Warren Bennis said: “Leaders are people, who are able to express themselves fully, they also know what they want, why they want it, and how to communicate what they want to others, in order to gain their co-operation and support.’  This latter point of engaging people to gain their support is critical to harnessing their potential in order to achieve superior performance and is the Club’s key theme for the next month.

Our workshop on 18th March in Heysham focuses on “Unleashing Talent and Celebrating Success” at Centrica-Hydro Carbon Resources (HRL).  HRL is responsible for extracting and processing natural gas from reservoirs beneath Morecambe Bay and delivering this to the National Grid for onward distribution and sale by British Gas.  In this “High Hazard” environment, teamwork is vital.  A command and control structure has to exist, both because of legislative drivers and to ensure the delivery of real-time process operations.  Alongside this, however, engagement of employees is vital to ensure mission success.  Using a variety of formal, union backed, structures and informal targeted communications, Centrica-Hydro Carbon Resources attempts to deliver reward and recognition where it is due, promoting values and behaviours that lead to employee commitment, retention and business success.

Look on the events page at Employee Suggestion Schemes to find out more and get yourself booked for this meeting.

Our special interest group meeting at EDF Energy later in March on The Impact of Change on HSE is designed to allow specialists in HSE and Change to explore this topic in more depth with their fellow professionals.  For more details email Special Interest Groups.

If you want to know the value of being a member of the Club just read some recent feedback about our recent workshop on Lean Six Sigma and Business Transformation: “Extremely well organised and presented Workshop.  Delegates were completely immersed in the event making it very interactive.  Overall demonstrated the value of being a member of the Best Practice Club”: Business Improvement Manager, Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Services.

Can you afford to miss out on any of the Club’s face to face or online learning opportunities?

To see the Club’s BPIR Management Briefings click Developing Leadership and Employee Suggestion Schemes and for information on related Club publications click Innovation Tools, Business Innovation Audit and Creativity Tools.

The whole concept of “learning from the best” is the lubrication that keeps the wheels of Best Practice dissemination and learning from others turning.  The challenge for most organisations is that whilst they will be increasing their use of benchmarking in the future to improve their performance, they need a more rigorous and consistent benchmarking methodology to allow them to fully exploit its benefits.  This is the reason for our focus on Benchmarking and the launch last year, in partnership with the Centre for Organisational Excellence Research and supported by Quality Scotland and London Excellence, of our TRADE Benchmarking Methodology.  The first two courses we ran were extremely well received and the next courses will take place on 15/16 and 21/22 April.  Email Benchmarking for more details