An essential competency for key decision makers and senior managers who want to make a difference to their business.  The competency to understand the process of 'business alignment' and set a solid ‘core’ or foundation around which leaders can then drive their business forward is key.

Based on the key concept of creating competitive advantage through having the customer at the heart of everything that you do, this competency includes:

• How to create strategic business direction in a simple and effective way
• How to leverage competitive advantage through out-of-the-box thinking and innovation
• Understanding how to ensure your product, customer segments and targeting strategies are commercially viable
• Based on psychographic profiling, we show delegates how to package and engage with different customer segments in a way that works each and every time
• How to create and align all aspects of your business culture including mission, vision, identity, strategies, values and beliefs to ensure your staff are engaged in delivering, and are competent to deliver, key business objectives 
• How to ensure that you have the right people doing the right job at the right time, and that they are doing it well
• How to measure business performance in a quick and effective way to ensure you put your energies onto what works.

Leaders with a new ‘mind-set’ for their business, able to thinking and acting differently is a true definer of true leadership.

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.

Changing your organizational culture is one of the biggest challenges a leader will face.  A business culture is formed over many years and changing it can sometimes feels like an uphill battle, in fact it is more difficult to change the culture of an existing company than to create a culture in a brand new business. If you have decided (or maybe your customers are telling you) that a cultural shift is needed, the two most important elements for creating this cultural change are senior team support and training.  

As you may know pitchblue specialise in behavioural change, and this cultural shift is all about this fascinating aspect of leadership. Senior players must support the cultural change, not only in the words they say and the way they say these words, but in their everyday behaviours too.

The second essential element to successful cultural change is training for the business as a whole.  Every staff member must clearly understand what is expected of them, and must know how to, once they have been defined, actually ‘do’ the new behaviours

There is a seven stage process to creating and leading cultural change including:

• Updating or creating mission and vision statements
• Updating key business strategies
• Creating value and belief statements
• Creating behavioural expectations around these values and beliefs
• Constant and effective communication
• Reviewing the company structure
• Review all operational systems

For a leader in this highly competitive world to be the best they can be and to achieve the best possible results, having the competence to design, lead and create an effective culture is vital.

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.

Values-based leadership is the way that a leader makes ‘aligned’ decisions and behaves in an ‘aligned’ and ‘congruent’ way that build the trust and commitment of those around them.  

All leadership behaviours have multiple drivers and the more complex the situation a leader is in the more complex the mix of these drivers becomes.  To keep it simple, two of the key drivers of leadership behaviour are beliefs and values.

Beliefs are based on the leaders past experience of similar situations.  Interestingly, beliefs are not equipped to handle complex new situations that we have not experienced before, so leaders may be unsure how to behave and will have to make a ‘best guess’.  Very often this ‘best-guess’ is outside of the persons conscious awareness.  To be a belief-based leader is obviously not the way forward.

Values are simply put “what is important to us” and as values are not constrained by past experiences, they are adaptable to new situations Values based leadership shows leaders how to deal with these new and complex situations by ensuring their behaviours align with their own, and their companies values.  

For this to happen, obviously a company must have clear values with a defined set of behaviours that reinforce these values and the leader must be aware of their own values and where their values align with those of their company.  Where teams unite around a shared set of values, they become more flexible, less hierarchical, less bureaucratic, and they develop an enhanced capacity for collective action.

Shared values build trust, and trust is the glue that enhances performance.   In the ever changing world of business today, values provide a flexible way or keeping leaders and teams behaving in ways that are true to themselves and their brand.

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.

Creating a winning team is far harder that it might sound.  Many companies have competency frameworks and matrixes that clearly outline the skills that each person at each level must have, there will be job descriptions that describe the task people are required to do, but the human being is far more complicated than a list of do's and don’ts.  

To bring a diverse group of individuals together in a way that means they perform, to lead this group through the stages of group formation in a way that allows them to work inter-dependently and to ensure that the team is balanced in all its connotations is a competence many leaders don't have.  

More often than not a team is recruited based on intuition and little science, however the most effective teams are created when a leader bring science to the table.  Behavioural science is a vast and complex topic but there are certain tools and techniques that a leader can use to ensure that the teams that they create are given the best possible chance to succeed.

Depending on the situation various tools can be used, most revolving around a combination of competency frameworks, psychometric profiling, occupational testing and, lets be honest, a bit of ‘gut-reaction’ is often useful too.  For those that disagree with intuition, here, why not read Malcolm Gladwells book ‘Blink’?  

pitchblue are specialists in working with companies and leaders to create high performing teams and have a wide range of tools at our disposal, which we are more than happy to pass on.  

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.

Essentially situational leadership suggests that managers must use different leadership styles depending on the situation. Leaders with this competency are able to analyse the needs of the situation their team are in. and then use the most appropriate leadership style. 

It sounds simple, and it is; when you know how!  

There are four types leadership behaviour in situational leadership, and knowing when behaviour to use as what time, in what situation is a wonderful competency to have.  These four behavioural styles are:

• Situation 1 - Telling / Directing – in this situation leaders define the roles and tasks of their team, and supervise them closely.
• Situation 2 - Selling / Coaching – in this situation leaders still define their teams roles and tasks, but they seek out ideas and suggestions from their team. 
• Situation 3 - Participating / Supporting - in this situation leaders pass day-to-day decisions, such as task allocation and processes, to their teams.
• Situation 4 - Delegating – here leaders are still involved in decisions and problem-solving, but control is with the team. 

Effective leaders should be versatile, and able to ‘shift’ easily and smoothly between these different behaviours inline with the situation.    The structure of situational leadership gives framework around which leaders can behave in the most effective way for their teams and the individuals in their teams.  

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.

Having created a winning team, the next task for a leader is to effectively coach that team to achieve success.

To be a great leader you have to be able to see each and every day from other people's point of view.  A leader has to be able to inspire their teams to make the right decision each and every time. 

Leadership is about being inspiration.  Leadership is about integrity and trust, it is about integrating your team into a cohesive unit, and it is about being performance orientated.  

The best leaders are those that have an innate ability to get the very best from their teams.  Leaders never stop learning these skills.  

There is a huge difference between managing, leading, coaching and mentoring.  The competence to use each of these skills at the right time in the right way is a wonderful talent and when asked, the ability to effectively coach a winning team was seen as one of the most desired attributes of leaders today.

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.

Culture comes form the Latin word ‘cultura’ meaning ‘to cultivate’.  The ability to create a culture that is conducive to the achievement of key business objectives as an absolute must for anyone in a leadership role.  

Company culture is important because it can make or break your company.  

Culture is one of the hardest concepts to define.  We know when the culture is right, we know when it isn’t, but how many leaders are able to define and ‘cultivate’ the necessary culture of an organisation or a team in such a way that everyone clearly understands it?  

Culture is actually quite easily defined with a little ‘know-how’. Culture is defined as the values, attitudes, beliefs and practices shared by a company's employees.  Companies with a culture that is aligned to their business objectives routinely outperform their competition. Some research has suggested this difference many be as high as 200%.  

Company cultures evolve and change over time, especially when staff leave and new ones arrive as each person brings their own ‘culture’ to the team.  As a business grows is culture will change.  What is essential is that this culture is created, expressed, lead and managed at al times.

To know more about how you can develop this competency, or how pitchblue can help to develop this competency in your managers and leaders please contact one of the pitchblue team.