Do you care or want to care?

Over the next few years, it’s anticipated that 60% of working age people will have a ‘caring’ dependency. What does that mean? Caring could involve a child with a disability, a partner who had a stroke last night, an elderly parent, a neighbour or a relative with Dementia. When do you help? The caring could be 24/7, just at weekends or Tuesday afternoons. All kicking off within a timescale that’s now, tomorrow or the future. 

Can you plan for this? Perhaps. 

Will it change you as a person? Maybe not. 

What about your work, your source of income? What about your capacity or capability to maintain your job? Is that going to be a problem? 

Do you tell anyone? “It shouldn’t be a problem these days?” Can you cope and continue ‘business as usual’, afraid to speak up in case you’re side-lined or seen to be ‘different’. Sound familiar?

As managers, can we identify team members with these responsibilities or the support they need? “But it’s their problem!” or “I wouldn’t want to employ someone with those issues” …really?

So what if the carer is you? Tell us how you would want your organisation to respond. Send us your thoughts on the CMI Southern LinkedIn Group.

Blog by Simon Howlett, CMI Southern Inclusion working group

Get help

Why is supporting working carers so important? (Carers UK resource)

If you are looking for practical ideas book for the webinar on diversity and inclusion in the workplace on Mon 6/6/2016, 6.30pm to 7.30pm. It will explore how your organisation can better support the growing proportion of the workforce with an impairment, disability or caring responsibilities.

Join us for practical advice to help you take the next steps and gain one hour CPD.

One-tenth of a second

As a manager do you dress for work without hesitation? Or do you consider how your appearance influences the perception and reactions of others? Or how the way you dress might influence you? A few weeks ago, someone challenged me. “Do people really care what people wear these days? Surely managers can see beyond a person’s appearance and focus on the individual’s knowledge, skills and achievements.” Well, yes and no.

Performance-based management should focus managers and employees on achievements, not effort. As long as an individual is delivering against their objectives, relationships with customers and colleagues are good, and their approach is legal, everything else should be unimportant.

Unfortunately numerous psychology studies demonstrate we judge each other very rapidly based on appearance. In one-tenth of a second. Or less. Longer exposures don’t significantly alter these first impressions (although they may boost confidence in your initial judgments).

Professor Karen Pine’s research and associated book from 2014 suggests that what you wear can boost or lower your self-esteem *. Not only that, the clothes we wear can influence the way we think.  Research teams from California State University, Northridge and Columbia University in 2015** found that “the formality of clothing might not only influence the way others perceive a person, and how people perceive themselves, but could influence decision making in important ways through its influence on [cognitive] processing style”. These preliminary findings have extraordinary implications. Processing style can influence many important factors in the workplace, from the way people approach decisions to the way people focus on a task.

The industry you work in, the culture of your organisation, the nature of your job, specific activities coupled with your personality, figure and personal style all influence your choice of dress.

Blog by Jo Strain, Women in Management Lead for CMI Southern Region

Update (19/5/2016)

At CMI Southern 'Dressing with Confidence' event 19 May 2016, Linda MacDonald, formerly Dressmaking and Promotions Co-ordinator for McCall, Butterick and Vogue Paper Patterns, explained the basics of figure types, garment shapes, lines and styles, and looked at the options for what to wear when based on the scenarios that managers may encounter. 

 

There is no right or wrong way to dress. The event gave insights for developing your own style of confident dressing.

Tips for what to wear for media or corporate videos were also featured as part of the event.

 

External links

Dressing with confidence in the fight for the vote - Dr Maureen Wright's blog on the use of dress by prominent suffrage leaders
 

Sources

* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2644076/You-DRESS-Clothing-significant-effect-self-esteem-confidence-claims-expert.html

** http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/minds-business/when-clothing-style-influences-cognitive-style.html

Women in the workplace

International Women’s Day 2016

As a manager or leader would you agree that a core requirement of your role is ‘good business sense’? 

CMI Southern Inclusion Lead Jo Strain asks managers in the region: “It is more than 100 years  since the first International Women’s Day, and while every UK organisation complies with the UK Equality Act (or risks huge fines), how many really understand that embracing diversity in their operation and leadership team can be a cost-effective option to achieve outstanding results?”

Research by Grant Thornton into UK, USA and Indian-quoted companies with at least one female on the board found a $430bn return-on-assets differential compared to men-only boards in 2014. A McKinsey report indicates that the most gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform the least diverse.

Academic research from the National University of Singapore in 2014 confirmed that boards comprising at least two ethnic groups, two generations and both genders produced an average return on assets of 5.1% - compared to just 1.1% for boards that did not have any diversity in their workforce.

UK executive boards are still predominantly white male.  While the Davies Review headlined that women comprise 26.1% of boards in the FTSE 100, up from 12.5% in 2010, if you look under the covers this has mostly been achieved by the appointment of women into non-exec roles.

The Green Park study in spring 2015 found the proportion of non-white managers at the Top 100 level in the FTSE 100 has fallen from 6.2% to 5.7% in the 12 months between the springs of 2014 and 2015, with roughly 40 out of 480 non-white leaders exiting their posts.  The report also confirmed leaders who were women or from minority ethnic backgrounds featured disproportionately as non-executive board directors, which suggested they had far less influence than may have been expected by the statistics.

In contrast, 2015 British Library figures show that a two-year government scheme to run business-support services from public libraries encouraged more than double the national average of women to start their own firms

Jo Strain, CMI Southern Inclusion Lead, said: “Good management and leadership are essential to any successful organisation and should be focused on making best use of all available resources.”

She added: “The culture we create, sustain and reward in our organisations is shaped and driven by its leadership. For example some organisations like Google track and publish their diversity statistics. Where the data is not as good as you might expect, it is important to be on the firm’s leadership agenda and for them to have an active plan to improve.

“Organisations that understand the business value of diversity and embrace it throughout their operation are more likely to deliver superior results and longevity.  Is your organisation aiming for mediocracy or stand out results?”

International Women’s Day

Women in Management

8 Ways to Close the Gender pay gap, CMI website

Welcome to the CMI Southern blog

Welcome to the CMI Southern blog

The Southern Board of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is looking at new ways it can communicate with its members.

We hope to use this resource to share ideas and news about the CMI in the region.

To find out more about the CMI visit www.managers.org.uk

CMI has a Women in Management Network (WiM) - you can find out more about this at www.managers.org.uk/wim

You can also follow us on Twitter @CMISouthern

Write for this blog

If you are a CMI member in the region and would be interested in writing a blog on a management and leadership-related theme, please contact us.

Copyright and endorsements

The blogs published remain the copyright of the writer(s) and are published here in good faith to promote the work and ethos of CMI Southern. Publication on this blog site does not constitute endorsement of any view or opinion or a particular product/ service. The education resource is made available as part of the support offered to managers and leader fellow members in the region.