They explore what can be done to help and support managers in the 21st century as well as how management development and training initiatives can address specific skill-gaps.

They also discuss what direction business education will move in over the next. Will MBAs remain as popular as they are today, or are they losing their relevance as the workplace changes?

Ruth joined the Institute from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, where she was also chief executive. She previously served as chief executive of Investors in People UK, HR Director for the NSPCC and a business development consultant with Coopers and Lybrand. She is a FCIPD and an OBE.

As Wayne finds out this week, whatever else they do, the most fatal mistake an organization can make is simply to try to ignore what people are saying about them online.

Wayne talks to new media expert, John Havens, who is VP of business development at BlogTalkRadio and co-author, with Shel Holtz, of Tactical Transparency, which explains what corporate transparency really means in the Web 2.0 world.

Wayne and John discuss the business rationale for transparency and explore the risks inherent in maintaining a non-transparent relationship with constituent audiences.

The explore how organizations can effectively communicate transparency and hw they ought to engage with boggers even when they are hostile and negative.

As John points out, whatever some executives might think, bloggers didn’t invent disgruntled customers. Moreover, responding to them with silence is just saying publicly that you don’t care about your customers and that they’re not worthy of any of your time.

Max works as a strategic adviser for four of the five most admired companies in the world and is a well-known speaker on subjects including innovation, engagement, human potential, customer experience, marketing, team building, and competitive advantage.

His latest book, The Truth about Innovation, offers the guidance managers need to overcome the innovation-related problems that they all face and at the same time improve their managerial effectiveness.

They talk about why it can take so long for a new manger to make a difference in an organization, why just changing things is not necessarily guaranteed to deliver progress and how organizations can switch from inertia into “innovation mode”.

They discuss what management development is – or ought to be- and what role business schools can play in it. In particular, they explore the vexed question of whether leadership be taught - and if so, how?

As Wayne finds out in this week’s Working Week podcast, in a climate where business leaders are increasingly concerned with the people elements of their businesses and differentiation, personal branding is becoming increasingly important.

Wayne is joined from the UK by Lesley Everett, an international authority on personal branding, conference and keynote speaker, author and columnist.

Lesley Everett is also the author of Walking TALL – key steps to total image impact. An executive impact coach, she helps individuals to increase their gravitas in the workplace with a clear and congruent personal brand.

As she tells Wayne, in the new world of work, your reputation, or personal brand, is the currency that sets you apart. But they key to having a positive personal brand isn’t image – it’s authenticity. While image is important in making a positive impact, it is meaningless without substance to back it up.

So while your brand is an effective means of increasing executive presence, confidence, personal impact and motivation, it is also the way that you communicate to your colleagues - and the world - exactly what you stand for.

After years of downsizing, outsourcing and corporate greed gone wild, today’s workers simply don’t believe that their employers value them. And as new generations enter the workplace, this belief is only getting stronger.

As she says in her book, “after many decades of being fat, dumb, and happy, American businesses and American workers have been forced into a change. In a relatively short time, fat has morphed into thin and happy into frightened. Prolonged fear does not bode well for future success.”

It follows, Judith argues, that employee’s perceptions and feelings have a direct impact on their productivity, leading to the state of affairs in the U.S. where a huge proportion of workers are either actively looking for new jobs or going through the motions at their current jobs.

These vulnerable and resentful feelings amount to a wholesale “psychological recession” which is taking a real a toll on organizations’ bottom line. And unless organizations face up to the problem, it is only going to get worse.

Judith is a writer, speaker and management consultant whose clients have included IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson. Prior to forming her consulting business in 1983, she was a professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan. She also served as a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.

But what does the situation look like from an Indian perspective? That’s the theme for this week’s Working Week Podcast, in which Wayne if joined from India by Gautam Ghosh.

Gautam is based in Hyderabad, where he is a Senior Consultant at Tvarita Consulting as well as a prolific blogger.

As far as the talent crisis goes, Gautam explains that the problem in India is not that there is any shortage of applicants – precisely the opposite – but that the “employability factor” of graduates and young people is very low.

