Colin Ellis

2 weeks ago | colindellis.medium.com | Colin Ellis

Whenever I start work with a new company they often refer to my other clients and say things such as ‘We’d like a culture like Cisco or Red Bull’ or ‘Give us some insights into Atlassian’s or Microsoft’s culture’ and I have empathy for the request. After all, it’s very easy to look over the fence and see what others have in respect of how culture contributes to sales, profits, engagement, staff retention or attraction and covet it. Yet, culture isn’t something that can be copied.

2 weeks ago | colindellis.medium.com | Colin Ellis

Enclothed cognition is a psychological phenomenon where the clothing you wear influences your cognitive processes and psychological states. This concept suggests that what you wear can affect your mental processes, perception, performance and behaviour in ways that align with the symbolic meaning of that clothing.

2 weeks ago | colindellis.medium.com | Colin Ellis

I’ve learned lots across my almost 40 years of work. Not just from structured training programs, but also from mentors, managers I’ve enjoyed working for and managers that I haven’t!I recently started work on a Management Mastery program with a client. We are co-,designing an experiential learning program (i.e. one that people will enjoy doing and tell people about!) and we started the process by listing all of the skills that we believed people needed in order to be successful at work.

2 weeks ago | colindellis.medium.com | Colin Ellis

Email Ghosting is a modern problem for corporate employees. It’s easy to blame the tool used to deliver the message that will never get read, however, there are five root causes as to why people ghost each other on email:People don’t understand how to use email — I know, it seems ridiculous, however, organisations don’t sit people down at their induction and say ‘this is the tool we use for email, this is how we use it, this is the functionality available to you and these are the rules’.

2 weeks ago | colindellis.medium.com | Colin Ellis

One of the questions that I’m regularly asked during interviews is ‘when did your interest in team culture first begin?’As a child growing up in the Liverpool area, it has a lot to do with sports and this is the picture that always comes to mind. It is one of the best school football teams that I played for when at Rainhill High School. Yet despite being part of a great team, I never really learned — until much later on — how to create one myself.