Grant Stanley Consulting

10 Reasons Why your Boss shouldn’t be Your Friend Is it ever OK for a manager to be friends with their employees? Believe me, this isn’t just a question brand new manager’s struggle with (and most of them do). It’s an issue a lot of experienced managers are questioned about as well, and many of them don’t think it’s a problem at all. The issue of “buddy to boss” might not be as black and white as you might think. Conventional management and HR 101 wisdom would tell you it’s absolutely not OK. In fact, some companies might even try to outlaw it through “cronyism” policies. However, in the real world of work, emotions and relationships can’t be governed by policy. Workplace relationships are can be extremely tricky, just as personal or family relationships can be. Managers are not robots – they have feelings and emotions. Sometimes you can’t help but like one employee more than another. Sometimes workplace romances blossom between managers and employees (that’s a whol...

Customer Service in 2015   As 2014 wound down, I took the time to pause, and look ahead to what top customer service trends will surface in 2015 and beyond. Good service — whether it's to answer a customer's question prior to purchase, or help a customer resolve an issue post-purchase should be pain-free, proactive at a minimum and pre-emptive at best, deeply personalised, and delivered with maximum productivity. Here are 6 top trends - out of a total of 10 - that I am keeping my eye on! Trend 1: Customers Embrace Emerging Channels to Reduce Friction. In a recent survey, we found that web self-service was the most widely used communication channel for customer service, surpassing use of the voice channel for the first time. In 2015, I predict that customers will continue to demand effortless interactions over web and mobile self-service channels. They will also explore new communication channels such as video chat with screen sharing and annotation. Trend ...

1)   Learn how to Delegate and do more of it. There are so many things to do when you're running a business, it's easy to delude ourselves that we need to do all of them. Then we wonder why we're so tired and frazzled and have no time to do anything else!  Determine your own Return On Investment, and decide to let someone else do some of the tasks for a change. Delegation is the key to a healthy work-life balance. 2) Promote your business regularly and consistently. Too often the task of promoting a business slips to the bottom of the to-do list in the press of urgent tasks. If you want to attract new customers, you have to make promotion a priority. Make a New Year's resolution to hire a marketing expert, or take the time to create a Marketing Plan on your own and follow through. Try some Low-Cost ways to promote your business to get started. 3) Make business planning a weekly event. Planning is vital if you want a healthy, growing business....

A powerful way to develop creative solutions is with storytelling.  Today companies are looking for ways to solve problems using creative processes. Creative storytelling offers significant benefits to every company. This process is not only much more rewarding for everyone involved , it actually produces more innovative and longer lasting results.   Here are just a few of the reasons why storytelling can help your company to develop collaborative solutions that deliver a genuine return on investment. Creativity and Ideas Generation Creative thinking in business yields measurable results. A culture of creativity within an organisation fosters idea generation and nurtures innovation. A co-creation process involves more people, which in turn generates more ideas. These people can include employees, customers and the wider community. Ideas that are developed within this group inform the story behind your business and your brand. Make use of the experiences of these pe...

After many months of procrastination, we finally committed the time and resources into finalising our website.  Whilst it is not spectacular, it is functional and contains FREE material for anyone to download and use. CSM Consultants are committed to providing a cost effective service that focuses on Inspiring and Enabling Business owners and employees to achieve new heights. We are your company's hindsight and our opinions can become your foresight! http://www.csmconsultants.co.uk