22 December 2008

Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow

Chris Rodgers has been appointed as Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Management at Cass Business School, City University, London.

19 December 2008

Best Comment on HR Strategy

Readers of HRZone.co.uk have voted Chris Rodgers's comment on the article "The ivory tower leader: How can HR help them engage?" as the best comment on HR Strategy during 2008.

Read the article and Chris's comment here.

9 December 2008

Employee engagement ... with what?

Chris Rodgers questions what we actually mean by the term "employee engagement" and suggests that the practice of engagement is getting ever more removed from reality.

26 November 2008

Leading Change through Informal Coalitions: Getting to grips with the hidden dynamics of organisational change

Lane4 has launched its Journal of Excellence, to share the company's cutting-edge research with business and HR leaders across the world.

The inaugural issue is subtitled Perspectives on Change, and contains an article by Chris Rodgers, based on his book, Informal Coalitions.

Journal editor and Lane4 director, Prof. Graham Jones, comments that the article "... highlights the common failure to engage with the informal dynamics of everyday organisational life and offers a new approach. Informal coalitions harness the power of talk in order to influence change in the complex organisations in which we work."

You can read more about the Lane4 Journal here.

28 October 2008

Organisational change: the messy reality

Stories abound of change efforts that have petered out, failed to deliver the expected benefits or disappointed those who were once their most enthusiastic supporters. All too often, the initial enthusiasm, intense activity and (frequently) large-scale investment are followed by disillusionment, cynicism and a feeling of wasted effort.

Can we escape from this pattern into something more useful or is it inevitable that events will take this course?

Read the full article here.

Autumn 2008 - Spring 2009

Leadership in a Connected World

Chris Rodgers has worked with Karen Blakeley, Associate Director of Cass Business School's Centre for Leadership, Learning and Change (CLLC), to put together a series of evening workshops on the above theme.

This aim is to build on the success of the highly popular series on Complexity, Conversation and Change that finished in June of this year.

More information can be found here.

20 August 2008

Chris Rodgers Consulting Ltd - 10 Years Old!

Chris Rodgers Consulting Ltd celebrated its tenth anniversary on 20th August 2008. 

We would like to thank all of the clients, partners and others we have worked with, for making this a successful and (largely!) enjoyable ten years.

Looking back at our first ‘brochure’ it stated our aim as being: 

“… to help managers to unlock the wealth of talent within their organizations and channel it for business benefit – enabling them to create high-performing organizations which inspire excellence and achieve sustainable competitive advantage.” 

This aim continues to inform much of what we do. At the same time, we facilitate client decision-making across a wide range of strategic business and organisational issues which go beyond this ‘people leadership’ agenda.  Most recently, this has extended to cross-industry workshops around issues at the heart of industry-wide policy and development. 

Since the publication of Informal Coalitions at the end of 2006, one strand of our work has focused more overtly on helping managers to get to grips with the hidden, messy and informal side of organisational leadership, change and performance.  We feel that this area is increasingly valued by managers as they tire of approaches that fail to address the ‘real world’ issues that they face every day. 

Today, our consultancy, coaching and facilitation blends this distinctive perspective on organisational dynamics with knowledge and skills gained through working with a wide range of client organisations, and extensive ‘in-house’ experience in commercial and public-sector management.  This ensures that our work retains a firm grasp of commercial realism and practicality. 

We look forward keenly to continuing our work with clients - both existing and new - for many years to come.