The most astute commentators of the global financial crisis swiftly recognised that the root cause wasn't an intellectual failure of the financial services industry and governments, but a moral one. Thousands of senior managers, regulators and economists knew there were critical systemic problems they should face up to, but they wouldn't speak out.

From the horrendous events unfolding in the Jimmy Saville case, to patient care outrage against the NHS and the complicit corruption between the media and the police, we've never lived in a period where the transgressions of organisations and institutions can be so readily and explicitly exposed on a global stage. We live in an increasingly transparent, noisy world, but most organisations continue unconsciously to build defensive cultures of silence.

Last week I had the privilege of talking to an expert on this subject, the wonderful Margaret Heffernan (author of Willful Blindness and the giver of some blinding TED Talks), at the PurpleBeach launch - a new community which brings together business leaders and experts to discuss people innovation. She cited research that shows that 85% of individuals in US and European organisations have concerns at work that they are afraid to raise.

Organisational silence refers to a collective-level phenomenon of saying or doing very little, or nothing, in response to significant problems that face an organisation. Underlying silence, Heffernan says, is a deep rooted fear of conflict. Of course, there's the fear of political danger too (research shows that somewhere between 70-80% of employees feel open criticism will lead to negative repercussions), but it seems that there's a more mundane issue at stake; individuals at all levels fear having difficult conversations that will quickly get out of control when they have little skill to deal with them effectively. "Yeah, we go from silence to screaming!" one of the audience called out to widespread nods and murmurs of approval. 

The fear of conflict is self-perpetuating; the less we confront, the less successful we are when it's critically needed.  A culture of repressed conflict grows and the organisation becomes crippled when things are going wrong. Conflict itself becomes a political issue.

Interestingly, Heffernan describes the root cause of silence amongst European workers and executives as futility - "even if I speak out, nothing will change, so why bother?" However, the Gallic shrug or the British stiff upper lip, "is still a way of forgiving myself my fear" she maintains. I'm not sure the trait is confined to Europeans - the frequent misappropriation of the Serenity Prayer is the US variant of the get-out clause.

Many companies believe that privacy and concealment are essential to competitive advantage. And in some cases they're undoubtedly right, particularly when directed outwardly. But when this extends into the company, towards its own people, the tensions generated produce dangerous no-go zones where bad behavior can be implicitly sanctioned.

Heffernan cited an example of a senior manager getting it right and the surprisingly simple mechanism that enabled him to break through the wall of silence: a boring question. 

Along with his colleagues on the leadership team, briefing materials about a new product clearly highlighted considerable safety risks. Nobody mentioned the risks. The negative implications of calling out the risk were obvious - short-term profits would be hit, morale would be knocked and market expectations rocked. Rather than deal with the conflict of doing the right thing, the leaders were choosing silence and a big gamble.

"Does anyone else here have any concerns about this product?"  This simple question opened up the right debate and in quick succession each leader expressed their deep reservations and the product was taken off the launch schedule. This 'boring' question enabled individuals to feel safe - there was no implied threat or criticism. 

We need a new conversation about silence. There's overwhelming evidence that it's a bigger issue than we're prepared to admit. We know from decades of research that group decision-making (go back to the Groupthink studies in the 70s and 80s) is significantly better with multiple perspectives and diverse thinking styles. 

If innovation is an argument, silence is the polar opposite. We can't learn when we won't talk about the failures and missteps we've made. Without openness to negative feedback loops, an organisation, community, team or leader is increasingly a marginalised force. Silence suppresses reality. Without a noisy debate within an organisation, senior leaders may take silence as consensus or support: "No news is good news."

Silence saps the power of the organisation. We need a noisy debate within organisations to connect to a noisy world.

THE SOCIAL ANIMAL by David Brooks

SHATTERED - Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality by Rebecca Asher

OPEN SERVICES INNOVATION by Henry Chesbrough

THINKING FAST AND SLOW by Daniel Kahneman

GREAT BY CHOICE by Morten T. Hansen

GRAND PURSUIT by Sylvia Nasar

EXPLORING LEADERSHIP by Richard Boden, Beverley Hawkings, Jonathan Gosling & Scott Taylor

EVERYTHING IS OBVIOUS by Duncan J. Watts

GOOD STRATEGY, BAD STRATEGY by Richard Rumelt

Maybe it's the sustained economic crisis that's pushed writers' thinking, but 2011 was a good year for great books. One of the defining moments (and books) was triggered by the death of Steve Jobs. For years, ill-defined rumours of his tyrannical behaviour lay alongside the seemingly unstoppable story of Apple's transformative effect on the computer and entertainment industries.  We worked alongside Apple in the 1990s and again this year and no-one was more surprised than us about the explicit nature of Steve Jobs' persona recounted in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (Walter Isaacson). Anyone having read Isaacson's biography of Einstein will know what a great writer he is. For megalomaniacs everywhere, a must read. For everyone else, a fascinating insight into a personality that never wanted to compromise on anything.

In complete contrast is the work of Jim Collins (Built to Last and Good to Great) and his devotion to what makes company performance endure. At the core of his work are mountains of data that reinforce a recurring theme - focus, hard work and humility are what mark out the great. In Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck (Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen), he looks at US companies that have outperformed the stock market average for their industry by a factor of ten between 1972-2002. His conclusions focus on challenging the need for disruptive leaders in turbulent times and that innovation is of paramount importance. However, time and again his examples of where this fails have little to do with the idea itself but with the context. Companies importing people or ideas that were inappropriate to the culture failed, unsurprisingly, to succeed. 

Real experience tells us that great leaders blessed with opportunity can create golden eras in organisations. What value can be learnt from aping others is perennially appealing and vexing in equal measures. What worries us about the cult of data is that regardless of the numbers, few (or probably no) organisations have ever succeeded in impersonating such success.  

Shakespeare probably had it right: "This above all; to thine own self be true." Organisations who know who they are and what they want can obviously benefit from the experience of others - "We've always been shameless about stealing great ideas" said Steve Jobs. But trying to copy the blueprint of another company's success is as unconvincing as thinking a tribute act can ever approach the real thing. 

The worry with Collins' undeniably powerful work is that it represents an either/or choice. His aversion to transformation and egomanics are clothed in reams of data. But as The Economist wrote recently, "Mr Collins might profit from a bit more willingness to admit that, like all management gurus, he is dealing in clever hunches rather than built-to-last scientific discoveries."

Collins could undoubtedly benefit from the truly impressive Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) when it comes to decision making. Over the past decade there have been a slew of interesting books on irrationality demonstrating how our decisions can be distorted beyond our awareness by a whole host of factors. What Kahneman, a Noble Prize winning economist, does, is to describe our thinking more holistically as comprising System 1 (Thinking Fast) which is unconscious, instinctive and effortless, and System 2 (Thinking Slow) which is conscious, uses reasoning and hard work. The last five years have given us great cause to challenge the reasoning of experts. Here is an important body of work that might help us to move to a new level of thinking. 

If you want to gain some perspective on economic history, then you're in for a rare treat.  Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius (Sylvia Nasar) manages to take the driest of subjects and transform it with warmth and insight into the personalities that have shaped our economic environment. If, as we hope, Marx was accurate when he said "capitalism's recurrent crises actually make it stronger", there could never be a better time to form an opinion on the dismal science.

What is leadership? Not a light read, but useful if you're interested in creating a strategy to develop that elusive capacity in your organisation. Exploring Leadership: Individual, Organisational, and Societal Perspectives is written by a collective of academics who regard leadership as a social process rather than as a set of competencies. It recalls an experience we had of a client asking us to make sense of over 70 competency statements that had been developed to describe great leadership in their client. The sheer complexity and confusion in this picture highlighted that the most fundamental questions about leadership had been missed. What are leaders there for? How do they create value in the organisation?  This book doesn't have all the answers by a long stretch, but it might help you to look at the challenge in a new and productive way.

Another great book on how experts become over-confident in their ability to extract meaning from seemingly infallible data: Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails (Duncan Watts). Highly recommended for overly certain consultants, strategists, investment bankers, marketers and anyone else trying to bet other people's shirts on a sure thing.

Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality [Paperback] (Rebecca Asher). One outcome of the last decade's inexorable rise in demand from work is the impact on parenting and the increasingly fragile balance of work and family, particularly for women. Described as a call to arms for a revolution in parenting, she describes the vicious work cycle: "The mother feels that she must cut back her paid work in order to look after the children because the father is working long hours; the father feels he should work long hours because the mother has cut back her paid work."  The consequence: women lose out on fulfilling and well paid careers, men don't get the granular reality of their children's lives, missing the real benefits of being a father. In addition to a powerful insight into modern life, Asher proposes a new balance in the parenting split that parents and corporate/government policy makers should read.

One of the delights of this year was David Brook's The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens. A book that divided opinion probably because it attracted so much attention from politicians and influencers - its main critics were the experts behind the story who never get such access or profile. Brook's chief achievement is to synthesise a lot of ideas about what it takes to be a successful human being and bring them to life in a captivating way. The Social Animal describes the research revolution of human consciousness, based on three insights: the importance of the unconscious mind in shaping our view of the world;
our emotions are not distinct from reason but inextricably bound up with it; we are not separate individuals but "emerge out of relationships." I read it on a beach in Italy this summer and never felt I was working. He pushes his assertions to the limits of his understanding in some areas, but despite this, it is a beautifully written book.

Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (Henry Chesborough)  The idea that innovation or creativity is the preserve of a creative elite in an organisation or can be hard-wired into a process is definitely looking like a losing hand. Building innovation capacity at a cultural level is progressively being recognised as the dominant path.

Henry Chesbrough's Open Services Innovation was one of the best innovation books published this year. In it he suggests that true innovation is founded on the notion that every company, regardless of what they produce, must see themselves as a service and that innovation comes from co-creating with customers that service to drive the experience forward. At the heart of the case is the undoubted commoditisation trap that all companies can fall into as they mature. Innovation is the revitalisation fuel to stamp out irrelevancy. 

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Richard Rumelt)  Strategy creep. Strategic marketing plans, a strategic waste management policy, strategic people management policy. The word strategy has crept quietly into virtually every domain of thinking, used by anybody wanting to give their idea, work or point of view that little more weight. In the process, the word strategy has become devalued and for many irrelevant. Richard Rumelt seeks to reclaim the idea and value of the word, describing its holistic meaning and worth to an organisation. We concur!