In particular, he says, organisations find huge problems with levels of communication skills. For example, highly-qualified software engineers may be great at writing code, but their lack of client-facing skills means that they face big problems at middle-manager and project-manager levels.

One reason for this is that Indian employers still place far too much emphasis on paper qualification and not enough on aptitude, ending up paying the price as a result through the need for extensive on-the-job training to boost certain basic skills.

And what of the economic climate? While the outsourcing and IT services sector is feeling the fallout from the downturn in Europe and the US, the domestic sector is still booming. In fact there seems little prospect of any sustained slow-down in India’s economic boom.

None of which is meant to downplay the very real sense of worry and foreboding that many of us are feeling – an atmosphere which poses very real challenges to leaders and managers.

So what can mangers do in the current climate to keep their people positive and inspired? According to Dan, the key is to communicate a vision, mission and strategy and – critically – to listen. If there are problems, ask people how they think the organisation should get past them and move ahead. In other words, involve everybody in what the business is supposed to be doing rather than dwelling on what ‘might be’.

Remember too, as Dan explained in a recent column on management-Issues.com, that the unsteady times we’re experiencing now are no worse than any of our previous unsteady times - and companies that take risks during unstable times often come out ahead later on.

The same goes for individuals. Sitting in a corner during a slow or erratic economy and waiting for things to get better is probably not the best thing to. Sure you might not hear from as many critics, but your chances for future success are greatly diminished, too.

The bottom line, Dan stresses, is that we still have choices. An unstable economy may seem like a good time to hunker down and ride out the storm, but is that really the best choice for the long term? Ask yourself, would taking a few calculated risks now pay huge dividends down the road?

As Myra explains in her book
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: A Harvard Psychologist’s Guide to Becoming a Superstar, high-achievers have the same complex array of talents and weaknesses that everyone else has. But what sets them apart is that they know how to capitalize on their talents and minimize the potentially adverse effects of their weaknesses.

On top of this, they have a passionate commitment to their goals while understanding the process by which you build success. They know the right steps to take, and they are aware that no one achieves great success alone or overnight..

But as she also tells Wayne, being a superstar doesn’t necessarily mean making it big in business, sport or entertainment. It means excelling in whatever it is that you feel passionate about and realizing your own potential, in whatever field that may be.

Wayne is joined by The Boss Whisperer™” and author of Taming The Abrasive Manager: How To End Unnecessary Roughness In The Workplace, Dr Laura Crawshaw, whose mission is to help abrasive bosses to rein in their aggressive workplace behaviors.

With most of us likely to work for someone who is blind to the harm caused by his or her management style, Laura explains why abrasive managers resort to interpersonal aggression with coworkers, why they deny their destructive impact and what individuals and organizations can do to effectively get these bosses to back off and behave in a civilized manner.

As she also tells Wayne, abrasive bosses tend to be blind to the wounds they inflict because they lack the ability to read other’s emotions. But, she insists, they can be reined in and their behavior can be modified.

Born in New Zealand, de Valk moved to the UK ten years ago, prior to which she was Chief Executive of New Zealand’s Institute of Management in Auckland for four years.

Despite all the time and money organisation spend on recruiting them, half of graduates leave the firms that recruited them within two years. As Penny argues, this is partly because organisations are over-selling themselves and partly because they fail to provide the sort of learning opportunities, communication and feedback that Gen Y demands.

They also discuss how cultural differences impact management . Is it true, Wayne wonders, that UK managers are the worst in the world, as a raft of research has suggested. And if so, why?

As a piece on Management Issues observed last week, it’s normally assumed today that switching jobs is the best way to fast-track your salary. But now new research has suggested that hopping jobs too often can actually end up damaging your pay prospects.

As Rowan observes, for people of his generation (the 40-somethings), it was normal to stay in a job for many years – even for the majority of a career. But now, it isn’t uncommon to come across candidates who have had five or more roles in the same number of years.

So what is the reason for this huge increase in turnover? Have many people job-hop because they’re a square peg in a round hole and how many because they were pushed? And what does this mean for the careers in the long term?

But equally, what should recruiters do when they come across a serial job-hopper – and how can employers reduce their involuntary turn-over rate?

