There's a wonderful book by Matthew Syed, "Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice". It could be written as a training and talent development guidebook. It explodes the myth that success comes through innate talent and explores how it is PRACTICE that makes us better. Those who seem like child prodigies are often just the ones who started practising very early, Mozart being a prime example. He was an incredible composer at 5 years old. But then again, he was made

Unlocking the Secrets of Leadership in Development TrainingWe can gain invaluable insights into business leadership from the director-actor relationship. We're thrilled to share that we had the honour of sitting down for a chat with the renowned actress Niamh Cusack to delve into the fascinating dynamics of the director-actor relationship and its relevance to business management and leadership and talent development training programs. Niamh shares her wisdom, acquired from ye

Beware of G.I. Joe and his fallacy....... In ZEN Coaching's recent work with Infogrid on Interviewer Skills we spent some time looking at interviewer biases, what they are and of course, what to do to mitigate their effects. One thing that was mentioned that we feel needs highlighting is the GI Joe Fallacy. This is something to consider for all biases and DEI training too. Simply put, it's the belief that merely knowing about something is enough to change behaviour. In this c

Would you like an uplift in your employees' performance of around 40%? Well, it's not as far-fetched as it may seem. Back in 2002, the Corporate Leadership Council published a report called "Building the High-Performance Workforce". In it, they examined quantitively what factors improved performance and by how much. The results show how feedback skills needs to be incorporated into management, talent and leadership development programs. As the graph from the report below show

Influencing Others: Management, Talent and Leadership Development Last week ZEN Coaching ran sessions on Influencing Skills and it's sometimes worth taking a step back to think about the thoughts delegates had, not only on influencing, but also on the roleplay practise itself within the context of Management, Talent and Leadership Development. Two main ideas came across loud and clear: 1) The most useful part of any training is the roleplay practise itself. And this makes sen

Welcome to our new blog. Here we aim to give you hints and tips, raise your awareness around what this type of training can do for you and discuss articles or research within Management, Talent and Leadership Development. And first of all, it's worth noting what we truly believe is the essence of our training - simplicity. Over the years as trainers we've been involved with hundreds of training programmes, many of which introduce complex models and try to replicate in great d