News - Cascade Consulting

Cascade has been accepted as members of the Association for Coaching

March 2010

Cascade have recently become members of the Association for Coaching (AC). The AC is an independant, non profit, leading body whose goal is to promote best practice and standards across the coaching industry. All clients should, of course, expect a high standard of practice from their coach. To ensure that this is achieved Cascade commit to operate in accordance with AC's Code of Ethics and Good Practice.

More details are to follow shortly.

Leadership and Resilience launch to focus on driving organisational improvement

August 2009

The social housing sector is no stranger to pressure in terms of increasing governance requirements, raising the bar on performance standards, achieving excellence and meeting our customers’ aspirations in terms of service delivery. In these times of even greater stress and demands on our business, our people become even more important to us in terms of delivering what’s required of us. Managers in particular need to be able to respond to the situations and challenges they face. Getting high performance with efficient and effective delivery out of staff teams isn’t about cracking the whip, but about being able to deploy flexible and appropriate leadership, demonstrating high personal awareness and emotional intelligence and having the mental toughness and resilience to stay focused, in control and committed. Whether it is preparing staff members for an inspection, delivering a bespoke leadership and management development programme, putting in place a performance improvement coaching programme or spotting and developing the talent that lies within your organisation, our techniques bring confidence and resourcefulness to your people.

After attending you will have a greater understanding of how to help your staff:
1. Create well formed achievable outcomes focused on performance, leadership and management.
2. Assess personal leadership styles, identify strengths and opportunities to develop flexibility and improve the likelihood of successful delivery.
3. Understand their personal drivers and inhibitors.
4. Eradicate limiting beliefs and attitudes.
5. Build positive mental states to achieve goals.
6. Create personal and professional action plans to bring success around their personal leadership style and resilience.

You will understand how your people can respond more effectively to today's pressures and to play their part more effectively and confidently by measuring and developing how they deal with control, challenge, commitment and confidence. The result will be staff members with:
An understanding of their own leadership style and how they can deploy this flexibly for increased performance and effectiveness.
Assessed strengths and weaknesses particularly in relation to their determination to deliver, engagement with teams and individuals.
An understanding of how and where they can improve their resilience and the likely factors that act as stressors for them.
Improved teams that can have significant and real positive influence.
Developed skills and behaviours through effective individual and group coaching and development delivered by your own people.

Please visit www.leadershipandresilience.org to find out more.

MiRo Behavioural Mode Assessment

May 2009

Cascade have recently become accredited Practitioners for MiRo and are pleased to be able to offer this pyschometric test alongside our other personal assessment measures. The MiRo Behavioural Mode Assessment is an easy to understand look into how we view the world and the way that this influences our motivations, fears, styles of communication and methods of leadership. Based on William Moulton Marston's ideas into human behaviours and linked to Carl Jung's personality types, the MiRo Behavioural Mode assessment can be used for self development, team building, recruitment and many more practical applications.

We are now able to offer our clients one of the most comprehensive and accessible reports available today. It will make sense no matter what psychometric assessments you may have done in the past and can be used for individual, leadership and team development alike. We find that it links very well to other measures and models in terms of enhancing individual growth, develoment, self awareness and emotional intelligence. MiRo is cost effective, quick and easy to administer so please contact us if you'd like to find out more about this, or any other our of our personal assessment tools and techniques.

Introducing ILM72 and MTQ48

March 2009

Cascade are pleased to announce that we are now licensed agents in the administration and deployment of two new questionnaires, in both in association with the Institute of Leadership and Management: ILM72 which measures leadership style and MTQ48 which measures mental toughness.

ILM 72 is the only and first leadership model that has been developed through examination of over 50 leading leadership models, across both academic and occupational spheres, in the UK, Europe and worldwide. The research showed that there are linkagesbetween all models and that all have some or all of their roots in one or more of the 6 leadership styles which ILM72 measures. These are measured on bi-polar scales and indicate an individual’s preferred style as there is no right of wrong on these 6 scales. The scales are: task versus person; flexible versus dogmatic; decentralised versus centralised; reward versus punishment; the means versus the end; and structured versus organic. In addition to these 6 leadership styles, the research identified a further 3 global scales on which higher scores indicate greater likelihood of success in leadership activity. These scales are determination to deliver, engaging with individual and engaging with team.

MTQ 48 measures mental toughness, the quality which determines in some part how people deal with challenge, stressors and pressure. There is a very strong link between Mental Toughness issues like Stress Management and Peak Performance Development and behaviour. These are all interrelated and MTQ48 provides a reliable and quick assessment of an individual's ability to withstand pressure in a range of environments. It measures mental toughness in terms of four core components - control, challenge, commitment and confidence.

Both questionnaires are simple and cost-effective to administer as they are run as online questionnaires which participants can access from their own PC at a time to suit them. They generate individual reports for each participant, as well as coaching and development suggestions and can be run on an annual basis, for example, to generate distance travelled reports to track progress. Running the questionnaires on an organisational basis generates invaluable information about organisational culture, the drive for improvement and performance management which can help identify strategies for change.