You can read my first two blogs for Training Journal here:

Find out why I believe that building capability needs to be combined with building capacity: Be Brave - Build Capacity in your Leaders.

Read my thoughts on why our focus should cultivating 'new behaviours' in pursuit of organisational performance goals: Beyond Behaviours.

Jean Gomes, DPA CEO and Chairman of The Energy Project, who took part in the 10k run commented: "This is such a fantastic charity and one that is close to our hearts. Every day they support over 140 patients and carers in their own homes and at the Hospice. They have to raise a staggering £15,000 every day just to keep the Hospice going. It was a great run, the team did brilliantly and we are already planning another fundraising run for Phyllis Tuckwell later on in the year."

During her three years at DPA, Clare has progressed from managing programmes to becoming a central part of the facilitation team; delivering many of DPA's flagship leadership and development programmes. She brings a compelling blend of broad business experience from roles in BP, Unilever and Thames Water, combined with deep subject matter expertise in the Learning & Development space to her client projects.

We're all in awe of the focus, motivation and organisational skills, that have provided the foundation for Clare to make the shift to Consultant just over three-months after coming back from maternity leave. And we're delighted to be able to create this new role to enable Clare to continue to shine. Well done Clare!

In my experience, the teams and functions with the highest engagement scores are those that deliberately don't place too much stock emphasis on tackling engagement scores directly. They recognise that the key to improving engagement scores is simply to improve engagement. This means putting the foundations of a high-engagement culture in place; tackling the key leadership and cultural issues that demotivate people and drive passive attitudes; and trusting that the results will follow. Along the way, the value of surveys is in giving feedback on progress towards this. 

I appreciate this may all sound a bit heretical, but when I think about the impact of engagement surveys, they have a lot to answer for.

Based on my recent experience, here are four good reasons why:

1. They reinforce the limiting belief that employee engagement is a process or capability - something that the organisation and its leaders 'do' - rather than an outcome they need to strive to secure.
2. They play into the common preference for rational data driving pragmatic action and encourage a superficial, symptomatic view of what it takes to engage people (devaluing the concept of engagement along the way).
3. They fragment focus on what are perceived as specific engagement issues, driven by individual or clusters of questions, and draw attention away from the more fundamental issues that often undermine engagement.
4. They legitimise potentially wasteful, and in extreme cases, destructive behaviours and initiatives that ironically often highlight, rather than resolve, the fundamental cultural and leadership issues they intend to address.

Of course, it's not the surveys themselves that are to blame necessarily; it's how they are used. I certainly believe that surveys are a useful barometer of how people are feeling towards the organisation (if the right questions are asked in the right way), and yes, they can contain useful indications of where some of the issues lie.

The real problem is that organisations seem keen to assume that the survey results contain the answers and that learning and enquiry should stop there. The common model that exists in most organisations is of leadership teams action planning responses to specific poor results.  This has great appeal. It is tangible and measurable and can be held up as evidence of activity. All things that most organisations love to do. The reality is that this is often done as part of a compliance response to an organisational edict, rather than a genuine desire to make a difference.

This approach is typified by one of my clients, who recently said to me: "I've been asked to develop an engagement action plan around my EES scores and I've said 'No'. I've told HR that my engagement 'action plan' is to carry on doing what we're already doing: creating a successful team in which everyone is clear on what we're trying to achieve and why; ensuring we all understand how we fit in to this; and making sure everyone feels that they can make a very personal contribution to making it happen".

That's the spirit.

What this really boils down to is not so much the surveys themselves, but organisational attitudes to employee engagement. There have been over 10 years of significant focus on engagement as an issue and a driver of business success. That's great, and to be welcomed. But I fear it's become established in the wrong way - as a silo of capability - and subjected to the normal rational, pragmatic conventions of business. We're losing sight of engagement as a personal high-performance state, driven by feelings and attitudes, and therefore a fundamentally human, intangible phenomenon. In short, employee engagement, as commonly practiced and perceived, is becoming stale and delivering limited results.

Employee engagement surveys are only part of this. But, as the most common totem or symbol of engagement efforts, they would be a good place to start to shift this pattern.

The key question is what next? I believe we have to re-focus back on engagement being a performance state that delivers all the business performance benefits that started the engagement bandwagon in the first place (we all know the statistics). We have to make it about understanding people and what motivates them and less about what organisations are doing to demonstrate that they are good engagers. We have to give employee engagement the focus and depth it warrants.

Perhaps a better starting point would be to start with: "How do we look at our best?" and build a better understanding of engagement from the perspective of 'who we are' and 'what our people value' rather than 'what we should do'.

To achieve this we helped them try something completely different by deconstructing the typical employee conference. Instead, we took them on a boat to an island in the middle of the Thames, ditched the majority of Powerpoint slides, gave every team a flipchart instead of a table and facilitated team conversations through a range of techniques. The whole organisation was involved in a discussion about what it will really take to be a company capable of achieving their bold ambitions for growth.

The event was a real success, both in terms of the tangible outputs and the tone and mood we were seeking to create. As well as over 40 practical ideas developed by the whole group, each team member walked away with their own ideas for build further momentum towards greater success.

Read what the Head of Home Entertainment & Sound at Sony felt about how this "excellent" event went.  

• How to inspire and lead a culture of innovation
• How to apply the secrets of the world's leading innovators 
• How to overcome the biggest barriers to personal, team and organisational innovation
• How to assess the optimum amounts and types of innovation across the organisation
• How to create a culture of rapid but safe experimentation.

Using DPA's Innovation Leadership profiling tool, participants gained new insights into their personal strengths and areas for improvement around leading innovation.

Delegates also received a comprehensive personal workbook containing the key models and ideas from the workshop and practical tools to apply in the workplace.

Mark Ryan, Associate Director, Learning and Organisational Development at John Wiley & Sons, said: "As well as challenging our thinking on this subject, there were some real practical takeaways from the session which are sometimes lacking in other providers' programmes. I should add that DPA has worked very closely with us to understand our business challenges and built a programme around these. I appreciate their personal approach and would not hesitate to recommend them."

Based on the positive delegate feedback, Wiley recently scheduled a second DPA innovation masterclass for a wider group of its leaders.

The new role will see Mona continue to 'connect the dots' to keep DPA running exceptionally smoothly and enable client-facing consultants to create successful programmes.

Driven by a deep interest in what DPA does, Mona has shown a desire to grow and develop and has recently completed the CIPD Foundation Programme in HR with flying colours. She now manages the majority of our business-critical HR and recruitment processes.

We're thrilled to be able to create this new role for Mona.

Ok, time for a show of hands please.

Who knows of an organisation that would benefit from better decision-making, more creativity, greater flexibility and improved levels of performance?

Assuming that most of you have raised your hand, it begs the question: but how?

The answer is that elusive mix of mindset, understanding and emotions that drives motivation, engagement and (ultimately) performance: positivity.

But why does positivity often prove to be so difficult to achieve in the workplace and even more difficult to maintain over the long-term? For a rising number of people, the answer might be a surprising one - boredom. In our hyper busy world, it's easy for us to confuse the rising demands of email, meetings and complexity - in other words activity - with productivity. Productivity implies intentionality and therefore true engagement. Pure activity quickly becomes reactive, repetitive and habitual. As more people spend more of their day reacting, boredom takes grip becoming one of the greatest barriers to productivity and therefore performance. People hate being bored. And boredom is surprisingly stressful. Even more so when people are busy, but still bored. It takes a toll, often beyond their awareness, sapping energy and resolve.

A UK study revealed that at least a third of British workers claim to be bored at work for most of the day, affecting jobs that on the face of it you would not expect to be 'dull' such as teaching, marketing, law and management. People feel most positive and perform at their best when they are appropriately challenged: when they are trying to achieve goals that are difficult, but not out of reach. If the dial is set too low, boredom can quickly set in. But turn the dial up too high and people may begin to experience the symptoms of stress and tune out of the real value creation process.

To maximise individual performance, people need to operate in the sweet-spot that exists between boredom and stress. An appropriate level of motivational challenge enables individuals to be at their most effective (a state often referred to as being 'in-flow'). A practical example of striking this optimal balance between using your skills and challenge comes from the world of entertainment in which video games are designed to engage players over an extended period of time. As their skill and expertise develops, they progress through the game but each level increases in difficulty to maintain an appropriate level of challenge that keeps them 'in-flow' and so prevents them getting bored. This is not dissimilar to keeping an employee motivated as they progress through their career.

The link between positivity and performance is highlighted by a survey carried out by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM). It showed that the top 10% of performers rate themselves with the highest positivity at 86 out of 100, whilst the lowest 10% of performers rate themselves with the least positivity with a score of only 30.

But positive thoughts in themselves aren't enough to drive performance unless they are accompanied by positive feelings and positive actions. And whilst individual differences mean that positive thoughts and feelings come more naturally to some than others, all of us can learn ways of increasing our positivity through:

1. Crafting our work to be more meaningful
2. Looking for opportunities to innovate and learn
3. Investing in relationships that energise us.

People who feel positive and happy in their role can be described as thriving. Not only are they satisfied and productive but they are actively engaged in creating their own future as well as that of the organisation.

Studies have highlighted four key mechanisms that foster thriving:

1. A degree of autonomy
2. Sharing information across the whole organisation
3. Increasing the depth and frequency of organisational citizenship behaviours
4. Providing regular feedback so that employees have clarity as to 'where they stand'.

The frequency of positive experiences is a much better predictor of happiness and performance rather than the intensity. Therefore, creating job roles that offer the employee regular and frequent opportunities to experience positive emotions, minimise boredom and allow them to do things differently can go a long way in promoting positivity and hence performance.

To put this into perspective, high performance teams have been shown to have a typical ratio of 6 to 1 for positive and negative emotions, mixed performance teams 2 to 1 and low performance teams as low as 1 to 1.

So although it may require a concerted effort for an organisation to create such 'thriving' conditions, the rewards can be significant in boosting company performance over the long-term in a sustainable way.

