Recommended reading: Mentoring skills and identifying toxic work cultures

The Connecter Manager

By Jaime Roca and Sari Wilde

Some leaders build exceptional talent and others don’t. That’s the reality that Jaime Roca and Sari Wilde, from research firm Gartner, explore in their new book, which delves into how managers need to learn how to work smarter and not harder.

The text draws on a global study that identified four distinct types of manager. However, one consistently performs far better than the rest and it wasn’t the one they were expecting.

Despite the general consensus, the authors suggest providing constant coaching to employees can actually be detrimental to their independent development and that connecting them to other members of the team or organisation is more beneficial.

Are you enabling a toxic work culture without realising it?

By Celia Swanson

In this article for the Harvard Business Review, Celia Swanson, who was the first female senior executive vice-president at Walmart, offers an open and transparent real-life account of how she was totally unaware she had enabled a toxic working culture. By speaking persoally, she hopes to help other businesses leaders avoid a similar situation.

She explains how this experienced drove her to develop several strategies to help her and her team identify how they could work together to prevent toxic cultures from taking hold.

Are you enabling a toxic culture without realising it?

Why last click doesn’t fit your display campaigns

By Goncalo Trindade

There’s no doubt numbers can be deceiving but often we get caught dwelling on them and it’s tricky for marketers to find the right way to measure how successful their strategies are.

Goncalo Trindade from Dunnhumby explains that it’s never too late to “cut through the noise” and connect with consumers while still achieving efficient business results. He acknowledges that by relying on the ‘last click’, marketers risk disregarding every action that came before. In this blog post, he argues why ‘last click’ is never the way to go and why it’s something marketers should avoid.

Why last click doesn’t fit your display campaigns

Mentoring: How can I help?

By Marco Bertozzi

Looking to hone your mentoring skills? Marco Bertozzi’s latest blog post is here to help. Bertozzi, European vice-president of multi-market sales at Spotify, has been striving to do more with less time but only doing things he enjoys that add value.

He has been exploring mentoring, but the more specific, shorter-session type that he believes could really help someone get a job. “[I] feel like we lack enough mentoring solutions for people in our industry,” he says on Twitter.

Bertozzi concludes the post by listing a collection of websites where people can go to learn more about some useful mentoring programmes.

Mentoring: How can I help?