the famous ad of the Duracell bunny, the ideal is of a sustainable charge that appears to go on forever.  Yet, unlike the Duracell bunny, I believe we are motivated by a series of charges that begin with even the smallest achievement until one charge builds on another and the momentum takes over to move us forward. As a coach, I enable my clients to “dig deep” for another charge or connection. Then onward we go and go….soon they are moving on their own…

•                Persistence…Yet, the Duracell bunny had no obstacles. Life is not without its bumps and road blocks and the same is true of the job search or succeeding at a job.  I continually hear in our Executive Forums, and from my individual clients, that they apply for jobs and spend hours writing detailed applications only to never hear from the employer or recruitment agency. Unfortunately, it is not just a matter of ‘poor corporate manners’ these days, but the truth is that employers and recruiters feel overwhelmed with applications. Candidates feel rejected and dejected by the lack of acknowledgement or response. Again, as a coach, I enable them to “dig deep” to remain resilient and onward we go and go until the next obstacle. Soon they are traveling on their own.

•                Relating …  Movement is all about direction and recognizing that we are part of a larger community of human beings. Sadly, too much time communicating by text and email may have left people with an inability to handle face to face communications with confidence. So many fail to match, pace and respond coherently when meeting others who ask questions about their aspirations, or with agencies and interviewers about their skills.

Candidates also fail to engage with the employer with questions that indicate an understanding of the company’s issues and challenges.  By asking appropriate and intelligent questions the candidate can appear to be a member of the team even prior to employment. Given good professional individual and/or team coaching, encouragement by professionals and peers along with preparation and practice, these employability skills can be learned and developed.

Karen Hatt

Partner

Certaintyone Ltd.

References

Chambers, Richard (2011) What constitutes ‘employability’ and how do we address the challenge? , FE Week, 26 September, Learning and Skills Events Consultancy and Training Limited, London

Herzberg, Frederick (2011), One More Time: How do you motivate employees? HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing People, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, Boston, Massachusetts

We’re also pleased to able to able to let you know about the following developments:

Sally Wells and Perceptive Placements
For senior managers who need to deal with professional recruiters, CertaintyOne has created a combined recruitment and integrated coaching service. Sally, with 14 years experience in placement across a variety of industry sectors, can help steer people into work. She understands the pressures felt during stressful periods, particularly by senior executives, and will handle discussions with a respect not always shown by some recruitment agencies.

Shirley Hawkins and Employers’ Guidance on Redundancy and Hiring
We are pleased to announce that Shirley is now available to lead redundancy planning for companies who have little experience of letting go of staff. Many need to reduce costs fast, whilst their owner/directors want to protect their company’s reputation with customers and suppliers , treat departing staff well, and motivate remaining staff to cope with increased workload.

Shirley has many years experience in answering the questions – who to let go of, when, how much will it cost, how best to take care of people, what support to offer them, how to avoid the risks of litigation, and can advise on TUPE issues.

Peter offers help in the South West Region
Peter undertook some pro-bono work for sixteen young people at the Dartmouth Apprentice, who were seeking to improve their career opportunities. In addition he has offered to help the Torbay Volunteering Service where a new Redundancy Support Service is being pioneered.

If you’d like to know more, feel free to get in touch