Learning Pool

Digital Future Gazing – 10 predictions for 2013

Breakfast with bright young things in the Soho Hotel

Yesterday I attended the 4th annual Digital Trends forecast presentation from digital PR agencies 33 Digital & Hotwire in the achingly trendy Soho Hotel. It’s a world I don’t often stray into – marketeers, PR people, social media agencies, brands, influencing – inhabited by bright young things and beautiful people. So what was I doing there? I went because Peter Sigrist, MD at 33 Digital is part of my Twittergang & I wanted to see him present and also because who isn’t interested in future gazing & horizon scanning – especially when someone else is putting up the skittles & inviting everyone else to knock them down.

As it turns out, the bright young things were also well informed, fun and sincere & the event was very enjoyable. I considered what impact the 10 predictions may have on my own public sector world – and my musings on this are below. You can access the report in it’s entirety here www.digitaltrendsreport.com – it also contains some very cool b & w photographs.

Peter wants to encourage lively debate about the forecasts so feel free to join in on Twitter. Use #hw33trends

Internal Social Networks – yep – I like this one. We’ve been using Yammer for years at Learning Pool & we know many of our public sector customers are trying to get started with something similar. Our experience has been that it helps our dispersed team keep track of each other & it savagely reduces internal email. In bigger organisations it allows everyone to communicate with each other on a more level playing field and it lets senior teams understand their own organisations better. The challenge next will be to see if internal social networks will foster new ways to achieve business objectives and even sales. We’ll see. For anyone starting out with an internal social network, make it easy for your team to use & be patient. There’s bound to be a few mistakes along the way but everyone learns and your organisation becomes more resilient as a result.
Data Porn – the age of the data geek is finally here, Big Data has arrived. The PR agencies are excited about the release of the 2011 Census data in early 2013. This time around the data will be there in a format where everyone can access it & slice & dice until the cows come home. What does this mean for the UK public sector? A recent Policy Exchange report estimates that fully capturing the big data opportunity to drive up efficiency and cut out waste in the UK public sector could be worth a total of between £16 billion and £33 billion
a year. What’s keeping you folks? For anyone out there who’d like to know more about what Big Data is, there’s a new e-learning course in the Learning Pool catalogue that we developed with the Cabinet Office & explains Big Data for public sector beginners.
Digital Health – in 2011 global healthcare costs totalled £3.8 trillion according to McKinsey & in the US costs were 20% of GDP. This prediction is about government encouraging people to measure & monitor their own health data to ultimately help them to help themselves to become more healthy. I think whether we like it or not this is definitely on the cards. I heard Nick Seddon of think tank Reform talk about this idea at length at July’s CIPFA conference and given that he was previously at Circle Healthcare he probably has a good idea about the way things are moving. On a more positive note, people these days want to take charge of their own health. We’ve seen that in our own team during 2012 with a number of people finally kicking the cigarette habit & the proliferation of bicycle purchases.
Peter Sigrist, MD of 33 Digital, revealing the first 5 predictions
When businesses learned to be good – I like this one too & definitely agree that this is on an upward & escalating trajectory. This topic even formed part of the CBI’s recent annual conference which included an entire panel session titled “Growing with Society – the need for new Business Models” led by Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman. Modern businesses are becoming more transparent, more connected (and in a way where serendipity starts to play more of a role) and more community focused – both internally & externally. For the public sector, I predict that the coming years will see a complete blurring between government, the private sector and the not for profit space as a new type of organisation emerges to deliver services to citizens.
Smaller can be better – the rise of the niche social network and a move away from Facebook & Twitter. This one is all about creating communities of interest where the measure is not the size of the community but the degree of engagement. It’s what we’ve been doing for a few years at Learning Pool with our own specialist Learning & Development community and this is a fairly well developed idea within the public sector with many niche Communities of Practice available in recognised places like the LGA’s Knowledge Hub. Peter talked about examples of “sub compact publishing” such as Bobbie Johnson’s “Matter” project – very interesting and described as – basically the opposite of all the received wisdom about online publishing — they only publish long pieces, they don’t publish very often, and they expect people to pay for content.