That’s the staring point for Wayne’s conversation this week with Judith E. Glaser, author of Creating We and The DNA of Leadership and CEO of Benchmark Communications.

As Judith explains, work can quickly become a depressing parallel dimension when aspirations are not met – aspirations that are bigger than the box a job forces you into. And with the human brain spending 75 per cent of its time in a dream state – thinking about the future and planning next steps - meeting aspirations is a critical if organizations ever hope to inspire creativity, innovation and engagement in their people.

What’s more, a sense of happiness and optimism works wonders for the body, mind and spirit. So understanding this – and understanding how to create environments where employees bring out the best in one another - is vital for the evolution of any business.

Larraine is the cofounder of The Lared Group, an international management consulting firm specializing in business relationships. She also teaches executive education at The California Institute of Technology, (Caltech), where she has presented a two day program on ‘Global Alliances’ for the past 23 years.

Her latest book, Measuring the Value of Partnering, examines how to accurately measure an alliance and why it is important.

With all the factors involved - productivity, decision making, team performance, the number of new customers, and damage control - getting a precise measurement can be a complex and daunting task. Knowing which measurement to use, and at what stage of the alliance life cycle, is critical.

Wayne is joined by Richard Buck, CEO of Eluma, a technology company which leverages the best aspects of social networking in order to provide users with the ability to collaborate with their most trusted source of information - their peers.

As Richard explains, Web 2.0 is all about user contribution. Where Web 1.0 was all about pushing content out to an audience, Web 2.0 is all about that audience creating its own content and participating with others.

Why does it matter? Because tools that help people collaborate and share information will have huge commercial benefits. But at the same time, they challenge the way that organisations operate both internally and externally.

The continuing male domination at top of organisations and the fact that so few women climb to the top of the career ladder is the subject of a new book, Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergence of our next Economic Revolution, by Alison Maitland and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox.

Alison Maitland is a business writer and was a Financial Times journalist for 20 years. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, named as one of the top 40 women leading change in France, is a Paris-based management consultant who runs 20-First, a consultancy that helps organizations to become gender-bilingual. She also founded the European Professional Women’s Network more than a decade ago.

They join Wayne for this week’s Working Week to explain the compelling economic arguments for changing this state of affairs. As they tell Wayne, it isn’t a problem that just affects women. It’s a problem for the whole economy, particularly as organizations struggle to respond to the challenge of an ageing workforce and the demands of the next generation of knowledge workers.

Companies that really understand what motivates women in the workplace and the marketplace understand that men and women are not the same – and so they can’t be treated the same. Just as a company opening a satellite in a foreign country needs to learn its language and culture if it is to be successful, so organizations need to understand the different language, culture and attitudes of women.

Those employers who do optimize women’s talents will boost the bottom line – although taking action to achieve this will require sustained courage and conviction from today’s corporate leaders.

As a former human resources director, Chris has some strong opinions about the bad press that HR departments seem to receive.

One of the problems for HR departments, Chris says, is that it is so hard to measure the benefits of much of what HR does.

But business IS people – in fact the only difference between many organisations – their key competitive advantage – is the people they employ, which includes their CEO.

But while people ought to be kept at the top of a company’s agenda, the fact is that many of those who run large organisations simply aren’t turned on by “people issues”. Why? Because they usually got to the top thanks to their specialist business, technical or financial skills, not because of their people skills.

dChris’ advice to HR professionals is to ensure that they make the ‘process’ side of their role as efficient and lean as possible. Then they can address the more intangible aspects of HR such as managing performance and developing talent.

Invincibelle is an organization that seeks to empower women to succeed in a multicultural world by creating a safe online community for women online and also organizing offline events.

Prior to founding Invincibelle, Deepika worked in Planning an Marketing positions in Fortune 500 companies. While she was there, she served on the boards of various professional organizations like NSHMBA (National society of Hispanic MBAs) and WIN (Women in Intel).

Deepika is currently working on her first book codenamed “Invincibelle Insights” that is based on blend of her experiences and more than 50 interviews of distinguished Invincibelle Guests - highly accomplished women who have succeeded in a multicultural world.

