The Motivation Agency Blog

In June 2015 I wrote an article for the Tourism Society Journal entitled Customer Service: Britain's Tourism Iceberg, in which I reflected on the sad reality that, while Britain's image overseas then ranked three in the world as a "nation brand" (behind Germany and the USA), for "quality of welcome" we were limping in 13th place. As I wrote at the time, “Whilst London 2012 unsurprisingly boosted our ranking, we have now fallen back to where we were in those dark, pessimistic, pre-Olympics days.” I argued that our failure to provide a world-class welcome threatened our long-term competitiveness as a major tourism destination - hence, the iceberg analogy.

It feels like every time a major business has a restructure, it becomes a cull on middle management. Clearly, middle management are expendable.

More than once, I have heard Directors moan that their middle managers are a blocker to innovation and change. Clearly, middle management are stuck in the mud.

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do things perfectly and get things right first time. But do we really learn anything by achieving perfection on our first attempt? Or is learning by making progress – having a go, reflecting on the outcomes, adapting the approach and trying again more effective?

How do you get a team to get to know each other and bond when they can’t have a chat over the kettle or pop out for lunch together?

The mythunderstanding that’s probably been corrected 10,000 times is still being perpetuated, even in some quite learned works.

As our frustrations of the pandemic finally start to lift there is a sense of excitement and panic as restaurants find themselves fully booked for the next year, holiday apartments sold out, people booking flights to foreign countries… and business leaders scrabble to “hit the ground running.”

And I fear we have learned nothing.

For many employees, the board of directors of a company or organisation, can seem very distant from the day-to-day life of the organisation. While the traditional legacy model of a board of directors “away in an ivory tower” and filled with “Nine white men with an average age of 62” has slowly

Does it make you cringe when you are being presented to by someone who thinks they are a really great communicator and really isn’t?

It didn’t always feel like a revolution then, but how far we’ve come.

It's twenty years since Martyn Sloman gave us his excellent book, The e-learning revolution.

We look forward to the day when Inclusion and Diversity are so high on the corporate agenda that we will no longer have to work hard to get them understood.