Now time for me to sign-off before any of you get bored…

Dan Pink's book Drive and Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, amongst others, have popularised intrinsic motivation research. The books showed that when people feel intrinsically motivated, they enter a high performance state, predominantly fuelled by three fundamental human needs:

1. Purpose - the need to feel we are contributing and progressing towards something worthwhile
2. Mastery - the sense of being competent and expanding our abilities
3. Autonomy - the desire for self-direction and choice.

Conversely, extrinsic drivers switch on our calculating brain and make our field of view narrow and short-term. Behavioural science shows that pay and rewards often inhibit performance by dampening our innate desire. In practical terms, evidence suggests if you pay people to do something they love doing for free, they will do it less well and may stop doing it altogether.

Fuelling intrinsic motivation and building a sense of automony, mastery and purpose is a relatively untapped opportunity to grow personal performance and engagement in what people do.

Our work with eBay on an innovative study into intrinsic motivation has uncovered some fascinating findings about what motivates people most powerfully and how managers enable this within their teams:

As an organisation, eBay is pretty exemplary in many of the ways in which engagement is judged and engagement survey data is strong. Yet despite this, there was one organisational challenge causing concern - relatively high levels of attrition and the loss of key and emerging talent.

Partnering with Dr Vurain Tabvuma, senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Surrey Business School and expert on motivation in the work place, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative survey designed to explore people's motivation and engagement experiences in depth.

Interestingly, intrinsic factors were generally rated higher than extrinsic factors like salary, bonus, package and job status. The top three drivers were clarity and pride in the business (purpose), use of talents and skills (mastery) and choice and empowerment (autonomy).

So what did we find undermines intrinsic motivation? Some very common challenges. Excessive demand, organisational complexity and lack of innovation all crowded out intrinsic motivation. Excessive demand means people feel less able to exert self-control and self-direction over their work. Doing things to a level that you don't necessarily aspire to is not a satisfying experience. Similarly, overcoming complexity to get things done was also an issue: employees struggled to collaborate across boundaries and implement new ideas effectively, which limited their sense of progress and accomplishment that's implicit in Mastery. Overall, they felt limited in what they could achieve and attributed these dynamics to what was undermining their sense of 'making a difference'.

These findings are helping eBay employees make progress against personally meaningful and rewarding goals. We've now developed a toolkit that provides a practical framework for managers to generate productivity, satisfaction, sustainability and creativity. Managers and teams are using the toolkit to positively shift the mindset around the organisational factors that inhibit intrinsic motivation at eBay.

The implications for employee engagement and motivation are important. Complexity, demand and lack of innovation are all common dynamics that we certainly see different flavours of in most organisations we work for. For many of the organisations, a paradigm shift is needed from engagement and intrinsic motivation being an organisational agenda - something we DO - to becoming an outcome - something we ENABLE - and a core part of what excellent people management looks like.

How are managers unlocking autonomy, mastery and purpose in your organisation?

So what was so different about the meeting this morning? As a consultant I've met and worked with hundreds of business leaders over the years, but today really was different. It was quiet.

We hear lots about the need in business for 'charismatic leadership'. The news and business press tends to be full of high octane, high profile characters, being the face of their brand. Indeed, many of the classic leadership development programme curriculums have advocated this particular school of thought, perhaps at the expense of allowing students to explore other forms of leadership.

Of course, charismatic authority is one of three forms of authority originally laid out by sociologist Max Weber, the other two being traditional authority and rational-legal authority. He defined charismatic authority as "resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him."  Over the last hundred years, where Western (in particular American) business has been the dominant force, charismatic leadership has been the leadership style very much in the limelight.

But as economic power continues to shift east, business as a whole is embracing more eastern cultural values out of necessity. There is also a growing body of evidence that a quieter approach to leading people and organisations will become more prevalent.

In her New York Times best seller "Quiet: The Power of Introverts", the author Susan Cain talked to Asian-American students who told her they felt alienated from the brash, backslapping atmosphere of American schools. In the book she questioned the dominant values of American business culture where forced collaboration appeared to stand in the way of innovation - the one thing most leaders say they want right now. She also explored how the leadership potential of introverts is often being overlooked.

Closer to home, we know that many of our clients are accountants, actuaries and research doctors who lead large organisations - some of whom are extroverts, but many more are self-confessed introverts. Without the headlines these are the quiet leaders we see leading their companies to growth, navigating complexity and uncharted waters successfully, creating loyal followers and employee engagement - simply because people listen when they speak. And they do this without the need to shout about it - their results speak for themselves.

As a life-long advocate of getting people in business talking more to achieve different results, today was a powerful reminder that true dialogue involves the type of active listening you rarely see, and that introverted senior leaders can do so very well.

Over the last few years I've been making a conscious shift from me-focused to others-focused, with some incredible results. In Dan Pink's fictional novel, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, he shares valuable tips for life. One of them is "it's not about you", something I'm beginning to realise. Contrary to my usual, 'hard-wired' thinking patterns, 99% of the time nobody is looking at me, people aren't talking about me and nobody really cares if the Starbucks man was rude to me. The most valuable thing I've learned is the more I help others, the better I feel. I don't understand it, but it's true. There are simple ways to access this good feeling in our leadership role every day.

At Christmas I spent time volunteering at a homeless shelter. I've wanted to do it for years, but always came up with excuses. I've always been wholeheartedly committed to wanting to take part in charitable endeavours, but only partly committed to actually doing it. This year I told people, became accountable and involved my network. It was a great experience. However, the dragging lead-up made me question my drivers: Was I truly trying to give something back? Was I led by a sense of duty? Or worse still, was this selfishness masquerading as a good deed? This questioning didn't make the experience feel natural and I didn't get the 'feel good' factor I was looking for. The truth is, there are many opportunities throughout our day inside and outside of work to give something back and it's easy to access that good feeling whenever we choose.

So, how do you build a little bit of philanthropy into your everyday leadership role, without getting out the soup ladle?

1. Give people your time - show interest, focus your full attention and really listen
2. Seek to understand - recognise that sometimes people don't want their problems solved, they just want to offload
3. Switch off your own agenda - help people find their own way by coaching them to come up with their own ideas and solutions
4. Stay 'others-focused' - use self-awareness to monitor where you're focusing your attention. Write yourself a note at the top of your notepad that says, "How can I help this person during this conversation?", or "How do I bring out the best in them?"
5. Nurture potential - understand strengths and weaknesses in skills and key attitudes about self. Build people's self-confidence through challenging and supporting them
6. Encourage - people will go to great lengths if they feel someone believes in them
7. Give them freedom - hire the right people, give them the basics and then give them the freedom to make their own decisions (one leader who actively champions this is Richard Branson).

One of the most wonderful gifts you get from being others-focused is a break from your own self-talk, which can be mindless and unhelpful. Making the shift, even for a little while, rejuvenates like a mini break with multiple benefits: you get a break, others feel their motivation skyrocket, engagement improves, and ultimately so does the bottom line.

Just for the record, my pace of life has slowed enough (albeit marginally!) and I have learned to meditate. Through the mindfulness that meditation brings, I'm more present during my conversations than I've ever been in my career. Move over… make room for me on that yoga mat.

Throughout the year, our consultants share their expertise through client work and programmes, speaking opportunities, our blog and providing expert opinion in leading business publications. This thinking is helping clients like Allianz, eBay, Royal London Group and Sanofi find the optimal balance between creating value today and value tomorrow and making them capable of enduring success.

The first issue includes: an extract from DPA's whitepaper 'Is your organisation designed for a reality that doesn't exist?', innovation lessons from creative industries, key learning from the Emerging Leaders Programme we designed for Sanofi, findings from our research into intrinsic motivation at eBay, insight into the retail sector, and our predictions of what will be on the leadership agenda in 2013.

If you would like a pdf copy of the launch issue, or to be added to our distribution list for future issues, please email marketing@dpacoms.com.

The video of the interview is well worth a look. While the context of the interview is the mobile phone market, Alex poses some tough questions that every organisation needs to answer about business model innovation and long-term survival.

For more information about how DPA is helping global brands such as Telefonica O2, eBay, Visa and Allianz improve their innovation capabilities, please contact: Elvin on +44 (0)1483 414000 or at innovation@dpacoms.com.

But on a serious note, we continuously ask ourselves the questions: How do we help our clients create that pride and passion in their employees? How do you involve and engage your employees so much that they become one of the strongest brand assets that you have?

Whenever I am with a new group of people I always like to ask them how they feel about work. At best people get some satisfaction from their role but this is often clouded by other complaints about their managers not supporting them, their colleagues not pulling their weight or their families displeased with the amount of hours they work. At worst, they agonise over every hour they spend at work and post their no-holds-barred feelings all over the internet.

I recently met with an econometrics expert, Les Binet, from a leading advertising agency and we had a great discussion about the power of engagement when it comes to brand promotion and presence. I strongly believe that if customers hear of a company who takes employee engagement seriously and have a team who are motivated, focused and are doing the very best job they can, the customer will know they're in safe hands and are purchasing from a company that values people.

Brands that have capitalised on the 'human touch' see a significant increase in business performance. They understand that a proportionately small amount of overall budget can have a disproportionately positive impact on all manner of things, including sales, customer retention, staff attrition, engagement, work ethic or the environment. People might say this is hard to quantify, but I don't believe it is, or that it has to be. There are very simple measures, beyond engagement surveys, that will show how the human touch can create a brilliant customer experience, directly or indirectly. 

The next time you find yourself trying to prove the case for increased resource for employee engagement, ask your Board these questions:

1. Do you want your payroll to be an expense or an investment?

2. What are unengaged employees costing your business in lack of productivity, attrition and brand reputation?

3. How many talented people would not have left your business if they had been working for people who created a great environment to work in?

4. Are you confident that every manager in your business is dedicated to getting the best out of each member of their team?

5. What could you achieve and gain by spending 1% of your overall budget on employee engagement?

As CEO, I'm the final hurdle, sensing how she'll fit into our culture and trying to look at her through clients' eyes. As a lot of rational analysis has been done, I'm unashamedly relying on my gut instincts to guide me. Fifty minutes into the meeting, it's all looking and feeling good. But… just as we're rounding up, Faith says something alarming in response to a fairly innocuous question. It jars with what I've heard and seen and I'm left feeling uneasy about her judgement. I'm due for another meeting in 10 minutes, so I can feel myself closing down even though I know that it's not the right thing to do. I should extend the session by another 30 minutes and gently tease this out into the open and be clear about what I've just heard. But I don't and I give in to the immediate pressures of the day.   