To help companies do just that, Best Companies (who also compile the Sunday Times “Best Companies to Work For” list) launched its own accreditation scheme in 2006.

The accreditation acknowledges excellence in the workplace and focuses on workplace engagement as an integral component of an organisation`s success, growth, and the bottom line.

Wayne gets the low-down from Jonathan on what organisations need to be thinking about if they are series about how they retain and motivate their people

The Accreditation developed by Best Companies is based on a star rating system where one star is first class, two stars are outstanding, and three stars are extraordinary. Organisational successes have been defined using data from the 2008 Best Companies to Work For survey which involved surveying over 140,000 employees from 558 companies.

The Best Companies survey is designed to measure employee engagement and uses 66 questions to gain a comprehensive view of employee engagement across eight factors. Every company that goes for Best Companies Accreditation is given a Best Companies Index score (BCI). This score (on a scale of 1 to 1000) is defined from employees’ responses to the sixteen key questions within the Best Companies survey. ‘Star Status’ is determined by the ‘BCI’ score and the specific cut-off points for One, Two, and Three Star Accreditation remain constant year on year.

Amid economic uncertainty and with fear of rising business costs, inflation and household debt, Jo argues that managers need to be more empowering – encouraging everybody in the organization to contribute – which means being willing to open their minds and innovate.

Bob is Bob Selden is head of the Australian National Learning Institute and author of a new book, What To Do When You Become The Boss.

As we all become increasingly concerned about the disengagement gap, Bob argues that many organisations are suffering from a widely-held fallacy that paying people more salary and perks will gain their loyalty, when all it does is gain is their compliance.

But equally, despite the obvious impact an ineffective manager has on an organisation’s profitability, many still pay little attention to training and supporting supervisors and managers, particularly in their first managerial role.

On the Working Week this week, Wayne talks to Paolo Moscuzza, an occupational psychologist and a Principal Consultant with the Business Psychology practice of UK-based ER Consultants, about the practical steps that organisations and recruiters can take to ensure that candidates chose them rather than someone else.

Among the things that employers often get wrong, Moscuzza says, are dragging the recruitment process out far too long – then wondering why a candidate has gone elsewhere – and burning their bridges by treating candidates as if they are doing them a huge favour by considering them at all.

And that’s before we even get onto the issue of retention – by which we mean rather more than sending your staff on the occasional training course in the name of “professional development”.

So if you feel your recruitment process is less effective than it might be and you retention stats could do with a boost, take 10 minutes out of your working week to listen to ours.

Marshall’s next book, Passing the Baton, will examine the problem of succession planning and the challenges of letting go and hading over the reins to new people.

As a recent article on Management-Issues highlighted, this is an issue that is rapidly becoming critical, with fully three-quarters of C-Suite executives in the U.S. - regardless of the size of their organization, location or industry - now viewing succession planning as their most significant challenge for the future.

But as Marshall explains, it isn’t just a problem for the U.S. Europe and Japan, with a more rapidly ageing force and fewer young people to replace them, face an even greater challenge.

And while demographics are less of an issue for developing economies such as India and China, the problem here is that there are more opportunities than qualified people to meet them.

Meanwhile, at the human level, Marshall and Wayne discuss the host of emotional and personal issues surrounding succession planning which makes so many incumbents disinclined to let go.

Bob is also co-author, with John David Mann, of a new book, The Go-Giver, a modern-day parable underlining the fact that generosity of spirit and giving more than you get can produce some very positive business results.

Bob discusses with Wayne how providing more in value than you take in financial compensation is the key to personal and career success and how good management can help instil this attitude in employees.

These are just some of the questions Wayne chews over with his guest this week, author Jim Kouzes.

Jim is the coauthor with Barry Posner of the landmark book, The Leadership Challenge, now in its fourth edition with over one million copies sold. He’s also an executive fellow, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University.

We have known for more than 60 years that more inclusive and empowering types of leadership behaviour produces higher performance, yet as Jim bemoans, we still see bosses ignoring this.

So who is to blame? Certainly the business schools and training organisations need to work harder to bang home the message that certain types of behaviour produces higher performance, particularly since there is nothing complicated about it.

Essentially, Jim argues, there are four critical things to remember about leadership.

