CQ Blog - Management skills for everyone!

When we speak informally about an individual’s personality, we may be referring to any number of qualities, from their temperament to their sense of humor, even the kind of media they like. However, in the social sciences, the study of personality focuses on enduring, reliable traits about a person that can be measured, and which are useful in predicting behavior (Saucier & Srivastra, 2015). The leading perspective on personality within the social sciences is the Five Factor Model, or the “Big Five”, which describes individuals in terms of their openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeability, extroversion, and neuroticism.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting the businesses and societies in a manner that is unseen before. By the end of the decade, there will likely be no field untouched by this technological advancement. Although people have been challenged by machines ever since the Industrial Revolution, this time it's different. AI is transforming many dimensions of our lives, revolutionizing how we think, learn, communicate, and work, threatening to take over activities with a substantial cognitive and creative load. The ability of the organizations, the workplace, and the workforce to transform themselves in response to these unprecedented changes will determine their survival success. The end result remains to be seen.

There are countless pieces of advice when it comes to improving work that relate to becoming more productive, efficient, profitable, happy, etc. While much of the advice available for free is not rooted in solid evidence, one of the main scientific assets to understanding workplace improvement is behavioral science. There is a breadth of evidence, even entire academic disciplines, which suggest that insights from psychology in particular are directly correlated to improving internal and external relations and practices at work. This blogpost highlights some of the main direct and indirect influences of behavioral science at the workplace and highlight how many principles can easily be implemented to much success.

Many organizations rely on on-the-job training to equip employees with leadership skills. There are many advantages to on-the-job training including its convenience and low-cost. However, in offering this type of training, many organizations ignore science-based evidence when considering best approaches. This blog describes on-the-job training and compares the training with the approach at CQ Net - Management skills for everyone!, which relies on evidence to provide instruction to training participants. The blog argues that our evidence-based approach is more valid and reliable and provides you with the essential management skills that help boost your career and personal growth.

Bold decisions that drastically change what is taken for granted have always been traits of leaders that attract and inspire people. The rise of social media and other means of online communication such as blogs, online communities and intranets allow leaders to spread bold ideas and big plans easier than ever before to their target audience and the wider public. On the one hand, this tremendous speed of communication is a powerful lever to mobilize people and initiate change on a level and magnitude never seen before. On the other hand, change is always accompanied with unintended consequences that backfire, if not handled properly.

Soft skills also called people or management skills get increasingly important in our 21st knowledge economy. In contrast to many hard skills, management skills cannot be substituted by technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and search engines. This is reflected in an ever growing demand for online and face to face management training programs. As a result, hundreds of millions of Euros are invested in management training activities every year. However, only a small fraction of the training content is transfered back on the job (Griffin, 2011) or adds value to the training participants. Drawing and theory and science, we derive six criteria you should look for when selecting a good management training program.

Have you already completed your organization’s agile transformation? Where do you apply SCRUM in your organization? Agility and agile frameworks such as SCRUM are the new Holy Grail for private and public sector organizations. As a manager and professional you might wonder whether you should jump on the agility bandwagon, or whether it is just another management fad you can confidently ignore. We take a closer look at the scientific foundation of agility and one of the most popular agile frameworks called SCRUM in this blog post.

Many organizations are choosing online programs to provide their managers with the skills that are needed to win the race. Online training is efficient and less costly than traditional training and research has demonstrated that it can be effective (Sitzmann et al., 2006). At CQ Net, our goal is to provide management skills training to everyone. This blog contrasts our approach to a traditional (online) MBA program and discusses the advantages.

Management trainings are an important part of most corporate training programs. However, in a VUCA world, organizations are more and more starting to move from a management training to a management learning approach. We have a look at the shortcomings of traditional management learning and introduce a new approach of management learning that puts emphasis on knowledge quality (evidence), applicability in daily business (context) and adaptability (agility). We do this from a knowledge worker's point of view during an product introduction project.

Leadership skills are somehow seen as magic skills only relevant for a executives, senior managers and CEOs. We argue that this understanding of leadership is outdated and that leadership skills are important for every professional and knowledge worker. After that, we have a look at what leadership is all about and we discuss five reasons why you should start to build your leadership skills today.