Later that afternoon, that little moment of deviance looms all-important in my analysis. The team is surprised and frustrated by my reaction, but we work it through, and hire the candidate. Fast-forward several years and Faith is a star performer. So, it's a happy ending. But it could have so easily gone the other way.

For 30 years, a disparate body of psychological studies and neuroscience research has been building into a field labelled variously as Unconscious Bias, irrationality and self-deception. In essence, it considers how we make decisions beyond our conscious awareness. There are dozens of well researched biases at work that influence how we form our picture of the world. In the case of Faith, one of two biases - Recency or Primacy - may have been at work on my judgement. This is where our decisions are overly affected by the sequencing or timing of information.

For example, if a manager is presented with information about two sets of candidates with identical skills and experience, but where information is ordered such that one candidate has all the positive attributes sequenced first and the other the negative qualities first, the second candidate typically never makes through to the next round of interviews.

This plays out in different ways depending on the nature of a decision making process. In longer decision making processes, where there are several rounds of recruitment interviews, Recency Bias takes hold. We know we're going to hear a lot of information throughout the process so we withhold judgement - however, what we hear last can eclipse everything else we discover. 

Think about how many candidates have blown their chances by saying something out of line in the last five minutes leaving you in no doubt they are the wrong person. If this happened 30 minutes into the first interview, its effect would probably have been diluted or contextualised amongst the other hours of dialogue.

In a session where the decision making process is much shorter - say a single meeting or interview, Primacy Bias takes hold. When time is short, you're unconsciously looking for short-cuts to make the decision, so you grab hold of information rapidly - in effect you tend toward making the decision on the first or second piece of solid data - and filter information with bias on it confirming the decision you've already made. Here, first impressions can make or break a decision.

So, what's the solution? The first is to accept that there's no such thing as totally rational, unbiased judgement - we are inherently biased. It's a deep feature of life, enabling us to function. The second is to start paying more attention to what we're doing. One simple lesson now being taught to judges to avoid being hijacked by their biases is to take better notes, paying particularly attention to separating facts and emotions.

Bias plays a crucial role in the hiring and development of employees, so it's unsurprising that teaching managers how to incorporate this most subtle and ambiguous body of understanding is fast becoming more popular.

Clare will be returning to continue her work on Scottish Life's business transformation programme, and to new projects specifically as part of the delivery team on a large-scale leadership development programme for Allianz.

Clare's experience working with blue-chip clients and her talent at delivering high quality programmes has always been a huge asset to the team. We're thrilled to welcome Clare back into the DPA fold!

Need more breakthrough innovation? Sure. What's the catch? The clue is in the adjective: breakthrough innovation requires a degree of breakage en-route. That means taking risks that don't always pay off.

It stands to reason: in a turbulent, uncertain and complex economic climate there are few 'knowns'. New product development in particular has become a voyage into the unknown with companies using intelligent trial and error techniques such as Lean Start Up.

But in most cases, the perceived negative implications of a risk-gone-wrong stifles the very innovation that organisations so desperately need.

That makes Doug Sundheim's Taking Smart Risks: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes Are High a timely and welcome guide for organisations that want to do just what the title says.

Five steps to smarter risk-taking

Doug gave me a sneak preview of the book before Christmas and I found it to be a rare and accessible blend of research, insight, wisdom and practical tools that deserves a place in every executive briefcase. 

Taking Smart Risks offers readers five smooth stones to slay the 'fear-giants' that crush smart risk-taking in their organisations:

1. Find Something Worth Fighting For

• Something Worth Fighting For (SWFF) is what all smart risks have in common.
• It must be simple, stir emotion, lend itself to a story or narrative and inspire action.

2. See the Future Now

• Ask questions, understand concerns, test the concept behind your ideas, and predict as many fail points in advance as you can.
• Have an open, honest conversation with trusted people around you to determine what is the worst that could really happen.

3. Act Fast, Learn Fast

• Start before you know where to start, fail early, often, and smart - build learning into everything and stay humble.
• Accept that you have to live with failure - since it is an inevitable by-product of taking risks, even smart risks. Failing smart is the best way to learn.

4. Communicate Powerfully

• Expect communication to breakdown and plan accordingly.
• Share thought processes, meet regularly, and don't avoid difficult conversations.

5. Create a Smart Risk Culture

• Define a smart failure - the acceptable boundaries within which it is okay to fail.
• Reward both the successes and these smart failures.

Every chapter ends with a clutch of useful tools to help readers de-risk risk-taking. If you're short on time, just read the handy chapter summaries and start playing with the techniques that Sundheim suggests.

If you're serious about innovation, growth or even plain survival, risk-taking is non-negotiable. Sundheim's book doesn't guarantee a failure-free future (what a relief as so much crucial learning happens when we fail!), but it will help leaders and managers in every organisation improve the quality of their risk taking.

The hardback and Kindle versions of Taking Smart Risks: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes Are High are out now.

So, like gold panners, we've sifted through the shale, mud and granite of the publishing world to find a few nuggets of worthwhile reading. Follow this link to Download a pdf of our Favourite Books of 2012.

DPA has a reputation for new ideas, stimulus and innovation. Part of the reason for this is that we have an extensive library, and between us really have read every book in it. We're pleased to be able to share the books we found thought-provoking and relevant this year and hope it will be a valuable resource.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Susan Cain). We spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings, but much of it is dominated with the ideas of the best talkers, not necessarily the best thinkers. Cain offers a powerful argument for rethinking the lazy assumptions about personality types.

Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Allen Lane History) (Mark Mazower) - A wonderful study of 200 years of attempts to create global governance. 

Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - a big idea that feels timely and true. Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, argues we need to focus on "antifragility"- things that become stronger under stress. He's an opinionated, in-your-face writer who has an abundance of confidence in his views. Marmite. We love it.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Pankaj Mishra) - Our world is dominated by the intellectuals of the West. Mishra introduces readers to the forgotten thinkers of the East and urges us to take stock of our long-cherished western values.

Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century (James R. Flynn) - This isn't a relaxed, populist read but if you're interested in how our intelligence is evolving, Flynn's remarkable study of IQ development is fascinating.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Michael Sandel) - One of the most important books of 2012. A nursery introduces fines for parents who are late picking up their infant children. Result: more parents are late. The fine makes us less moral, more calculating, seeing it as a payment for more time rather than a penalty for transgressing our moral responsibility. Sandel surveys how free market thinking has pervaded into previously unimaginable domains of our culture and counts the cost to our society. 

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change (Charles Duhigg) - A comprehensive tour of the latest science of how habits are formed and what it means for personal and organisational change.  

The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs (Cynthia Montgomery) - A marriage of strategy and leadership that starts with why your company matters.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Jonathan Haidt) - Brain science sheds new light on the possibility that our political and religious beliefs are hardwired given our brain preferences. Controversial, but powerfully thought-provoking.

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive (Bruce Schneier) - Why does society work? Schneier argues that four forces are at work: moral pressure (values and social norms); reputational pressure (peer pressure in intimate groups); institutional pressure (the rules and norms of large groups) and security systems (mechanisms designed to induce cooperation).

Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Tony Judt, Timothy Snyder) - A fascinating tour of thinkers of the last century. Judt's last book before he died.

The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies for Disrupting Markets and Building Brands (Amitava Chattopadhyay and Rajeev Batra with Aysegul Ozsomer) - In 2005, 44 of the companies on Fortune's Global 500 list were from emerging markets. In 2010, there were 113. Low labour costs and abundant natural resources are typically cited as the key sources of competitive advantage of emerging market competitors. Here we see how blinkered a view that is. Time to wake up!

The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation
(Ron Adner) - Innovation thinking driven by opening up an organisation's awareness to its environment.

Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution (Lisa Bodell) - A slew of ideas to get your people thinking and acting differently.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't (Nate Silver) - The US pollster whose predictions have astounded the market with their accuracy.  Humans are over-confident in their predictions. Silver advocates being the 'fox' who keeps an open mind, adjusts theory to evidence, and is wary of ideology.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson) - This is a big book full of deep ideas about globalisation. We're entering a new era of geopolitics where assumptions that prosperity equates to inclusion should be carefully challenged. 

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust (John Coates) - A thesis on the impact of testosterone, cortisol and adrenaline on markets, risk and decision-making. Fight Club anyone?

In my first management role I had to performance manage one of the most challenging individuals I've ever had to interact with in my 18-year career. There's one way to describe how I managed the situation: terribly. I'm willing to cut myself some retrospective slack due to the fact that, like many fresh, young managers, I was thrown in at the deep end with no formal training or guidance. So what made it so terrible? I entered the conversations with absolutely no conviction.

Imagine the scene: I'm anxiously preparing for my meeting. I need to give feedback about the unhelpful and sometimes, downright nasty comments that are regularly made across the office. I have a plan, a list of bullets, things to say. I even have a list of likely responses, so that I'm ready to tackle any excuse. But I am completely oblivious of one key thing. One monumentally powerful insight, which could have changed my whole approach, not to mention the outcome: Belief. At that moment in time, I thought:

1. This individual will never change,
2. This conversation is pointless, and
3. It is going to be extremely unpleasant for both of us.

In The Coaching Manual, Julie Starr states: "What we believe to be true about our world and ourselves can separate people or bring them together." In this scenario, this statement couldn't have been truer, and it doesn't take a behavioural psychologist to work out that every one of the statements above played out like a Shakespearean tragedy. Every leader has experienced something similar at some point: the sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach that comes with the loss of belief that they can impact a person or situation.

What I learned during that whole experience, I continue to use today, when I'm coaching leaders within global companies. I'm often asked what one nugget of wisdom I can give leaders to achieve outstanding performance. And I always say that having belief is the most powerful mindset in achieving ambitious goals through a capable, motivated and high performing team. Fundamentally, if you believe in your people, they know it. Feel it. If you don't, they feel that too.

So what can leaders do to access the power of belief?

1. Find something to believe in. Embed your belief in your mindset going into any conversation - whether you trust that you are shaping the highest performing team possible, the integrity of the HR process, or that you are about to have a useful conversation, whatever the outcome - find something to believe in and shape your approach around this.

