A Day In The Life Of...
BLAIRE PALMER, CEO
Tell Us More About Your Background?
Beofre moving to Dubai, I worked in sales for an advertising agency in London. My background is predominantly in Telesales.
Tell Us More About Biz-Group
Biz Group started two decades ago when I first came to Dubai. We are a training and development company, predominantly like your magazine. We also have a team building division and a strategy division that helps small businesses.
Everything we do is about improving performance. For example, how do we improve the performance of teams, the performance of people and the performance of businesses?
What Made You Originally Set Up A Training Business In Dubai?
I originally came here two decades ago to launch a product for a client from the training industry and just fell in love with Dubai in early 1992. Dubai was entrepreneurial, optimistic and sunny. Every time I landed back in the UK it wasn't sunny and the 90's was quite a depressing time for UK business.
So, I looked at an opportunity to start a new business. I didn’t have enough funds to start an advertising agency, so I started a training company which grew from an initial idea and a passion, to what you see today, with 46 people in the company and a very passionate team helping companies improve performance.
How Do You Help Companies?
From a training and development perspective, traditionally we work with an organizationt o find out what their business objectives are, what strategic issues they want to improve and how we can provide training and development solutions tailor made for them, or alternatively implement some of the international programs we have that help get companies from A to B. We also help individuals, whether it’s leaders, front line customer service employees or the general population through professional development. We help companies improve their business results.
Take Us Through A Typical Day As CEO?
Having just read Arianna Huffington’s new book 'Thrive', what I shouldn’t be doing first thing in the morning is checking my iphone to find out what emails have come in overnight from our overseas partners, but I’m still doing that.
Then my day is pretty much mapped out intensively, sometimes I think I’m like a doctor, my PA manages to fill in appointments back to back. If im not in the office, I am in a training room first thing in the morning .
So, a typical day of mine may start with introducing a new concept, like multipliers for senior leaders, followed by running an 8 hour workshop.
But. I don’t think there really is a typical day in my diary, I could either be in the office supporting the team, I could be delivering business keynotes internationally or even delivering a training
30 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST SEPT 2014
THAT PEOPLE THING
Tell Us More About Your Background?
I’m trained as a broadcast journalist. I always wanted to be a performer – an actor or a singer – but worried about the job security. Going in to broadcasting seemed like a safer version of that aspiration. Having said that, I now speak to audiences all over the world about how leadership is changing, so I got my wish to be on the stage after all.
What Made You Get Into Training?
When I was a Producer at the BBC we interviewed the high profile American coach, Laura Berman Fortgang, and featured one of the UK's leading coaches, Ginny Baillie. Meeting them both inspired me to become an executive coach. After a couple of years I began to feel that, while coaching 1-2-1 has benefits, working in a vacuum wasn’t always helpful for coachees. So I started working with teams and then developing leadership programmes for groups.
The dynamism of a group of leaders together can’t be beaten. You create a gang of “turned on” people who can really bring about change. It seems a terrible waste to me that talented people can be turned off the work they do by their employer. My passion for journalism was zapped by my experiences working in the industry. It’s my mission now to help companies create environments where people and their ideas can thrive. It’s great for employees but it’s also great for the business because they capitalise on the latent talent of their people.
What Current Training Trends Do You See?
The big problems with traditional training are that:
1. It is theoretical and the connection between the theory and how to apply it in the current, everyday environment is not clear.
2. There are too many places for delegates to hide. You can go on a training course without the experience affecting you in any way.
3. There is too much emphasis on handouts, slides and specific “take aways” as if the main benefit is the imparting of information from the teacher to the student. If you want to learn some models, read a book!
Forward-thinking training focuses on the delegates’ real world and how to apply theory and experiences the delegates already have. A coaching, challenging, provocative approach is much better here than a teaching approach. The best consultancies treat every delegate as an individual with personal development needs. In our business, we don’t believe that you can reach 90% of delegates or 80% of delegates or 50% of delegates. We believe you can reach them all. As we say: “‘we never leave a man behind”. But you might have to invest time, energy and emotional commitment to achieve that.
And we rarely produce a handout! What happens to handouts? Nothing. When you go to a movie they don’t give you a handout at the end so you remember the film. You remember it because it affected you. The same is true of the best training.
48 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE FEB 2015