KnowledgeBrief Hot Topic

Throughout history, priests, academics, sages and wisemen have advised leaders on how to lead. How to wield power, conduct yourself with dignity, and inspire love or dread in your people: all these questions have been answered in different ways across the centuries.

In the 21st century, organisations, possessed by the culture of high performance and continuous improvement, sometimes push employees to behave like top rational achievers, while forgetting about their inner emotional labyrinths. Research suggests that individuals with high emotional intelligence display better social relationships, performance, negotiation skills, and are generally more content with their life.

Entrepreneurship represents the capacity to create, develop, organise and ultimately manage a successful business. Whilst the term has become widely synonymous with the development of new and emergent business ideas, entrepreneurship is also a process which can be utilised to enhance processes within the structures of existing organisations.

The ability to successfully identify, confront and overcome problems within the workplace presents a key facet of effective organisational functioning. However, work-related problems (and their root cause) can often be unique, unfamiliar and thus difficult to navigate. Consequently, we find ourselves in a position whereby organisations are continually required to adapt and engage in new and innovate ways of thinking in an effort to find positive solutions to these “wicked problems”.

Sport and performance psychology has received a growing interest, not only in the sporting world, but also in the world of business. Many of the psychological attributes required for an athlete or team to excel in sport have been regarded as similar to those exhibited in individuals and teams who tend to excel in the workplace. We hope this Hot Topic will capture your interest and get you thinking about how you can harness the power of performance psychology to enhance your own working practices

Whilst some remain reluctant toward change or fear the prospect of having to embrace ever evolving technological advancements, there is little denying that digital technologies represent a promising avenue for future professional innovation. If used effectively, digital technologies could play a key role in enhancing the quality and proficiency within the healthcare sector.

To some degree learning is so commonplace that we assume we know how to do it. And to a certain extent this is true. But are we any good at it? Or do we take it for granted that we know how to learn, unlearn and re-learn? Learning and learning to learn requires conscious effort and in today’s busy world, learning is often one of those areas that gets squeezed out.

Many managers and leaders remain locked into a single style of behaviour that they have adopted over the years. However, to get effective results for their team and organisation, leaders need to make a conscious decision to manage their own behaviour and adapt their style to the person or process they wish to influence. This Hot Topic explores a key leadership trait to make a bigger difference in the organisation: Adaptive Leadership.

Within the context of modern leadership practices, the ability to problem solve has come to be regarded as a critical cognitive skill. Through actively engaging in creative problem-solving processes, leaders can identify, formulate and implement strategies to help reduce the likelihood of failure, whilst simultaneously enhancing the quality of individual, team and organisational practices. This Hot Topic will offer you with some food for thought in relation to your own approach to leadership.

The concept of wellbeing in the workplace has been a major topic for years, but many organisations still don’t know all that it entails or why it is so important. This month’s Hot Topic is about how to protect and enhance wellbeing in our workforce, how to build resilience and how to create a basis for better performance.

A fundamental part of every leader’s and manager’s role is finding ways to solve problems. Good processes are essential when approaching a problem, to be able to solve them quickly and effectively. This month’s Hot Topic introduces a study about what behaviours to empower, as well as what behaviours to decrease, in our teams to give rise to good problem-solving skills. The research also explores psychological safety in teams to make us all better problem solvers.

Employee engagement is a barometer that illustrates the relationship between the employee and the organisation. It embraces all the factors that influence the extent to which employees are committed to organisational goals, mission and vision, and can have a significant impact on organisational performance. This Hot Topic explores how to manage, measure and strengthen employee engagement.

Ecosystem has entered the vernacular of everyday business. Terms such as “business ecosystem,” “collaboration ecosystem” and “economic ecosystem” are now being used universally as people seek to articulate the future of business and customer interactions. But an ecosystem reflects much more than a network and it differs fundamentally from a market.

The concept of organisational justice focuses on the effect that social relationships in the working environment have on performance. The theory behind this is that an individual’s perception of fairness, relating to aspects of their work, influences their behaviour. This, in turn, can lead to either negative or positive outcomes in terms of performance. This means that the adoption of fair principles has potential positive effects on both organisational performance and employees’ wellbeing.

Described by the Economist as “the trust machine”, blockchains have evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems, such as provide supply chain transparency and dramatically improve the sharing of information, whilst allowing a visible assurance of authenticity. It looks like, with the right mix of leadership, collaboration and sound governance, we can yield significant benefits from blockchain.

Our work and lives are increasingly interdependent, and networks have emerged as the way in which individuals communicate and collaborate across the planet. Yet, organisations still rely on ways of working created more than a century ago during the rise of industrialisation. Hierarchical systems, team structures and organisational processes are geared to efficiency and routine – and get in the way of knowledge flow, rapid learning and adaptability.

Change management can be a catalyst to help organisations react, flex and adapt by reviewing their own mind-set and capabilities about what it takes to make effective change happen.

How often have you presented an argument – backed up facts, figures and robust research – but have failed to convince people? The evidence should speak for itself, right? The simple answer is that facts and rational arguments aren’t very good at altering people’s beliefs. Humans’ are just too prone to adopt short cuts in their decision-making process to be persuaded by mere fact. This month’s Hot Topic looks into dealing with fake-facts and the art of arguing for the evidence.

Technology has revolutionised our workplace, offering increasing options and freedom for people as to how, where and when they work. Providing your employees with more control over the ways that they do their work can have beneficial effects. The dilemma is, however, the more choices that we give employees, the higher the risk of fragmentation. Individual levels of productivity may go up but cohesion and trust between employees and teams goes down.

In Spring 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect, which empowers EU citizens to move all the data they have at various providers, for example at Amazon, Vodafone, etc., to one place and ask other providers to erase their data. Companies will no longer get away with merely providing a binary yes-or-no consent at the initial point of collection and to ensure information exchange, companies must come up with new ways to do business with their customers.

Despite the increasing need for innovation, many organisations still struggle with the challenges of both generating creative solutions and being able to put them into practice. This Hot Topic research focuses on how to make sure your activities or processes are successfully realised, introducing a simple exercise to better free up resources, and provide you with a checklist to get the innovation governance responsibilities right.

To change people’s mindset and way of thinking, you have to engage with the most complex system in nature – the brain. The EY Edge journey will continue as an exploration of the brain behind thinking, motivations and purpose and how to achieve highest performing teams and a better working world.

We say that our most valuable asset is the knowledge of our employees. However, organisations can often become too focused on using data to create insight and miss out on the intuitive insights of their best managers and experts. According to Dr. Viktor Dörfler, University of Strathclyde, it is all about getting the best of both worlds: analysing data where appropriate (Smart) and using intuition of experts when that is more promising (Art), as well as how the two can help one another (SmArt).

Sometimes we are too close to our work and our business to understand the full potential for both unlocking hidden value and managing potential risk. We are often too engrossed in doing “legacy activities” – working the way we’ve always done.