Sentient World – this is where it starts to get a bit scary. Social media gave interested parties the ability to listen to what we say; the sentient world will give them the ability to see what we’re doing. Foursquare has launched a service for business this past week and one of their original co-founders is apparently working on a version of tweetdeck for Foursquare. One for the public sector to sit back & think about I believe as we watch the early adopters. Sometimes called the Internet of Things, to the layman it’s sensors & transmitters within inanimate objects connected via the internet – fridges that order more milk, shoes that can tell you how to get home, a lamp that when you switch it on in London lights your sister’s lamp in Co Tyrone so that she knows you’re at home, mirrors in shops that tell you more about the coat you’re trying on, thermostats that learn which rooms you don’t go into so they leave them colder. I loved the story about the Fitbit & the leaderboard & this is something we will definitely be trying out in Learning Pool as the New Year kicks off. Who can walk 1,000 miles first? My bet is on Eddie Ryce.
The Rise of Storytelling – every FTSE100 company now has a community management team. Two years ago none of them did. This is about using compelling stories with a beginning, a middle and an end to bring audiences to you, get them to stick around & ultimately to buy more stuff from you. I see lots of examples of public sector organisations pushing out stories about the places they are in & the people they serve.
The Un-Boxing of TV – yep – agree with this. I can’t watch tv any more without Twitter banter running in parallel & everyone I know is the same. Can’t think of a public sector application of this one as all that is televised is council meetings & I don’t think anyone watches them anyway. Maybe use this medium & idea to push out campaigns about public health or to encourage more engagement in local democracy? I have a horrific metric for you however – 70% of trending topics on Twitter are TV related 😦
Selling’s from Mars, engaging’s from Venus – remember that you can only manage what you measure. It’s easy to measure sales. Engagement isn’t as easy to measure. We had a good laugh about Twitter campaigns that have backfired & one that we discussed was the Waitrose campaign that asked people why they shop at Waitrose – cue hilarious results (Harrods is too far to go midweek, because I was once in the Holloway Rd branch & heard a dad say “put down that papaya Orlando”, Asda doesn’t stock peacock/unicorn feed, if you buy a full tank of helicopter fuel you get 10% off champagne and so on). Rather than backfiring I think that campaign was a resounding success. I think the public sector understands that if you want citizens to engage, you have to hold conversations on topics they are interested in but perhaps we don’t see enough of this happening.
The User Experience of Social – this one is about thinking through the entire user experience that people have when they interact with us in more than one place. In my opinion no-one does this right. I’ve recently been accessing estate agent websites on my smartphone when I’m out & about & they are a curse – every last one of them. This is about waking up to the fact that channels do not contain siloed audiences – the same people are using multi channels. Everyone including the public sector needs to think a lot harder about UX from multiple devices & including more”helping hand services” that align service offerings & save time & energy for the user.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog as much as I enjoyed yesterday’s event, even if I can’t extend the Soho Hotel breakfast to you. I saw Jon Foster of Futuregov yesterday & we were debating whether or not local authorities really should start thinking more like brands. We concluded that they probably should. It’s certainly time for everyone to take better control of their conversations and interactions in a more holistic way.

As always, I look forward to your comments & your own predictions for Digital for 2013.

5 top tips to keep that small company culture as your startup grows?

Not so long ago Learning Pool was 4 people congregating around Paul’s kitchen table in Donegal. 6 years later we employ 50 people, support over 700,000 learners & 350 public sector organisations & Deloitte’s have deemed us to be the 26^th fastest growing technology business in the UK over the past 5 years (6^th fastest growing on the island of Ireland) with 1100% growth in our revenues in that period. At the same time, our customers tell us that our business feels more like a family to them than a company. This week’s blog is about how I think we’ve managed to combine aggressive growth with retention of the desirable qualities of a small business and keeping hold of our personal values along the way. I appreciate this is a topic that many of you will know far more about than me so I’m looking forward to reading & answering your comments and questions.

