February 28th, 2022
Bourton Group has been helping to make businesses better for over five decades, and during this time, we’ve seen many trends come and go. However, irrespective of the business sector and the general direction of change, the following three objectives have continuously remained high on most business performance improvement agendas: We want real, tangible business […]
February 2nd, 2022
For the fourth year running we’ve been acknowledged by our clients and peers for our consultancy work within the Construction & Infrastructure sector of the Financial Times UK’s Leading Management Consultants 2022 report. We are over the moon that our Operational Management Consultancy has been listed alongside some of the UK’s most well-known consultancy firms. […]
February 1st, 2022
I was recently asked my opinion on a trend that seems to be emerging from the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on businesses and organisations. The trend seems to suggest that people are ‘re-imagining’ not only their approach to work, for example, hybrid working, but also who they may be working for. It’s fair to […]
December 1st, 2021
Over the last few months as things have begun to return to ‘normal’ Bourton Group has embarked on some very rigorous 5S activity. Like a lot of you, while our operations were forced into ‘working from home’ – we realised that there were quite a few items that were no longer necessary to our more […]
October 19th, 2021
Whilst reading a great article in Forbes during a recent flight to Portugal, The Pandemic has changed Business Structures: There’s No Going Back. I was struck by the comment from Brian Chesky, founder, and CEO of Airbnb, who rightly says, “travel will never go back to what it was before the pandemic.” The article also […]
September 6th, 2021
Developing Management Capability in Others Much attention is paid to the difference between leading and managing, and the concept of ‘leadership’, quite rightly, gets considerable airtime in the learning and development arena. Never before has demonstrating the skills associated with capturing and engaging the commitment of people been more expected or more challenging. And, whilst […]
August 4th, 2021
Squeezing extra performance from teams Consistent and sustainable high performance from teams has never been achieved by simply instructing them to work better harder and faster, and issuing veiled threats if they don’t. As with any social group, the behaviour of work teams is the outcome of a complex mix of situation, opportunity and individual […]
June 13th, 2021
Aligning Personal Objectives to Organisational Strategy Too often, people working in operational roles see strategy as something that doesn’t affect them; they are just there to do their jobs. But how do leaders know that everyone is working towards the same overall goals? How do you, as a manager, make sure that everybody’s contribution counts? […]
April 26th, 2021
What is an empowered team? The individuals in an empowered team (also known as a ‘self-directed’ or ‘self-managed’) are not intrinsically different to that of an average team. An empowered team, however, is one where the knowledge, experience and motivation that already exist within the team is fully utilised, as they are given more freedom […]