2. Your people are multi-dimensional. The more dimensions you uncover, the more you'll build trust. You'll also have more options to choose from when you need to find something to believe in!

3. Prepare for success. Take time to create a plan, considering what you're going to say and how you're going to say it. At the very least, think about how people like to receive feedback and how they might react.

4. Reframe to give yourself options. Use a technique like Perceptual Positions to help you mentally view the situation from a number of different standpoints and give yourself options to tackle the situation. This prevents you from becoming stuck.

5. Offer a challenge with support. Dare people to do things differently and tell them how you will support them. Agree actions/next steps and follow through. Expect change to be incremental and based on individual potential.

6. Keep it real. Be honest and authentic. Use your self-awareness to keep you in the right frame of mind and grounded in your beliefs. This doesn't mean you have to play it nice or be inflexible, just that you act purposefully with your emotions.

The power of belief can be used in so many guises e.g. believing in yourself, believing in your vision, believing in your company's mission and/or simply believing that you are making a difference. And if you have any doubts about the importance of this, ask yourself: How does it feel when someone looks you in the eye and says: "I believe in you"?

The research demonstrates that when we feel intrinsically motivated, we're considerably happier, more satisfied and more successful - and at work we feel more productive, innovative and flexible. Furthermore, extrinsic motivation - the carrots and sticks most commonly deployed by organisations - can actually inhibit performance by narrowing focus, dampening creativity and restricting our perceptions of acceptable behaviour.

To illustrate how powerful intrinsic motivation is, and the limiting nature of extrinsic motivation, I recently told a global leadership team at a FTSE 100 energy company this true story about a colleague…

He started playing golf when he was ten with his Dad. He instantly loved the game. By the time he was a teenager he was spending all his spare time at the golf course, seeking every opportunity to play. By 15 he was convinced that he wanted to turn pro as soon as he left school, and began to be mentored by his local club's pro. This only fuelled him more, and he ate, slept and breathed golf, so utterly convinced was he that golf would be his career.

Finally he left school and turned pro. After seven years of absolute commitment and passion, he was starting to earn a living from the game he loved.

And then something changed - his relationship with the game of golf. Firstly, he wanted to earn more money. Secondly, the pro was no longer his mentor, he was his boss, and he became naturally more demanding. Golf was no longer a game, it was a set of tasks and requirements, subject to the same restrictions as most other jobs.

So in the first year my colleague really applied himself. By the second year the magic was fading, and at the end of the third year he stopped. And he didn't swing a golf club for the next 10 years.

Instead he came to DPA as a receptionist. He developed a passion for graphic design and established an in-house graphic design studio, which he continues to lead today. And he's really enjoying playing golf again - when the weather's nice!

This story may be the story of any 17 or 18 year old learning to make their way in the world. But it also demonstrates the power of intrinsic motivation - the fire that comes from within - and how easily it's crowded out in the workplace when extrinsic drivers - rewards and punishments - are prevalent.

For the leadership team I was working with it provoked an interesting conversation in one of the groups I was chatting to afterwards - what if work felt less like work? Obviously, it's utopian to think that everyone would come to work purely for the love of it.

But if the story of my colleague, and the body of research around motivation, suggests anything, it's that helping people to satisfy more of their own drivers for intrinsic motivation could offer a key route to increasing greater personal engagement and performance in a more powerful way than money, incentives and punishments ever could.

In my next blog I'll be examining the factors that promote intrinsic motivation and how we've been working with eBay to help employees make progress against personally meaningful and rewarding goals.

Today, nearly every major company has some form of representation, often at board level. The business benefits of your own employees knowing (and buying into) your business plan seem obvious. And, of course, it did happen before the 'Engagement Era' - but just in a different guise.

Another fundamental shift has also happened in the last eight years: since when do we say "engagement" instead of "communication"? As the engagement bandwagon rolls on… communication is out, and engagement is in! So much so that the word is almost another business cliché.

The flavours of employee engagement that an organisation can buy are also bewildering. There are the offerings from advertising - glossy, creative and visually compelling. There's the take on engagement from corporate communications - at its best aligned to the message also going to the customer, at worst something completely contrary. Then there's employee engagement from HR - often with origins in employee relations, but brought up-to-date. And finally there is the business psychologists' approach rooted in changing behaviours.

So, how do customers navigate this array of options? Well, for me it's all about context and choosing the right tools for the job. The advertising, corporate communications, HR, psychology and left of field approaches can all work - depending on what you are setting out to achieve and who your target audience really is. The best solutions integrate the positive aspects of all the flavours. Three simple questions can help you make smart choices:

1. Is it really engagement?
If you want to inform people it's communication. If you want to involve people, and are prepared to alter your course as a result of their input, then its true engagement.

2. What do you want to engage them with?
And is it worth their while? Choose carefully. You want to engage people only with the things that matter to them, and where their input will make a positive difference to the outcome. If you are serious about engagement, never pay lip service to 'seeming' to work collaboratively. Engage where appropriate. Communicate where appropriate.

3. What do you want people to do differently?
True engagement means people start to behave differently, and take new kinds of action. Be clear from the start as to what you want people to do as a result of your 'engagement', and their motivation for potentially doing so. What's in it for them? What's in it for the organisation?

So where now? The last 18-months have, for many organisations, seen cuts in budget for communication and engagement activities, as the recession bites. However, a positive outcome of this is that it's increasing the focus on choosing the right tool for the job. I've worked with several major blue-chip companies that are engaging people with things that have immediate, tangible business impact. Take the 'ideas system' at Allianz, where every employee has been involved in creating operational efficiency savings and new revenue opportunities in the last year. Another example is the work Toyota have done to completely reinvent their business model, through engaging the whole senior management community around a series of challenges.

Engagement can give real tangible, financial benefits. But, getting the best of it means aligning it to a real business challenge that you want a group of people to solve together.

I'm currently working with a client to inspire a new type of leadership focus across the company that unlocks innovation and passion in teams. Ed's stories about his experiences at NASA and Google served as reference points for what can be achieved when the stakes are high. We kicked-off the programme with me interviewing Ed in front of leadership teams as a rousing call to action.

At Google Ed ran the Advanced Projects Group responsible for imaging for Google Street View and Google Maps/Earth, book scanning technology and innovative energy projects. Prior to Google, he had a distinguished twelve-year career as a NASA Astronaut. He flew on three space missions logging over 206 days in space. In 2003 with just nine weeks of training, Dr. Lu earned the distinction of being the First American to launch as the Flight Engineer on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He became part of the first two-person skeleton crew to live aboard the International Space Station for six months. He received NASA's highest honor; the Distinguished Service Medal.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Ed talked about how Ernest Shackleton's leadership style had been a talismanic inspiration at NASA. "He may not have attained his goal of reaching the South Pole, but surviving a year, ice-locked and keeping 28 men sane and alive was an even greater achievement."

We discussed the pressures facing teams to be incredibly reactive and he recalled the mantra of a former boss: "if it isn't about to kill you, you've got time to think".  He then went to give an illustration. His spacesuit's C02 unit failed and started to heat up. In seconds he had to make a decision to pressurise the cabin and take his suit off before he would burn to death. He had no time to consult with Mission Control. The last recorded temperature inside his suit was 140 degrees - at which point the sensor failed. "That's when thinking isn't a great idea - I'd say most of the time, we have time to reflect!"

Perhaps the most interesting point was the contrast between his experience at NASA and Google. Undoubtedly, life at NASA was demanding. When Shuttle Columbia exploded, Ed was sent to Russia to join a Soyzu mission to rescue the International Space Station. He compressed an 18-month cosmonaut-training programme into nine weeks. However, at Google, he found that his life started to lose all balance as the constant email and meeting-driven culture meant he started to work ever-longer hours and spend less time thinking. Although his team accomplished amazing outcomes, the price for Lu was too great and after three years he left to pursue his current portfolio of entrepreneurial and philanthropic work.

The objective of the Emerging Leaders programme is to equip the cohort with the capabilities needed to lead one of the world's largest telecoms companies. It aims to create the 'VPs of tomorrow' by giving them the leadership and innovation skills needed to negotiate the landscape of a continually changing and uncertain market.

DPA is developing a bespoke smartphone app to support the delegates, giving them innovative ways to experience elements of programme content.
 
DPA ran a successful leadership module in Telefonica O2's last Emerging Leaders programme around the theme 'Leading in the Digital Age.' The module equipped delegates to lead a high-performance culture of sustainable innovation. The module included a master class led by New York Times best-selling author, Jean Gomes and a live, start-up simulation at the heart of the music industry. One delegate describe the module as, "Probably the best event I've been on in my career."
 
The first module of the programme begins in February 2013.

For further information please contact Elvin Turner.

Bringing more than 18 years' operational experience from commercial management and senior leadership roles, coupled with a Masters in Organisational Psychology, David will be working on large-scale business transformation programmes for a number of our high-profile clients. From organisation design and development, to new business strategies, change management and delivering growth through enhanced organisation effectiveness, David's focus will be around helping clients to achieve their business plan.

Tammy Day, Managing Director of DPA said: "We're delighted that David's chosen to join us and to be key part of the client team focused on some recent, significant new projects for DPA."

For many clients the best return means pragmatically linking growth of their senior managers and leaders with clear financial returns. It also means leadership development with fast application 'back in the day job', and as little time out of the office as possible. They need to do more, with less, and prove it.

Within organisations where a large number of managers have been promoted into leadership roles on the basis of their technical ability (rather than leadership skill), I've found that developing leaders' Emotional Intelligence achieves rapid, lasting, visible and measurable results.

Emotional Intelligence is essentially all about performance. A study from the Center for Creative Leadership shows that when star performing leaders were compared with average ones, nearly 90% of the difference was attributable to EI factors. The good news is that Emotional Intelligence is highly practical and developable. The process of EI training also offers insights into your awareness and regard for others can help you to improve the performance of your team too.

And for managers in customer-facing roles, it can also have secondary benefits; according to Stamford Business School, 70% of the reasons for losing customers can be related to low EI. 