Learning Pool team having cake – which happens pretty much weekly

Before I start I should say that one of the greatest pleasures of owning your own business is having the opportunity to shape the culture of your organisation because we all know too well what bad company culture looks and feels like.

These are my top tips:

Aine and Emma – two of our original Learning Pool team members snapped last week at LP Learning Live South

Invest in your own people and help them grow with the business. Today our team extends to more than 50 people, but 15 of those 50 have been with Learning Pool more than or very close to 5 of our 6 years and not one of them is in the job they started at – they’ve all moved up or sideways and up. Many of our team did not have years of experience when they joined Learning Pool, but what they lacked in experience they made up for with great personalities, enthusiasm and energy, a hunger to learn and desire for success. Our original company culture is carried in each of their hearts and delivered via their daily actions.
Linked to point 1 above is take care with your recruitment. Recruitment is the most important job of a fast growing company’s founders so make proper time for it & don’t delegate it to someone else. The worst mistakes we’ve made in our 6 years so far have all been linked to poor recruitment decisions. You know what they say – better a hole than an asshole – and it’s true. Avoid prima donnas and mavericks, whatever they seem to bring – they just aren’t worth it. Recruit for potential and personality and work hard to develop your talent. When you make a recruitment mistake, reverse the person out as quickly & as painlessly as you can for their own sake and for everyone else’s.
At the end of last week’s LP Learning Live South
It’s easy to be customer focused when you’re small. As a startup you have to over deliver anyway and when you’re starting out you don’t have many customers and you’re eagerly learning from them. As you grow, you have to find a way of continuing to deliver that level of excellent customer service. We’ve done this by constantly automating as much as we can as we’ve grown so that our customer facing people get to spend as much of their working week as they can interacting with customers – as that’s where the value add lies for our customers and for us. We’re about to go through another (painful) round of this between now & Christmas but we recognise it’s worth it.
Encourage everyone to have their say. We’ve tried hard to do this at Learning Pool from the very start. We have a culture where everyone’s ideas are heard and debated (even Tony’s) and everyone is expected to innovate. We’ve used Yammer for years to facilitate ad hoc brainstorming across our dispersed team and it’s also used for extensive banter and leg pulling. I used to worry about this but it’s only made me nearly faint once & that was when a local authority HR director asked me if they could see Yammer working in situ.
Night out in Dublin 2011
As founders and senior managers you have to love your team and all of you have to love your customers and enjoy interacting with them. None of that can be faked. It has to be real. What do I mean by love your team? You have to care about them in & out of work and sometimes even take care of them, you have to appreciate the contribution they make and reward them as best you can – financially and in other ways, you have to trust them and give them space to develop and progress. You have to make time to have some fun together as that’s important too. The Learning Pool team works hard but we play hard too and we find time to do some voluntary & pro bono work together when we can.

Team in pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Day

That’s my thoughts. Look forward to reading yours.

10 things crowdfunding investors want most from digital media investments

Tim Brundle presenting at Culturetech

There was a lot to like about last week’s CultureTECH festival held in Learning Pool’s hometown of Derry. So typical of Derry that our city’s event managed to combine both culture + technology. Many attendees agreed it was the culture element that elevated the festival way above the millions of other web summits that every man, woman & dog hosts. A lovely taster of some of the magic we expect to see for 12 months during 2013 when Derry becomes the first ever UK City of Culture.

I enjoyed listening to many of the speakers on Friday (especially Andrew Dubber (who advised us to invent the future rather than trying to predict it), Fiona McAnena, Sir Nicholas Kenyon and of course lovely Ben Hammersley) but the speaker who gave me the most insight into one of the topics I’m most interested in was Tim Brundle. Tim is Director of Innovation at the University of Ulster where over the past few years he’s made investments of between £5k & £328m in over 60 tech companies & seen returns on investment of 0.8x to 42x. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that he knows what he’s talking about.

It’s a well known fact that everyone suddenly wants to be in digital. According to this presentation, by the end of 2011 87% of the top 100 VC firms had digital media funds or portfolio investments.

