Exchange Blog

The Houston Exchange and Rochdale Boroughwide Housing receive Training Award

Training is at the core of every successful business providing benefits such as improved bottom line, empowered employees, engaged employees and increased capability. It is the investment that offers a return repeatedly.

Case Study – Rochdale Boroughwide Housing

To achieve Rochdale Boroughwide Housing’s (RBH) ambitious transformation agenda of improving the customer and employee experience while increasing efficiency, enhancing the leadership capability within the Repairs Service was fundamental to success. To effectively manage a transformation of the service, a realignment of the leadership team within Repairs was undertaken to allow for more focus on leadership and people management activities.

Case Study – Employee Engagement

We set up a 360-degree survey measuring Team Climate and Leadership Styles (based on research by the Korn Ferry Institute) for the CEO, Executive Team and the remaining leaders/managers in the organisation (30 in total). We wanted to better understand the team climate.

Upcoming Event – Leading with Care, Purpose, and Resolve During Uncertain Times

Catherine Thomson of The Houston Exchange is a licensed practitioner with EBW Global. In this workshop, she will be using the EBW Global Emotional Intelligence System, a unique assessment and development tool. Based on over 20 years of research and worldwide use, it enables individuals and teams to understand why they behave the way they do and to use a 10-step framework to help to improve operational performance.

Powerful Profitable Conversations in Action in the Public Sector

We believe that Leadership more than anything else sets the tone for the organisation. A Leaders gift is the ability to deliberately model trust, confidence, compassion and integrity. Leaders are judged on how well they communicate, influence, develop strategy, make difficult decisions and inspire others

Powerful Profitable Conversations in Action in the Transport Sector

The client had set an ambitious strategic agenda, and it was clear that they needed to shift from an operationally focused organisation into one which was absolutely customer-focused. The strategic goals placed significant emphasis on improved performance, improved quality of service, increased customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

Powerful Profitable Conversations in Action in the Housing Sector

To Undertake a 360 Feedback Exercise on Climate and Leadership Behaviour and then Design,, Build and Implement a Leadership Development Programme for Top 30 Leaders.

Northern Lighthouse Board Leadership Development

The Chief Executive wanted to harness the collective capability of his senior leadership team to lead and embed the changes within the organisation. Read more to see what the challenges being experienced in the organisation included.

Case Study – Leadership Delivered

We believe that every conversation in the organisation is an opportunity to lead. In recognition of the significance of leadership conversations, all our coaches are accredited to work with the theories and tools of Structural Dynamics; a theory of face-to-face communication pioneered by Dr David Kantor.

Leadership Agility (with emphasis on team)

We believe that with the guidance of top executives, agile leaders can be developed internally. By identifying and developing high-potential talent, your business can improve its ability to deliver strategic priorities. Having an agile leader on the team takes the company from good to great. Your leaders are focused, confident and driven to lead.

Team Development

Most business conversations are nowhere near as powerful or directed as they need to be. As a result, issues get swept under the carpet or otherwise glossed over and not dealt with.

Boardroom Dialogue

Never more than now has the spotlight been played so brightly on the effectiveness of Boards. So, what do you need to do to ensure that your board is performing to the best of its ability? Most boards regularly revisit systems and processes of governance. Don’t waste all your efforts here. That’s not what makes the real difference.

Kantor Behaviour Profile (Baseline)

Using the Kantor Behavioural Profile (baseline) as part of a group/team intervention supports a whole systems approach to enabling individuals within an organisation to understand the contribution they make to the system and what needs to change.

Behaviours 360

The Behaviours 360 questionnaire provides individuals, groups and organisations with the opportunity to receive behavioural feedback on leadership and behavioural competencies. It can be used ‘off the shelf’ for immediate deployment or it can be easily configured to incorporate an organisation’s specific client competencies and behavioural indicators.

What is Leadership Agility?

We use the Leadership Agility Accelerator™ and the Leadership Agility 360 ™ tools which are based on research undertaken by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs resulting in their award-winning book, Leadership Agility.

Be All Ears

‘Noise’ no longer refers just to sound, but to the general distractions that make our lives chaotic and stressful. We’re constantly busy, but are we effective? We’ve mastered multi-tasking, but do we really get more done in half the time? Communication is something we believe we’re experts at. Maybe in terms of personal broadcasting, we have. But the victim in all of this is our ability to truly listen.

Psychological Safety – Moving to the Learning Zone

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. She states that psychological safety isn’t about being nice; it’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other.

Step up to a Real Conversation

I am passionate about changing the nature of conversations in organisations. I want to help leaders to have powerful conversations that lead to sustained changes in their behaviour to create engaged teams while at the same time link this to operational profit.

5 Critical Things That Coaches and Leaders Can Do to Make Every Coaching Conversation Count

In a previous life when I was designing HR people processes, a key component of most Performance Development Processes (PD) was to have regular coaching conversations throughout the operational year. Leaders and their staff agreed that this leadership activity was essential. So, no conflict there! When I created a new PD process, my practice was to check in with users in the organisation what was working and what was problematic as the process was rolled out.

Northern Lighthouse Board Leadership Development

“Today we had the final workshop of a year-long Leadership Development Programme for our Senior team. Thanks to Catherine and Arlene from the Houston Exchange for guiding us so well – we have learnt a great deal” – Mike Bullock, Chief Executive

How Toxic Is Your Work Environment?

In his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t, Robert Sutton makes the case that there is a correlation between toxic organisations and abusive bosses.

Leadership Agility

The Leadership Agility Accelerator is a tool that has been developed to help leaders select and work on specific leadership practices that will take your agility to a new level. So how does this tool help executives, leaders and managers deliver for today and safeguard tomorrow? Understanding what level of leadership you demonstrate, versus what is required of you in your role is a great starting point.

LEADERSHIP: How Open are you to New Ways of Being

The role of a Leadership today is viewed very differently compared to a generation ago. In the last 20 years a new way of looking at leadership has emerged which views leadership as much more complex. However, irrespective of how operating environments have changed, I still see leaders behaving in ways today that are similar to how I was managed (good and bad) and it makes me wonder about what those great managers/leaders did, and would they still be effective today.

Working with the Shadow Side of Leadership

When under constant pressure to deliver, achieve more with less, and carry the can when things go wrong, it is easy to forget the intense pressure leaders are experiencing today. This is costing organisations dearly in financial and human terms and it’s not sustainable. In fact, recent studies tell us that up to 75% of office workers are struggling to be productive. If that were a medical condition, it would be classed as an epidemic. […]