In 2013 I see the trend of shorter, cost-effective, measurable leadership development interventions continuing - particularly development that means leaders are better able to succeed in an increasingly high-pressure environment. So, when asked where I would place my leadership development budget for the best return, I would say developing Emotional Intelligence is a strong and increasingly vital option to consider.

Whenever someone mentions mergers and acquisitions, a visceral memory takes hold… I'm sitting in a stunning designer office overlooking the Thames. It's sunny, I have in my hands perhaps one of the world's greatest cups of 'corporate' espresso and I'm with a wonderful client… who is in a very bad place. He's telling me about the takeover of his firm by a big conglomerate.

"It feels like the ultimate act of aggression. I'm not staying, regardless of what the package is." He's recounted several meetings with his new colleagues in which he and his team have been "clinically dissected" and "put on warning". By the way, he's led the company for ten years, winning export and top employer awards, as well continuous double-digit growth. For the last four years, his company has been an unquestioned market leader. And he has forward orders for 36 months that most CEOs would die for. Not a B player then.  

His experience is typical of the clear down of key managers, an automatic move that is seen as mandatory by many acquiring companies for making future gains. A study of acquisitions of supply chain firms in 72 industries finds that the opposite is true: companies that held an acquired firm's top team reported considerable better financial performance than those that let them go.

The clear-out mind-set has its origins in considerable research that suggests that firms are bought because they are failing to perform or realise their potential. In the past, this may have been more generally true, but today much merger and acquisition activity is driven by the need to expand internationally, move laterally into adjacent markets or accelerate innovation. In the latter case, what the company is acquiring may be a better performer than it is.    

For example, a major financial services client spent €300 million on a highly innovative boutique R&D firm. This firm had created a series of blockbuster products that filled a much-needed gap in the purchasers' capabilities and brand image. The leadership's inability to engage with the new firm's talent meant that within a year, most of its prized knowledge workers had left in frustration. The leaders had focused on the products and demanding plans to see future revenues. They considered the acquisition as a tangible asset with no discernable human qualities that they were responsible for. Just a year later that's all they had left - the tangibles. The real value - the knowledge and relationships of its most talented people - had left the building.  

But even if a new owner seeks to retain the loyalty of an acquired company's leaders, how is this accomplished when they often fear they will be ultimately substituted or sidelined? The research found that financial rewards - bonuses and other monetary incentives - paled in comparison with establishing a strong psychological contract. Obvious? Well yes, until you consider how poor most leaders are at figuring out how to do it. Focusing on the newly acquired talent as a series of tangible assets overlooks the fundamental motivation that drove their performance in the first place.  

In leading companies, the best talent is there because of purpose - a positive psychological relationship with the challenge, the community and the company. Reconnecting and reviving that relationship must be the responsibility of senior leaders when acquiring new organisations. 

And my friend? He left three months later with 15 of his team and set up a new pioneering firm that had a successful IPO three years later. His old firm was jettisoned for 18% of its purchase price two years after its acquisition.  

Perhaps it's time for leaders to rethink what they are acquiring?

Leigh Chattington, Senior Consultant who designed the workshops explains: "Both Sussex Police and East Sussex County Council share similar goals and challenges relating to culture, public perception and aspirations to become more accessible and genuinely customer-focused. The workshops aimed to identify a common ground for both organisations, creating a neutral space to build relationships and share ideas. The workshops also support individuals as they develop behaviours and confidence to become more creative and decisive in their roles."

DPA created a workshop environment that was open, positive and forward-focused. Deliberately mixing people from the two organisations together enabled the facilitation of the common ground discussion. Participants worked together to identify the needs of the community and discussed different scenarios, which they chose from a range of flash cards. They discussed their mindset and the approach they would take for each scenario, as well as how they might work together in a way that removed barriers and empowered people to make autonomous decisions. Finally, participants completed an exercise around self-assessment, self-awareness and action, which will help them to manage their emotions under pressure.

DPA will continue to provide support for the East Sussex Council in developing the emotional intelligence of its leadership team and cascading and embedding key messages from the workshops. Both organisations have created a lasting partnership and will work together to create a network of customer service champions to be role models of brilliant complaint handling and practical customer service.

'Innovation Playlist' - offers insight into 11 business innovation lessons from experts in the music and video game industries. The ebook aims to help readers:

• Balance extreme creativity with commercial pragmatism
• Sustain disruptive innovation
• Deal with failure, fear and learning
• Use lean times to spark better innovation.

Throughout the book, Elvin uses his experience of helping organisations improve their innovation performance by collaborating with experts in highly creative and entrepreneurial industries.

"Turner is an excellent interviewer, asking questions that draw out behind-the-scenes insights into the creative process, and then comparing them to the remarkably similar challenges that businesses face" - Innovation Tools.

"5 out of 5 - Innovation Playlist is a great insight into the parallel worlds of music and business" - Amazon.

Take a look at a full review of the book on the Innovation Tools blog. The ebook is also available via iTunes or Kindle.

Steve Jobs revelled in his Reality Distortion Field. He used it brilliantly to persuade content owners and publishers to join Apple's iPad revolution. It also created a sort of force field against the antimonopoly powers. Since his death, Apple has been undergoing a series of mini revolutions as once no-go zones are cleared away and Tim Cook and his leadership team stand on their own.

For hundreds of years, scholars didn't challenge Aristotle's belief that objects of different mass would fall at different rates. His brilliance in so many domains created an unquestioning acceptance in generations of academics. Not until Galileo Galilei put his theory to test did people wake up to the fact that he was wrong. Aristotle would have been horrified by this passive belief in his ideas. He never believed authority proved anything by itself.

In reality, authority is exactly what we bow down to (and often perhaps crave) in so many ways. As markets become ever more volatile, managers and employees are ravenous for certain answers to close the widening ambiguity gap between execution and strategy. We continually hear the frustration of leaders grouching about their team's inability to translate strategy into results and equally employees complaining that their leaders 'only' describe the 'what' they want without defining the 'how' in any practical level of detail.

The leadership challenge is to focus ever more on crystallising strategy so it resonates with each employee and engineering brilliant mechanisms of empowerment, so every ounce of engagement is employed to allow people to seize power. The mark of a great leader today is to get granular in what the specifics of belief and behaviour of performance look like. In part this is what the leaders of Starbucks did to turn the act of selling a $3 cup of coffee into a $11 billion business. In Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, the psychological and behavioural training that employees receive in coping with difficult customers reveals a remarkable degree of commitment to engage in the real world of work. 

The next time you're firing your teams up with the possibilities of the future, ask: "is my power enabling practical action, or building the reason to kick new behaviours into the weeds?"

During her time at DPA Vicki has proven herself as a talented Programme Manager and has also been repeatedly recognised by clients for her ability to quickly form and add-value to client relationships, as well as create and deliver key elements of their programmes. This coupled with her drive to develop in her chosen communications discipline through private study (achieving straight As in her diploma in Digital Marketing at the London School of Marketing), means the Consultant role is a great fit for Vicki's current skills and future focus. We're delighted to be able to create this new role to enable Vicki to continue to grow and develop in her chosen discipline. Well done Vicki!

Our next Innovation Juice takes place from the 6th-9th November 2012 and is a unique three-day innovation leadership training programme that allows delegates to experience and experiment with proven tools and techniques used by the world's greatest innovators.

Based on over 30 years of continuous research and global experience, Innovation Juice gives leaders access to the source code driving the world's most successful innovation teams. It also provides the essential tools, shortcuts and methodologies for sparking and embedding the fundamental drivers of innovation performance.

To find out more about our Innovation Training call Elvin on +44 1483 414000 or email innovation@dpacoms.com.

But then Jean Gomes is a unique individual in all the right ways. Few people who meet him go untouched by his energy, insights, sense of fun and empathy. And few companies work with him without being radically challenged, inspired and equipped to do new things in new ways.

And that goes for DPA too: Jean's leadership has shaped a culture of excellence and innovation that, as an employee, it can be easy to take for granted (thankfully clients regularly point it out to us though!).

In recent years Jean has become a sought after strategist, coach and confidant to senior figures inside companies including Sony, Coca-Cola, eBay, Microsoft and Toyota. In times of unparalleled economic uncertainty it's not hard to see why so many boardrooms are queuing up to benefit from his insights and instincts.

From a colleague's perspective it's thoroughly gratifying to see. Sitting across the office from Jean, many of us have observed the blood, sweat and tears that he has poured into making DPA the company that it is today.

Jean, from everyone at DPA: It's a privilege to work with you…happy 25th anniversary!

"Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. "Is this the right move?" When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions."

In a Fast Company blog, Mayer wrote:

"When I meet people who run design at other organizations, they're always like, 'Design is one of the most political areas of the company. This designer likes green and that one likes purple, and whose design gets picked? The one who buddies up to the boss'. Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a 1% test [on 1% of the audience] and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we're looking at data all the time."

It's not hard to imagine the disgruntled Bowman feeling powerless in the face of such a remarkable logic-testing environment. The interesting question it poses is: how resilient is Google's absolute dependence on data-driven decision making? It's not an easy question to answer. No company in history has had such access to so much data and the means to make sense of it. No company has been able to aggregate as much top global talent in one force.

History tells us repeatedly that societies collapse, as do organisations when they believe only rationalism is the means to solve all problems. Microsoft's stumbling fortunes are a good example, where Apple's iPhone revenues now eclipse the performance of its entire line. At the turn of the century, the software giant was without question one of the coolest companies on the planet. It had the perfect platform for tapping the emergent internet-based technologies and smart phones, but it repeatedly sidelined projects that didn't fit its worldview of Windows computing. In parallel its culture became dominated with process and control mechanisms that seemed only to serve Steve Balmer's desire for total compliance to his authority. Powerful as Google undoubtedly is, its moral and creative imperative can only be driven forward in the long term by harnessing the left and right modes of its collective brainpower. And it will be interesting to see if Yahoo now makes the leap out of its stalled position with a creative transformation or continues to languish in ambiguity.

The word alone provokes a stressed reaction in many people - "I'm not creative". But creativity takes on such a myriad of forms, this reaction is almost certainly untrue for every human being. Baking, gardening and social problem solving are just as valid forms of expression as writing, drawing or interior design. They all enlist a crucial blend of left- and right-brain thinking that gives us that unique feeling of possibility, fulfilment and, from time to time, break-through ideas.