For the purpose of this blog I’m going to share with you the 10 things Tim believes people investing through crowdfunding schemes are looking for in digital media investments. While Tim was talking I thought about our own company and how attractive we would have been starting out if we’d been scored against these criteria.

Business Model is first up and most important – people want to believe that they’re going to get money back. Giving thought to your business model & revisiting it from time to time is something every business should do & I’ve written on this topic before. For new businesses and teams seeking investment it’s incredibly important to spend time getting it right as a small change in your business model can make big differences in the shape of and priorities within your eventual company.
Location – most people seeking a project to invest in via crowdfunding look for something that’s local to them. With the internet I’m not sure why that would be. Even if you’re close by you won’t be able to influence what they do – but I guess it’s something to do with local knowledge & familiarity.
What Tim calls True Grit in a team. I heard him say a few times during the course of the day that early start up success does not necessarily guarantee success in subsequent ventures and because of this crowd fund investors want to try out with newbies.
Goes without saying investors look for a Smart Idea.
More interesting is that they look for an idea that will generate a Big Splash. This means something that people think can be rolled out quickly, catch on fast & generate rapid user adoption.
Investors look for a product that is Beautiful – doesn’t everyone?
Kentucky Windage – a term which originated in rifle shooting & is about compensating for your shot when using a hinky shotgun by trying to second guess where the bullet is going to go. In this instance it’s about how people try to second guess what the route to market of a new product is going to be.
Personalisation – people base attractiveness of the investment around what the product or idea means to them, how it appeals to them & how they imagine use of it would enrichen their lives.
The product itself is quite low down in the list of considerations but crowd funding investors are interested in whether or not it appears to be Authentic and Real.
The last one I like. Does the idea or product have a Future & Enduring appeal. Tim told us the well known story about Zhou Enlai’s take when asked about outcomes of the French Revolution 200 years earlier – of course he believed it was “too soon to tell”.

I’ll leave you with this pic of Tim & me taken on Friday night after a fabulous day at CultureTECH. We’re very lucky to have someone like this in and around the Northern Ireland investment scene and so accessible to companies starting out. I know Tim has been a great help to many fledgling startup tech businesses and like me, he love, love, loves to see teams pitching.

I’ll finish by expressing my thanks to Mark Nagurski and the entire Digital Derry Action Team for giving us such a great event last week and for sealing the exciting twinning deal with London’s Tech City.

What makes a great virtual team member?…time to practice what I preach

Today’s my last day in Northern Ireland for 6 months. For the past 5 years I’ve managed a highly motivated part of the Learning Pool team who are absent from our Derry mothership & who work from home in England and Scotland. Tomorrow I become one of them. This past couple of weeks I’ve been really mulling this over & wondering what it will mean for me. I’m also slightly worried that I may not be the exemplary virtual team member that I imagine I will, a carbon copy of the perfect remote worker in the image I have in my mind’s eye.

In my view, these are the qualities & behaviours of a great virtual team member:

· superb communicator – in both directions – giving & receiving information; this applies equally to customers & colleagues

· highly organised in terms of managing appointments, follow ups, phone calls, CRM updates, keeping your online calendar bang up to date

· ability to work efficiently on the hoof (on trains, in cafes, at airports, in the car)

· knack to really bond with people you don’t see face to face much – other virtual colleagues but also the people in the powerhouse or mothership – the people you need to actually do things for you that you can’t do yourself

· planning your schedule to get the most out of each day by combining appointments & using common sense

· gift for really knowing what’s going on beneath the surface at HQ, think that comes about by really listening to what your colleagues say

· makes the best use of the available technology & doesn’t get bogged down in constant technofail

· books travel well in advance to get the best prices

· effective collector & disseminator of customer information back to the mothership team

· self starter with a lot of drive

· ability to complete & finish things (this one is tricky for me) in a fast paced & constantly moving environment.

From time to time I’ve been critical of how other people do some or all of the above. I guess I’ll know by this time next week how I’m doing myself. Any hints and tips from you, my dear readers, will be most welcome as always.

