The CGA Blog

Passionate, Ingenious, Sustainable, Enabling – meet our values and find out about yourself!

Thursday, October 29th, 2009 @ 7:14pm

We had new business cards printed a few weeks ago based on our values.  Being known for thinking outside the box our CEO, Christina, turned them into a mini-personality profile tool.  It is a bit of fun more than anything else but if you meet us in person ask us to give you the full on version of this personality profile!

Our values are very simple:

We have been using these cards at networking and business events over the last few weeks and we are already seeing some interesting trends appear.  So we wanted to expand our horizons and offer everyone the chance to meet our values online. So we have added an online version of our business cards to this website:

Meet our values – a bit of fun

If you would like to take part in some informal research please click on the link at the end of the values page once you have made your choices and let us know your job title.  In return we will send you more information on the theory behind the cards and share the informal findings once we have gathered enough information to generate a meaningful report!

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Mentoring Podcast 7 of 7 – Being a Role Model

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:07pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 7 – Being a Role Model

This is the final podcast in this series and covers the challenges of being a role model.  We hpoe you have enjoyed them as much as we have enjoyed making them!

A summary of the sections are:

Topic 1 – A leadership story

Topic 2 – Who or what is a role model

Topic 3 – Raising your standards

Topic 4 – Exercise for personal development

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Mentoring Podcast 6 of 7 – Discovering your Mentoring Style

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:06pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 6 – Discovering your Mentoring Style

This podcast covers understanding your mentoring style.

A summary of the sections are:

Topic 1 – What do you mean by mentoring style

Topic 2 – What is your mentoring style

Topic 3 – The potential for growth and problems

Topic 4 – Exercise for personal development

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Mentoring Podcast 5 of 7 – Giving Advice without Resistance

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:05pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 5 – Giving Advice without Resistance

This podcast covers giving advice without getting resistance and matches the content in your workbook that starts on page 32.

A summary of the sections are:

Topic 1 – Why do people resist advice

Topic 2 – The change cycle

Topic 3 – Tips for giving advice

Topic 4 – Exercise for personal development

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Mentoring Podcast 4 of 7 – Communicating through Questioning

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:04pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 4 – Communicating through Questioning

This podcast covers communicating through questioning and matches the content in your workbook that starts on page 26.

A summary of the sections are:

Topic 1 – Why use questions

Topic 2 – The six little men

Topic 3 – Probing questions

Topic 4 – Exersise in being curious

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Mentoring Podcast 3 of 7 – Building Rapport

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:03pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 3 – Building Rapport

This podcast covers basic principles of rapport and how to build rapport and matches the content in your workbook that starts on page 25.

A summary of the sections are:

Topic 1 – What is Rapport

Topic 2 – Matching and Mirroring

Topic 3 – Personality and Building Rapport

Topic 4 – Exersise in Building Rapport

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Mentoring Podcast 2 of 7 – Listening Skills for Mentors

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:01pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 2 – Listening Skills for Mentors

This podcast covers basic listening skills for mentors and matches the content in your workbook between pages 17 and 20.

A summary of the sections are:

Topic 1 – Active Listening

Topic 2 – 8 Levels of Active Listening

Topic 3 – Keeping the Conversation Going

Topic 4 – Listening Exercise

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Mentoring Podcast 1 of 7 – The Mentoring Life Cycle

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 @ 9:00pm

CGA & CYC Podcast 1 – The Mentoring Life Cycle

This podcast covers the mentoring life cycle and matches the content in your workbook between pages 10 and 15.

A summary of the sections are:

Stage 1 – Preparation

This stage is the pre-session work that all mentors need to do in order to mentally prepare themselves for being a mentor.

Stage 2 – Initiating

Stage 2 is about preparing for the first meeting and building a rapport with your mentee.

Stage 3 – Facilitation

Stage 3 is where the relationship between the mentee and the mentor develops as trust builds and objectives are identified, and problems are overcome.

Stage 4 – Closure

Stage 4 looks at what has been achieved and life after mentorship.

We hope you enjoy it!

These podcasts are Copyright CGA Management & North Yorkshire County Council / Connecting Youth Culture

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Transpromo – Operational Savings or Marketing Bonanza?

Friday, October 2nd, 2009 @ 1:28pm

The need to increase shareholder value and deliver performance improvements are constant drivers in the day of an Operations Director.

We’ve all heard of the phrase “you can’t have your cake and eat it” but this may be one of the rare occurrences when you can do just that.

Traditionally, delivering projects in the financial services sector has involved gaining buy in from multiple departments. Operations, Finance, Marketing and Technology departments may all be involved and each one has a different agenda.

So as an Operations Director, examining the business case for intelligent client communications, is the real ROI best provided by :-

• the ability to communicate to your clients in a more effective manner using the most appropriate channels to maximise the return from each client interaction?

Or

• Or the ability to reduce operational costs associated with client communications?

When you consider that banks have a regulatory requirement to keep their clients informed in a timely manner, for example when interest rates, terms and conditions or tax treatments change, the savings made possible by being able to incorporate this information on a transactional document compared to producing ad hoc mailings or including leaflets that don’t get read becomes clear.

Where it becomes more challenging is in meeting the audit and regulatory requirements of these organisations. Because Transpromo incorporates information from several data streams and departments, this creates additional challenges that need to be solved and in addition, what happens if you need to communicate time sensitive information and the client’s next statement isn’t due until the end of the month?

Transpromo certainly isn’t a direct replacement for all adhoc mail, however if it is implemented to it’s best advantage in an organisation, then maybe the most significant gain may be attributed to quantified operational savings rather than uplift predictions from the marketing department.

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Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) and Intelligent Client Communications.

Friday, October 2nd, 2009 @ 1:24pm

Here in the UK, Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) has been a central focus of the FSA’s retail strategy for a while now, with TCF principles incorporated into supervisory visits through ARROW since the beginning of this year. Now with the FSA pushing through the Banking and Payments Services (BPS) conduct regime and assuming regulation of the sector with effect from 1st November, now may be the time to ask how this is going to impact on your organisations communications strategy and what steps have you taken to embrace and embed TCF in client communications throughout your organisation.

The FSA believes the new regime will deliver real benefits to consumers through a set of principles and outcomes. For example :-

Principle 6 : (a firm must pay due regard to the interests of it’s customers and treat them fairly)

Outcome 3 : Clear and regular communication is aimed at ensuring that clients are provided with clear information and kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.

Financial institutions have regular communications going out to clients, from the welcome letter and ad hoc communications through to regular monthly statements. TCF provides an ideal opportunity to revisit your communications strategy and build a business case for moving to intelligent client communications.

Being able to communicate the latest updates to your clients ahead of the competition, or providing them with relevant information or marketing on transactional documents are all good business case reasons you may agree, whether it be for increasing client loyalty, retention or simple to increase response rates to marketing, however it also solves one of the biggest issues of TCF that organisations are grappling with. It’s not sufficient simply to implement treating customers fairly, you must be able to evidence and prove you are treating them fairly. Intelligent client communications allows you to do just this.

If you are involved in one of these projects, then why not give us a call and see how we can help you.