A 2012 global study* into the role of creativity in society, business and education highlights some interesting insights. Universally there is increasing pressure to be more creative in every field, but people spend less than 25% of their time focused on creative tasks. Only 1 in 4 people feel they are fulfilling their creative potential. The paradox is that organisations say they want more creativity, but their actions focus on productivity.

There's increasing evidence that the rational left-brain's dominance is pushing more of our work and lives into the short-term.

It can be seen clearly in our young people: since 1958, millions of young people across 50 countries have been tested for their creativity using the Torrance Test - the gold standard in creativity assessment.

Why is this relevant? Torrance's creativity index has been incredibly good at predicting those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently re-analysed Torrance's data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Unlike IQ, which seems to have been rising at 10 points per generation - something known as the Flynn effect - creative intelligence in our economic powerhouses has started to fall in the last 20 years. This can be seen very clearly in the work of US academic, Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary, who analysed almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily increasing - just like IQ scores - until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.

Being relevant for many established organisations means confronting the need to leapfrog up their current value chain. Whilst leaders might rationally 'get' the need for more creative focus, every bone in their body screams out pragmatism, de-risking and immediate return. The bottom line is that organisations are what they value. But our new landscape demands that leaders shift what they value.

*State of Create (for Adobe) - Research firm StrategyOne conducted surveys of 5,000 adults, 1,000 per country, in the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan. The research was designed to identify attitudes and beliefs about creativity and provide insights into the role of creativity in business, education and society.

During the conference each team member presented about a project they have been working on and shared their learning and best practice. We celebrated our achievements as an organisation in 2011-2012. We also talked about our plans for the coming year, our purpose, our ambition and what we'll be doing to continue to achieve our mission of building powerful organisations.

The work that takes place during each conference ultimately informs our client work and enables us to continually improve the quality of the service we provide. The inspirational conference is also part of our commitment to the ongoing training and development of the team and our Investors in People Gold status.

Catherine has led some of DPA's most significant programmes this year, including a global vision and values programme for a high profile financial services company, and a programme helping to embed matrix working for a major pharmaceutical company. 

We're really happy that Catherine will be joining the senior team here at DPA, steering our largest client programmes and playing a central role in running our business.

We 'kidnapped' a group of its most talented and passionate middle managers and gave them access to an incredible and liberating experience - permission to 'go create a Skunk Works operation'. Skunk Works refers to innovation projects that are 'off the radar' from senior management. Famous examples include The Sony Walkman, IBM's early PC division and Malaysia Airlines' laboratories that enabled the company's turnaround. Freed from the limitations of red tape and their risk adverse managers, what could they do? 

The answer, it turned out, was virtually nothing.   
Having worked with the team for a year on their leadership, we engineered the means to give them what they said they wanted and what the company needed: more entrepreneurial freedom.

Things started well. Within 24 intense hours, a multinational team had created a series of proposals for radical innovations for products, service offerings and new business models. In 15 years' working with the company, we'd never seen anything comparable in terms of creativity and ambition.

From there though, it was downhill. Within a few weeks, the team's impassioned commitment to build an innovation hub had collapsed in guilty excuses and finger pointing. They were 'too busy', not everyone was honouring their commitments and, to be honest, most were too anxious about the consequences of being a 'positive deviant'.

The principles we had used to design the experience had created success in other organisations, so we started our internal de-brief by ruthlessly questioning our own failings. Perhaps we had not contracted with them robustly enough? We had done the project without payment for two reasons. Firstly, we were paying back a long-term commitment from a loyal and extremely positive client. Secondly, we wanted to be in the same motivational space as the participants - we were doing it because we collectively believed it was the right thing to do.

We had filmed every moment of their time together and studying their conversations and subsequent communications, we saw a clear pattern in the language they used. A compelling narrative ran through their brain at a subconscious level - expressing itself in "I Can't". 

Almost 80% of their conversations outside of the creative part of the project accounted for the following. Here's the anatomy of "I Can't": 

It's easy to feel sympathy for these individuals - after all, corporate life has got a whole lot more demanding in recent years. Remember though, we weren't asking them to volunteer - they had signed up to these commitments because they expressed sincere belief that this type of innovation was essential and they wanted to be part of the change. So what happened? 

Their response had become defined by their focus on the limiting factors in their environment - the scarcity of resources and support - rather than the enabling ones they had total control over - their passion, insight, creativity, relationships, energy and knowledge.

Tina Seelig, Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Programme, runs an interesting experiment in her innovation classes that sheds light on limiting factors. Teams of 14 receive an envelope with five dollars of 'seed funding' and are told to spend as much time as they like planning. However, once they open the envelope, they only have two hours to create as much money as possible. Two hours to leverage five dollars - how do you think you might do? Could you double it, or even turn it into $100?

The highest performing team managed to create $650. And the all important factor in their success was that this group (and the other groups that made the most money) didn't use the five-dollar 'seed funding'. Intuitively, they understood it to be a limiting factor that narrowed their thinking. Instead they ramped up their observation skills and found opportunities where others saw problems and then enlisted their problem solving skills and creativity to find new solutions - solutions that netted teams an average of 4000% return on investment.

Developing the capacity to see problems as opportunities is not as easy as it sounds; it requires practice and managers to model the behavior. All too often we default to being defined by what we can't do, rather than what we can.

Delegates have described the "deep learnings" that they took from the intensive programme that is built around a 24-hour entrepreneurial experience, giving participants the essential skills and know-how to spark and sustain organisational innovation.

Comments from the delegates include:

• "The experience gave me the chance to discover how creative I can be."
• "I enjoyed being taken out of my comfort zone and given the chance to think more dynamically."
• "It was an enjoyable experience that will reverberate for a long time to come."

This programme allows participants to experience what it feels to be truly innovative in a low-risk environment, offering insights into how to change the way they work on a daily basis and become highly innovative.

The next Innovation Juice begins at 7pm on 9th October 2012 and finishes at 4pm on 11th October 2012. The programme takes place in Guildford, Surrey and is limited to 25 spaces.

For more details, please contact Senior Consultant, Elvin Turner, on +44 1483 414000.

New research from Ohio State University about the effect that stories have on us might encourage leaders to reprioritise the technique in their repertoire.

The study suggests that when we immerse ourselves in a story, we may actually end up changing our own behaviour and thoughts to match that of the character - an effect the researchers call "experience-taking".

"Experience-taking can be a powerful way to change our behaviour and thoughts in meaningful and beneficial ways," said Lisa Libby, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

In one instance the researchers found that people who strongly identified with a character who overcame obstacles to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election several days later.

Participants who experienced the effect while reading about a character who was revealed to be of a different race or sexual orientation showed more positive attitudes toward the other group and were less likely to stereotype.

Experience-taking doesn't automatically occur every time we hear a story. It requires us to put aside our judgment and 'lose' ourselves in the story. Mechanically recounting a story unsurprisingly fails to grip people at an emotional level. You need to tell stories with conviction and skill - a capability that can be learnt and perfected by everyone.

The real power of stories is that, told well, they have the genuine potential to encourage open-mindedness, lower resistance to change and strengthen our resolve in facing difficult challenges.

Turns out stories really can change our world.

The findings appear online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and will be published in a future print edition.

A Senior Vice President, heading up a multi-billion dollar division of a one of the world's largest software companies, told us: "We're asked to think and act as CEOs of our own company, but in reality, we have little real control over how we run this organisation - we operate it, we don't run it." Our experience tells us that this is a common characteristic, leading to a 'control gap', or a 'No Man's Land'.

Leaders and managers focus their attention on what they don't govern, leading them to weaken their grip on what they do control. This can be seen very clearly in the case of an intervention we conducted with the UK division of a global manufacturer. We asked its leadership team to rate the control it exerted over 16 strategic decision areas (e.g. budgetary allocation, sales targets, marketing spend, headcount investment, training and development, research and development). We then asked them to rate the control exerted on those decisions by their line managers at the head office. Combining both sides, the maximum control was 100%, split between the UK division and the HQ.  

What they didn't know was that this exercise was being conducted simultaneously with their bosses, 6,000 miles away. When the data was compared, the average 'control gap' was a factor of nearly 40% across the board: the UK team believed it had 30% control over the development of its customer management system, whereas the HQ believed it had less than 10% control. In the majority of the 16 factors, the head office managers perceived that the local team had considerably more autonomy and control over decisions than the local team believed.  

The basis of this astonishing gap is undoubtedly a dearth of effective relationships, trust and dialogue, but at its real heart is individuals' judgment being emotionally distorted by the perceived lack of being in control. What we've found is that typically, one or two negative, but relatively minor trigger events or symbols - "we're not allowed to decide the timing of an event" or "we can't flex our budget between teams" - lead managers to project a lack of control across the board. This creates a vicious cycle of diminished accountability, with an underlying narrative of "I can't". If leaders feel like this, imagine the downstream effect on their people. Regardless of the words they might use, their mind-set of diminished power casts a long shadow over the organisation.

With the rising demands on locally facing parts of organisations to respond ever more rapidly to customer needs, is 'just' managing the business enough? Leaders now need to exert maximum control over local needs for innovation and responsiveness. The no-man's land of turf wars or expedient leadership behaviour increasingly won't cut it. 

Since then, he's played the 'Two Things' game whenever he meets someone from a new profession. He captured it for a while on his website which also features dozens of people who've contributed their own 'Two Thing' definitions.  

The wonderful Oliver Burkeman drew my attention to the game in his Observer column with the thought that: "about a third of the self-help books that cross my desk could be distilled to two things: first, if you can tolerate a little discomfort, you can achieve almost any goal; and second, it's amazing the lengths we'll go to avoid discomfort." 

At the heart of the game is the idea that most things that are worth pursuing to the highest level are born out of paradox - of holding opposites and moving past the contradictions found in every field of human endeavor. I developed my own 'Two Things' in the phrase; "innovation is the equal marriage of pragmatism and creativity" to underline that the process of generating new value doesn't come from either unrestrained imagination or logical innovation production lines - it's a fusion of both.