So what am I going to miss most over the next 6 months when I’m London based. Folks – there’s no competition on that score. The photo of Paul was snapped yesterday at Stansted airport. He’d just finished a conference call with our tech team & is posting something up on Twitter. As usual, we had a few right old laughs yesterday – despite both of us having a 3.30am start, a tricky meeting at the Cabinet Office and the usual mixed bag of rushing around London for meetings, juggling stuff as we go. Along the way, and starting at 5.30am, we also discussed everything that both of us are working on, we did some long term strategic planning, we both chatted to a number of colleagues, customers and partners, sketched out a couple of new products or markets for existing parts of the Learning Pool portfolio, swapped the usual load of gossip (mainly about other entrepreneurs or businesses), exchanged views on the content of business books we are both reading (cuts down on individual reading time if your business partner reads it & gives you a précis of course), managed to have both breakfast & lunch in the most random of places, went through some sort of time/space portal at Stansted airport, took two plane journeys & two long drives each, but were emailing again when we got to our respective homes last night. The relationship anyone has (should have) with their business partner is pretty intense and full on. I’ll refer you to a previous blog of mine if you’re interested in reading more about this – it’s here https://kickingassets.co.uk/two-heads-are-better-than-one-10-pros-of-havi

We’ve been working together like this for 8 years, we rarely disagree and you couldn’t put a cigarette paper in between us. I guess that’s what I’m going to miss most.

Job Hunting? Be careful you don’t cross the line into canvassing…

It’s a dog eat dog world out there, especially if you’re on the hunt for a job. I’ve written a number of blogs over the past couple of years offering advice to people looking for new employment opportunities or getting ready to attend interviews and I always encourage people to be as proactive as they can. This means being alert to opportunities as they come up, using your networks, sending carefully crafted emails or letters & cvs to organisations you want to work for, etc. As we all know, a large percentage of jobs are never advertised – so it’s important that you get yourself on the radar.

However, you can go too far. When that happens you can be in danger of either being disqualified for canvassing or you can just annoy someone so much that they put you on the “no thanks” list before you even get a chance to shine.

Recently I’ve started to receive large numbers of Linked In requests from people I don’t know. Many of them are people that are looking for work. Guys – this isn’t going to do you any favours. First of all, I only connect with people on Linked In that I have met in real life & know and like. I joked when David Cameron joined Linked In that he needn’t bother sending me a request as I wouldn’t accept it. It’s the truth. In my mind, it’s pointless being professionally “connected” with hundreds of people that I don’t know. Twitter’s the place for that.

Sometimes, before I click the “ignore” option, I do take a look at the person’s Linked In profile. Call that what you like – nosiness, curiosity, even politeness. I live in Northern Ireland so if it’s a name I half recognise or someone that I think I may have met, I look at the profile to find out more information. Surely that’s the point of having profiles.

I don’t then expect that person to send me a public tweet thanking me for looking at their Linked In profile & saying they hope Learning Pool will be in touch with them shortly.

This is so wrong on so many levels:

1. If we’ve advertised job vacancies, we’re in a process and using social media in this way to promote yourself to people in the company could be construed by some to be canvassing, and that can result in your application being disqualified from the process. In Northern Ireland we work within very strict recruitment guidelines in order to meet legislation around equal opportunities in employment.

2. I might sit in on interviews from time to time and I might meet people before we offer them a job, but it will be our team leads that are driving the recruitment process at Learning Pool not me. If you contact me outside of the process, I am unlikely to know anything about the particular process you are in (we advertised 10 vacancies in the press on 27 December) and even if I was interested in your experience and skillset, I’m unlikely to mention you to one of our team leads – they’ll pick it up themselves as part of their shortlisting activity.

If you’re looking for a job & want to work at Learning Pool, spend time & effort instead improving your cv (most of the ones I see are dire) and writing a decent covering letter. Or spend time getting onto our radar before we actually go out to recruitment – so that we already know you. There are many ways you can do this – intelligent commenting on our forums, writing an interesting personal blog & making us aware of that, conducting interactions with us on Twitter or coming along to our events & chatting to us.