1. Honesty and integrity are the most important traits of a good leader.
2. The most effective leaders are forward-looking. They have a vision of the future.
3. The most effective leaders are team players. Tough-guy leaders may be effective in certain situations, but the evidence is that long-term, this is not effective
4. Enthusiasm is infectious. Leaders who are up-beat, energetic, optimistic and engaging get more out of those around them.

With a shrinking talent pool from which to pluck the leaders of tomorrow, Jim stresses that developing future leaders is a matter of rigorous training and development, not a question of finding the rare individuals with innate gifts.

And here’s a final thought. In order to become an expert at anything, research suggests that you need to practice at least 5,000 hours (over the course of 10 years.

That’s two hours a day – with time off for weekends – every day, for 10 years.

So If we want managers who are experts at what they do, we need to be developing them and helping them throughout their careers. Not just for an hour or two here and there.

Myra is the author of Follow the Yellow Brick Road: A Harvard Psychologist’s Guide to Becoming a Superstar, a book based on her research into how over 60 well-known people became superstars.

She is also CEO of Work Intelligence, Inc, which uses the latest scientific knowledge of human behavior to help businesses maximize employee and organizational performance and Behavior Scientific, a boutique firm dedicated to helping companies identify, hire and develop superstars.

Myra and Wayne explore the link between stress and burnout, and our growing reliance – or should we say “addiction” - on computers and communications technology.

Why do many of us send emails when a phone call or face-to-face conversation (remember those?) would do the job far better? Why have such socialable animals come to develop such an obsession with such anti-social tools? And what is this addiction is doing to the way we all react in the workplace?

With research published earlier this month confirming that most managers are deeply sceptical about the constant stream of projects, ideas and initiatives coming down from on high – believing most of them to be a complete waste of time – Charles and Wayne explore the whole phenomenon of “initiative fatigue”.

Why is it that organisations so rarely seem able to empower their people to finish what they started? And if you do feel you’re suffering from “death by initiative”, what can you do about it?

Kevin is the author of Remarkable Leadership and Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, a learning consulting company that provides a wide range of services, including training delivery and design, facilitation, performance coaching, organizational consulting and speaking services.

He tells Wayne that while retention seems to be a problem across the globe, the solution is essentially very simple: measure what motivates people to stay and address those issues.

And as a raft of research has shown, it isn’t money that persuades people to stay, it’s having quality managers, providing opportunities for accomplishment and recognising individual contributions - two of which don’t cost organisations anything.

That’s the starting point for this week’s Working Week, in which Wayne talks to Michelle Brailsford, a founding partner at at Jupiter Consulting Group, a boutique learning & development consultancy dedicated to adding life back into work.

As Michelle explains, the sort of skills associated with female right brain thinking - intuition, creativity and the ability to collaborate - are becoming as important in the business world as the traditional left brain, rational approaches usually adopted by their male colleagues.

And as women becoming more important in the global marketplace not just as workers, but also as consumers, entrepreneurs, managers and investors, this process of feminisation will only accelerate.

Michelle has also written a new piece for Management-Issues that should be required reading for any women hoping to climb the career ladder - The rules of the game for corporate women.

As she explains to Wayne, many women struggle with playing the corporate game because they have never been taught the rules. Yet they possess all the skills they need to succeed in the political arena and make a real impact at the top of their organizations without having to become a man in a skirt.

If the burden of electronic communication sometimes becomes just too much, you need to listen to the Working Week. Because this week, Wayne talks to Dr Monica Seeley, co-author of ‘Managing in the Email Office’ and an expert on email best practice and efficiency.

A Visiting Fellow at Imperial College’s Management School, Monica has conducted several research studies, including looking at gender differences in the use of electronic communications and the use of collaborative working tools.

She is also founder of Mesmo Consultancy, which helps organisations educate users to manage and use email more effectively to improve their business productivity.

And improve it they must, because as Monica tells Wayne, our addiction to our inboxes – plus the sheer number of unnecessary emails we are all sent - means that we are each wasting between seven and 21 productive days a year.

Listen on to find out how to regain control of the email monster and how to give yourself back some time to think, rather than click.