Here are a few of my favourites from Whitman's site:

The Two Things about Medicine:

1. Do no harm.
2. To do any good, you must risk doing harm.

The Two Things about Being an Executive Assistant: 

1. The boss is always right.
2. The boss is always wrong.

The Two Things about Parenting:

1. There's no such thing as too much affection.
2. It's not so much what you say, as it is what you do.

The Two Things about Human Relations:

1. We serve the company's, not the employees', interests.
2. Compliance, compliance, compliance.

The Two Things about Innovation:

1. Innovation is inversely proportional to organisational strength. 
2. Organisational strength increases with time.

As the author of the Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests in his playful little book, The Bed of Procrustes, much of what purports to be knowledge is in fact just an attempt to "squeeze life into reductive categories and pre-packed narratives". As he says: "I went to a happiness conference; researchers looked very unhappy."

Try playing the 'Two Things' game and see if you can span the incongruities in your world more skilfully.

Edward Wyre, Awards and Events Manager told us: "This is a fantastic achievement and recognises the quality of the work you and your HR team are doing. This is amplified by the fact that this was a record year for entries into the awards, demonstrating the continued commitment to driving best practice in the HR field."

The Emerging Leaders Programme is part of the Sanofi 'Development for All' ethos designed to support all employees in the achievement of the company vision and goals. Specifically designed to accelerate the development of those employees demonstrating an early promise for leadership, the results in terms of building future leader capabilities and readiness for critical business roles in the future has exceeded expectations. A second programme launched last week with a new cohort of emerging leaders.

Tammy Day, DPA's Managing Director comments: "The Sanofi UK & Ireland People development team commissioned DPA as a partnership with different business ltd through competitive tender to develop a bespoke Emerging Leaders Programme. Our partnership team was chosen because we combined a deep understanding of the customer environment, insight into leadership development and fresh thinking from outside the pharmaceutical sector. We're delighted that our work with Sanofi has been recognised by the HR Excellence Awards judges."

The winners will be announced in June where 500 fellow HR professionals will be celebrating with us!

The global economic crisis is stress-testing organisations to their limit; regardless of their growth or decline. Predictably innovation, leadership and engagement have once again become white-hot issues as value creation systems creak, their limitations exposed. Another 'must-fix' capability is emerging - collaboration; chiefly because silos wasting effort competing over scarce resources, rather than aligning to win, has become an excruciating sideshow for many CEOs.

At its core, collaboration is about working outside the boundaries of team, department, division or organisation. That in itself makes it hard. Not only are employees increasingly pressured to do more for same - or less - they are now being asked to work in a cultural no-man's land, where there's typically an absence of clarity, leadership and technique. Given the option between the comfort and clarity of your team's core priorities versus the ambiguity of collaboration, it's obvious where most people choose to focus.

The difficulties of collaboration and cooperation aren't just tied up in how organisations are structured; most of us avoid engaging deeply with others outside our social group. Despite corporate messages of unity and 'we're in this together', organisations are comprised of intensely tribal groups, often trading with each other at a stereotype level - as Aristotle put it, thinking you know what others are like without knowing them.

Richard Sennett's new book 'Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation' underscores how tough cooperation is in reality, requiring more than just goodwill, but real craft. Few of us are taught those skills; we're just expected to know them. As he points out being in a community of like-minded people is easy; collaboration amongst dissimilar groups is when things become difficult. The internet has created the delusion that the world has become a more cooperative place, but as Sennett points out, it's just got easier to join a bigger community of like-minded people.

The book describes the technology age as one of "the great unsettlings" where society actually took a retrograde step in cooperation. In the modern era, the first unsettling was the Reformation, when the cooperative patterns established by the Catholic church were destabilised by a new individualism. The 'new' made the old ways of community seem naïve and claustrophobic, but also ushered in a period of less civic mindedness and more selfish relations within communities. A similar transition ensued during the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment. Even until relatively recently, science and medicine were cold, rational environments where status and individual expertise negated the need for real collaboration. Today, hospitals and science programmes rank amongst some of the most proficient cooperative models.

Sennett argues that we need to build rituals that make cooperation more successful, using the fascinating comparison with craft-based skills - you're either making or repairing things. The foundational skill is the capacity to listen rather than debate; in doing so, we start to build a greater ability to take pleasure in the company of others.   This is a largely philosophical take on the subject, but none the less useful for it.

As more senior managers get the call to make collaboration a priority, many will fall back on process and technology to 'enable it', missing the essential foundation of creating purpose and motivation (the 'why') and the essential human skill of being able to value each other more fully, so more of us can bring our value to the enterprise - the real 'how'.

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, Richard Sennett. Allen Lane. Recommended.

Tammy, who has just launched a blog to document her trip, comments: "This really is the trip of a lifetime to Antarctica. I've been an avid traveller since a very early age and this expedition offers a hugely rare opportunity to visit somewhere both spectacular and inaccessible, but more than that - a chance to test myself mentally and physically, perhaps more than I've ever done before. As well as the 'Leadership on the Edge' aspect, the 2041 programme that I will be joining focuses on the environment. In 2041 the moratorium on mining on Antarctica comes to an end, meaning that the last wilderness on earth will be in jeopardy. The environmental message behind 2041, and climate change is clear, so as well as meeting culturally diverse people from global organisations that can make a difference, I'm looking forward to learning more about the current science behind climate change."

Last year, our CEO, Jean Gomes completed the expedition, and DPA is sponsoring Tammy this year. Jean comments, "My experience in March last year was transformative and I'm delighted that Tammy is going. It builds on the momentum we're creating in our support of 2041 and I know that she will benefit hugely and bring a wealth of value to the expedition."

The continuous development of our team has always been one of our strategic priorities; and the final report affirms our commitment to ways of working that we recommend through our consultancy work with blue-chip clients, including Coca-Cola, Dell, Microsoft, Sony and Toyota. Our work has helped to initiate long-overdue performance breakthroughs inside some of the most challenging organisational environments across the world's most competitive industries.

Assessor, Peter T Kearns commented in DPA's Investors in People Review Report: "There is an absolute parallel between the behaviours that clients are encouraged to develop, and those demonstrated within the company itself."

The report also highlights the importance of our unusual definition of 'success'. Peter continues: "This is a quite remarkable organisation, different from others in relation to most of the models used to define a 'normal' business. It is successful when measured using the metrics normally used to measure business success (such as income generation, profit, survival through the recession, staff retention, etc.) yet its real success is described by the people in quite different ways, including: excitement, love, challenge, creativity and story-telling."

We were awarded our initial Investors in People accreditation in 1997.

Elvin Turner, Senior Consultant, accepted the award on behalf of our team: "I'm so proud that we've won. I think I've got the best job in the world and I've thought that since I joined DPA 17 years ago. We really appreciate being recognised in Surrey, especially as most of our employees live here and many of our clients are based in Surrey too."

As a Surrey-based business operating on a global stage, we're proud to be working with clients such as Aviva, Coca-Cola, GSK, Nokia, Sony and Toyota, from the beautiful surroundings of Lower Eashing, near Godalming. The Surrey Advertiser also featured an interview with our MD, Tammy Day before the ceremony.

Our approach to continually learning, building knowledge, developing our team and doing 'what we love' to deliver the highest client service is a big factor in receiving this award. You can find out more about our approach and how we have grown over the last 30 years in the DPA story.

Gold organisations are deemed to be good practice organisations and they are invited to apply to become Champions and be role models, sharing their good practice and leading by example. We're very excited to join this prestigious group of role model organisations who promote Investors in People through best-practice sharing activities. We'll be giving presentations and advice about becoming recognised by Investors in People and talk about how companies can improve and maintain performance. We're already coaching clients who aspire to the Investors in People Gold standard.

John Telfer, Managing Director of Inspiring Business Performance Ltd (IBP), which is responsible for delivering the Investors in People Standard in the South, said: "Achieving Champion status makes DPA one of the best Investors in People accredited organisations in the whole country. I hope that news of their success will encourage others to follow their example and use the Investors in People framework to help realise their business goals and ambitions."

We'll be facing the panel of expert judges in a presentation later this month. The judges will be looking for evidence of how employees are engaged in strategic goals and company values as well as how the company has invested in professional development and employee well-being.

It's a huge accomplishment for DPA to be nominated as finalist in the National Business Awards. The Awards showcase the best of British business and celebrate outstanding achievement. We operate on a global stage, working with some of the world's biggest and most successful companies, and we're proud to be doing this from our own small corner of Surrey. Our clients have been extremely supportive in acknowledging the credibility and achievement of becoming a finalist in the National Business Awards.

Earlier in 2011, DPA won Employer of the Year in the Toast of Surrey Business Awards.

Research  shows that creative leadership rouses a deeply emotional reaction within organisations. Because of the opposing images we have of creativity and leadership, investors, leaders and employees prefer the model of a leader as one who cultivates a stable and secure environment. 

Occasionally called 'positive deviants', being a creative leader can severely influence your chances of progress, unless you have a wealth of charm. Companies say they want new ideas from their managers but studies conducted by researchers at The Wharton School, Cornell University and Indian School of Business highlight that the prevailing model of effective leadership is one that promotes pragmatic, noncreative solutions. Creative employees are gradually filtered out on their journey up the corporate ladder. 

For most people in organisational life, the 'exemplary' leader diminishes ambiguity and encourages stability, emphasising shared goals and group identity to maintain the status quo. In contrast, the stereotypical creative advocates unproven solutions that are seen as unhelpful, not pragmatic, risky and at worst indulging a personal need for gratification. In short they provoke fear and criticism.

The researchers conducted two experiments to test how bias against creative thinkers played into their perceived suitability for top posts. The first asked 364 employees at a refinery in India, whose jobs required them to find innovative solutions, to rank their colleagues' level of creative expression and leadership potential. Even in a workplace that appreciated creativity, relatively creative people were seen as less likely to become leaders.

In the next trial, close to 400 undergraduates in the United States were allocated first to be idea sellers and then to be assessors. The assessors were asked to rank the sellers on the power of their ideas and leadership potential. Creative types were seen just as competent and personable as their purely functional peers, but were judged less fit for leadership. 

What these and many other studies show is that given the option between the creative candidate and the 'safe pair of hands', large organisations, consistently prefer leaders who preserve the status quo. 

We are what we value. What leaders value shapes what the culture permits.  If the CEO wants more innovation, building an innovation leadership capacity has to be a priority.