I know that many of you will have opinions or questions about this topic and I hope we can have some debate in the comments section. As always, love to have your input.

London Calling

I’m getting ready to move to London in the New Year. There, I’ve said it. Learning Pool started life in London in a rented loft in Crawford’s Passage in Farringdon before shifting our HQ back to Derry. We used to call our London base Crawford’s Pass amongst ourselves because it made it sound more Irish. In our early days we were paranoid about customers knowing we were a Northern Ireland company in case it was a barrier to us doing business. As the last 5 years have progressed, we became less coy about our origins as we cemented our customer relationships although we hung onto our London phone number. These days, our customers love the fact that we’re an Irish company and some of them have even been to visit us at our office in Derry. Others have even been brave enough to join our team.

Our fabulous Head of Content, Deborah Limb, joined us from another more famous e-learning company. Deborah had never been to Northern Ireland before her first day at Learning Pool. She arrived at our office on a cold, wet, Monday morning in November 2007, clutching the remnants of a sopping wet map in her hand. She still claims she never saw daylight during that first winter.

Now it’s my turn to go back the other way and it’s a bittersweet feeling that I have. I lived in London for 17 years before moving home to County Tyrone at the start of the new millennium. I left the pushiness of the city behind & moved right into the middle of rural Ulster. I’ll never forget waking up that first morning & hearing no sounds. Nothing at all. I remember the relief I felt & ever since that day, I’ve half felt as though I’m on holiday – a sort of working holiday where you work harder than you’ve ever worked before but your colleagues & neighbours are so friendly that it somehow compensates you.

I quickly learned to be less brusque & more chatty in my interactions. More talk about the weather & people you know & less focus on the agenda is the Northern Irish way. Gradually the sharp edges from all those years spent living in the city were worn down a little. Of course I’ve been back in London pretty much every week since 2000 – sometimes twice a week – but always as a visitor, staying in a hotel room, running for a plane home as soon as the meetings are finished. I’m wondering how I’ll slot back into the hurly-burly of London life after the deep, deep peace of country living (quoted with a nod to Mrs Patrick Campbell).

So why am I as a person and why are we as a business doing this? I guess we’re fed up with fighting for what’s right (that it should be just as easy to do business from Northern Ireland as it is from any part of the UK or indeed Europe) & accepting what’s reality. Like it or not, London is indeed where UK government’s beating heart lies. It’s also where a large number of our customers, a huge number of potential customers and some of the people we’d like to work more closely with are based. On top of that, our Northern Ireland location is stifling Learning Pool’s growth as there just aren’t the skills here that we need to recruit in to grow our business. We’ve raised this point many times with Invest Northern Ireland. We’re further hampered by having an ornament of an airport 5 miles from us in Derry that we never use as the flight times aren’t conducive to being anywhere on time to do business – and the government agencies and politicians seem more interested in in-fighting & scoring points off each other than looking outwards & making Northern Ireland an easier place from which to operate internationally. In summary, we’ve concluded we’re missing out on opportunities and holding ourselves back by not having a London presence. And I think that’s a very sad state of affairs. Learning Pool was recently confirmed by Deloitte to be Northern Ireland’s fastest growing tech company & the 6^th fastest growing on the island of Ireland, but we have to look to London in order to continue our expansion.

Of course there’s plenty of upside. I’m looking forward to being back in the heart of the capital for a six month period and I’m intending throwing myself into the whole London work/social scene and spending plenty of time with friends & colleagues, old & new. I’m looking for somewhere to base Learning Pool London right now so watch this space & all will be revealed.

I know this is an emotive topic, especially for other Northern Ireland businesses – so I’m looking forward to your views & a lively discussion in the comments below. Keep ‘em coming!

Billy Bragg…songwriter, activist & national treasure

I’ve been a fan of Billy Bragg all my adult life – which is pretty much all his adult life. The photo above was taken today & features my rather tatty but much prized Billy Bragg t-shirt bought in 1985 & survivor of so many wardrobe clear-outs. I almost threw it away when we moved from London to Northern Ireland but I couldn’t bear to. It reminds me too much of the miner’s strike & the stuff that went on back then.

