A helping hand with assessment for learning
If you’ve read our news item: How BlueKit Nurture New and Existing Relationships, you’ll know that we allocate some of our time to reaching out to others to explore collaborative opportunities.
Professional development is largely exclusive to big organisations, yet smaller businesses and organisations yearn for that too. Forget the bureaucratic paperwork that keeps the human resources department on the winning side of employee disputes, we’re talking about the genuine desire to explore your art, generate fresh ideas and discover new angles.
We’re also talking about a real opportunity to appraise your own work; even schools encourage students to consider the, WWWs: What went well? and EBIs: Even Better If.
We generate business plans and operating strategies often as we go, responding to what we’ve learnt along the way, or the new opportunities that arise unexpectedly. And indeed, this is indicative of the real, hands-on life-experience that can’t be found in the classroom alone.
Despite this organic development that we insist requires the skill of the ring: the quick reactions, the ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving, the first strike and resilient stamina till the very last; we all know that the analysis of our opponent’s game, the mapping of its foot-work, and study of its specs, will give us much more of a sporting chance.
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Silent weaknesses and sharpest strengths
It’s challenging to find real mentorship and unbiased appraisal of your plans. Many find themselves paying for this kind of service, whether it’s the employ of a professional mentor, or the provision of a consultancy service, and these are often invaluable investments: the outside looking in will always reveal the silent weaknesses and sharpest strengths.
But, if the finance just isn’t available to invest in this kind of support, there are other creative ways of developing the right kind of mutual relationships that can help you, and help you help others.
KingstonBusinessSchoolLogoWe were recently able to appraise not just ourselves, but our business. With the help of Anca Mandruleanu, Business Advisor at Enterprise Europe Network, we engaged with Dr Serhiy Kovela, who leads a Management Consultancy module: a part of Kingston Business School’s flagship MBA programme. As a business, we supplied a real-life case for Kingston MBA students to practice their management consultancy skills, whilst Dr Kovela facilitated the engagement from the academic side. What we received, was a very realistic business consultancy service, focused on a particular developmental aspect of our business.
Dr Serhiy Kovela
Dr Serhiy Kovela
Our experience was fantastic. This project enabled us to build in valuable time to explicitly communicate our plans and methodologies, and critically assess our business strategies.
Our consulting team of three executive MBA students used their experience and academic understanding to review, evaluate and deliver a proposal comprised of recommendations and deliverables designed to strategically support our objectives. The consulting team prepared a comprehensive report and presentation to convey their findings with achievable, measurable and time-related targets.
We found we were able to extract very real implications and engage in careful deliberation, enhanced by the views and assessment of those outside of our organisation.
We remain deeply grateful for the relationships that we have formed with both the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) and Kingston Business School, and respectively, with both Anca Mandruleanu and Dr Serhiy Kovela.
We’d also like to give a big thanks to Justine Finance-Elzokm, Events & Marketing Manager at Newable Innovation, who’s helped bear the fruit of this collaboration.
You can read more about our engagement with the EEN and Newable Innovation in our Case Study, available in Newable’s resources
It is a very real delight to continue working with each other, as together we strive for opportunities and achievements that propel us all.
This is the sentiment we want to convey: we encourage everybody to reach out!
“Many hands make light work.” phrase attributed to John Heywood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Heywood