Positively transform and drive sustainable improvements in performance and results

It’s 29 years yesterday since I took over the running of Sewells. We’ve learned a lot about how to help our clients to dramatically improve their business performance over that time. Probably the biggest thing we’ve learned is that success in business isn’t about doing extraordinary things …. it is about doing the simple things extraordinarily well. The “simple things” are those which still

When we, at Sewells, as part of our world renowned business improvement programmes ask senior leaders what changes they’d like to see as outcomes, it’s often, “for our managers to be more accountable and responsible for their results”. There is a huge problem with linking those two things together … because, philosophically and practically, they are worlds apart.    

Our 55 years’ experience in helping businesses improve show that many leaders seem to spend a lot of time wishing. They wish they were slimmer and fitter, richer and smarter. They wish their businesses were more successful, their teams more productive, their customers more loyal. But what would it be like if they could change their wishes to belief, total

A recent Gallup poll of more than one million workers concluded that the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs is a bad boss, or immediate supervisor. We’ve learned that 75% of workers who voluntarily leave their jobs do so because of their bosses and not the position, the role itself or the company. Never mind how good, well paid,

Every workplace team has some degree of dysfunction. But the dysfunctions in any team, in any form and to any degree – whether it’s having a blame culture, a lack of trust, or paying lip service to landing the new changes that will improve performance – come at a cost. At its best, it could be keeping organisations from exceeding

If strategy is identifying how to achieve/exceed objectives, implementation is all about making it happen. It’s the follow through. Implementation is where the treasure lies – and it’s the biggest gap in any business improvement programme. The primary elements of successful companies are: Clear goals for everybody within the company that deliver the general strategy A method of measuring development

Are you getting the business results you hoped for in 2019?  Are you “future-proofing” your business with the improvements you’re making? The best definition of insanity we’ve ever come across is doing the same old things over and over again, hoping for different results. If what you’re doing to achieve your goals isn’t working, a new, dynamic, tried and tested

How many so called “leaders” do we know / have we known who:-   Come down on people like a ton of bricks if they don’t keep regular office hours … and then announce they’ll be “working from home for the next two days”? Freeze salaries and make redundancies and then take delivery of a swanky new company car or

We invest a lot of our time and energy into our work and part of the return on that investment is the benefit of being led by someone we respect and admire – someone we can look up to. It doesn’t always work that way. Far too many of us end up working for NTLs (Non Trustworthy Leaders). NTLs can, and do,