Yesterday, the Learning Pool crew was breakfasting in the Gibson in Dublin following the Deloitte Fast 50 Awards ceremony on Friday night. I don’t have to tell you how late we went to bed. Suffice to say it was a similar time to when I often get up. At breakfast, Billy Bragg was at the next table. I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. I did, however, have the decency to wait until he’d finished his breakfast & read the newspaper before I approached him for a chat.

He was exactly as I imagined he would be & I was delighted to hear he was heading over yesterday afternoon to the Dame St protests in Dublin to show a bit of support & play an impromptu gig on a makeshift stage assembled by the protesters & activists. Good on yer Billy & good luck with your Irish tour. Might see you Friday night at the Empire in Belfast. Details are here if anyone else fancies it too http://www.billybragg.co.uk/gigs/gigs.php

Billy Bragg stories welcome via the comments as always.

How to present yourself well at job interviews

In my job I do a lot of interviewing, both for Learning Pool & for other organisations that ask me to help them out with this from time to time. It’s taken a lot of effort to find and assemble the 50 or so perfect (ish) people that form Learning Pool’s current #teamlovely.

There are no doubt thousands of books written on this topic but having been involved in two sets of interviews this week alone, these are my top tips for interview success. You will have loads more tips of your own & I hope you’ll share them with us in the comments section below.

· Do take a few deep breaths before you go into your interview & try to remain calm; we know you’re nervous but you have to be able to manage your interview nerves

· Don’t bring in a load of files & papers & copies of cvs to your interview – it’s distracting & makes you appear disorganised/forgetful/dishonest (as in you can’t remember stuff about your own career!)

· Don’t take notes or write stuff down – again – it’s distracting

· Instead, do really focus on what the panel are telling you or asking you; 30% of the people I interviewed this week (yep – you heard that right) asked for the question to be repeated when they were already half way through answering it.

· Do manage your time well. You will know in advance how long your interview is likely to be. Don’t ramble on for ages when answering what are clearly icebreaker questions designed to make you relax a bit or you’ll have no time left to get onto the stuff you want to tell them about yourself.

· Do really do your homework about the organisation & think about the job so that you can pre-empt the questions you might be asked – not to stalker level obviously, although if you have carried out research that’s that thorough, don’t tell the interview panel – it will scare them.

· Do be friendly & chatty but don’t be too over familiar or go too overboard in your enthusiasm for the organisation

· Do pre-prepare enough questions so that if some of them get covered off in the course of the interview you still have one or two left

· Don’t ask about money in the first interview stage unless either the panel brings it up or you’re there for a sales job

· Do think carefully about why you want the job & why you want to join that organisation as they will probably ask you – saying it’s because it’s close to the train station isn’t a good response.

I’ll leave you today with some of the weirdest interview behaviours we’ve witnessed lately:

· The guy that drank about 3 pints of water

· The girl that told us she would do ANYTHING to get the job – Paul’s face was a picture on that occasion

· The guy that turned up dressed head to toe in white, including a hat

· The girl that couldn’t stop crying – that was difficult to cope with

· The girl that didn’t appear to have read the job description at all – despite having submitted a detailed application form

· The guy who was so argumentative that we had to stop the interview & start over again

Looking forward to your stories, as always.

What does the startup founder director want from team members?

Working in a small business is not for everyone. The working environment is transparent to a degree that many people find uncomfortable (your colleagues and manager, maybe even your directors are likely to be aware of your every move – which is great if you’re performing). New business is rarely turned away so the only way quality can be maintained and delivery deadlines met is by team members working longer hours; this happens a lot when your small business is growing. Your founder directors, although appreciative of everyone’s efforts, are always looking for “more”. Performance issues are likely to be addressed sooner rather than later and perhaps more bluntly than many people are used to or prepared for. The runway between joining as a newbie and being deemed to “fit in” may be viewed as too short by most. Also, the swift exit if your colleagues decide you aren’t going to work out is brutal.

Of course – there’s a lot of upside too. If there wasn’t, no-one would bother putting themselves through startup discomfort & pain. But that’s not the topic of today’s blog. Today is about what I as a founder director expect from team members as a minimum. Here’s my top 10:

1. Commitment to our customers, to the business and to our common goals. This covers everything from being on time for meetings, doing your prep, being reliable and a host of other stuff. Real life recent commitment examples from our own small business are being in the office on a bank holiday because a project review must take place, giving up a Sunday to travel to a company event – even though family plans had already been made, changing plans and flying to see a customer the next day because they needed you to.

2. Passion about our company, customers, products and mission – this has to be real, it can’t be fake or people can tell. See my accompanying blog photo of Eddie Ryce from Learning Pool’s sales team if you don’t believe me (photo credits to Paul Clarke & Ruth Cassidy).

3. Honesty – about where you are, what you’re doing, why something failed, what you think about something.

4. Hard work and an eye on the prize – yeah – long hours sometimes but an outcomes focused approach where you can easily prioritise what’s important and make sure that’s done first. Linked to this I expect you to travel in your own time and to make sure all your follow ups and admin are done without anyone having to check or nag you.

5. Self-sufficiency. Not everyone has this on Day 1 but everyone needs to strive towards this. Spending time managing team members’ performance is an overhead I’d rather do without. You should make it easy for your line manager to manage you.

6. Self confidence but with it the ability to know when you need help and the confidence to ask for it.

7. Self-awareness – required to be a good team player. It should be obvious to you before it is to anyone else when you’re verging on asshole behaviour.

8. Enjoyment of the here and now. Everyone wants to and will move up – but try and enjoy what you’re doing to the full when you’re doing it.

9. Responsiveness – if I’m trying to get hold of you out of hours it’ll be for a good reason. If I can’t reach you despite having provided you with every device known to mankind (at your request usually) that’s annoying. Please note – being available in this way isn’t for everyone.

10. A desire to improve. Everyone should have this although in truth, some need it more than others. That’s life!

They’re my top 10. I’m sure there are loads more. Keep your comments coming. I love to receive and read them and so does everyone else.

Team Building’s great…but what happens next?

On 1 August Learning Pool turned 5 years old. 5 years is a significant milestone for any company and certainly time to take stock and work out what happens next. We decided to spend 3 days together as a team in order to celebrate, have some informal time together (although Learning Pool is far from formal at the best of times) but also to revisit our plans and discuss our options as a group.

This photo of Paul & me with our team was taken on Derry’s new Peace Bridge last week – just before we split into 6 teams and scrambled all over the City on a fun treasure hunt. We’re very proud of our team. I doubt it’s possible to grow a sizeable team any quicker than 5 years, no matter how many management books you read or how impatient you are. It’s like growing a harmonious flower bed or baking good bread. There’s a method & stages to go through but at the end of the day, it takes a certain amount of time.

People have to form relationships & become comfortable with each other before they can perform well at anything. It’s difficult to do this when the organisation is growing fast as there are new people joining the team all the time & “upsetting” the dynamic. Everyone knows the Tuckman model of team formation and the 4 stages – forming, storming, norming, performing. It can be hard to get onto those later stages when there is a constant influx of new team members.

When I look at the photo, 18 people or about one third of our team have been with us less than 12 months; 16 have been with us for over 3 years and the remaining 23 have been at Learning Pool between one & three years. I often think about the Belbin exercise our team completed at our first team building event on Lusty Beg island in December 2008 when the company was just over 2 years old. We had no co-ordinators & no implementers. We had 2 completer finishers (fortunately!), one team worker, 2 plants and a solitary monitor-evaluator. The remaining 24 people were crammed onto the resource investigator & shaper spaces – 12 apiece. Things have changed since then, although some days I miss that early chaos.

My question to you all in this blog is how do other companies build on the success of team building days & keep the momentum going once your dispersed teams have dispersed again. How do you keep that energy & focus going once everyone has waved goodbye and gone back to their day jobs?

Mary McKenna's Blog

Come ramble with me…