Hi and welcome to Cultivated Management.
My name is Rob Lambert and I help managers release agility in their organisation, become effective AND liked and balance the pillars of their life.
To become a better manager means you need to become a better person.
That’s where the name Cultivated Management comes from – to Cultivate ourselves as managers. To tend to our skills. To nurture our effectiveness.
TO CULTIVATE
“To improve by training or education. To tend. To nurture. To grow”
Our goal is to become the most trusted, reliable and entertaining resource for managers who want to release agility, become effective and lead a life they can look back on with great pride.
Weekly Newsletter
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Books and Free Resources
You can find books I’ve written plus some free resources here. They’re some pretty cool stuff in there – and I’m adding to it a lot.
You can also find books I’ve read and would recommend to managers here.
The Cultivated Management Philosophy
There are three core parts to being a Cultivated Manager – at least according to me.
1 – Pillars of Life
The first step is to take care of yourself by building on the Pillars of Life and ensuring you are focussing on what’s important to you in life. Life is short – don’t fill it with someone else’s dreams, goals and activities. It’s yours to live. Focus on the right things, at the right time for your right season of life. You should spend time working on:
- Your education
- Your health
- Your family
- Your finances and money
- Your impact on society at work and the wider society
- Your effectiveness
If you do this, you’ll have more to offer your people. You’ll have a better life. You won’t give away your life to an organisation. You stand more chance of building the life you want and need.
2 – Be Effective AND Liked
The second step is to become unbelievably effective AND liked. We’ve all met those people who are effective but hard to work with and disliked. Equally, we’ve met those people who are lovely. Like Cuddly Bears. But we all wonder what they do all day and why they’re still employed. Your job is to be effective AND liked. To tread the line carefully and know when to flex either way.
The best way to do this is know exactly what’s expected of you as a manager and develop a Superpower in the world of business – effective communication skills.
3 – Release Agility
The third step is to Release Agility in your organisation.
Agility is about moving quickly and easily towards your goal. Releasing means to set free.
Your goal is to free, unlock and release the agility in your organisation. Agility follows action and overcoming of obstacles. As you free more agility you discover more problems – and so the cycle continues in the journey to forever moving more quickly and easily towards your business goals. No agile framework will help you do this. It’s quite simple really.
- You paint a bright future picture of where you and the organisation is heading
- You are honest and identify the reasons why you’re not there yet. What’s stopping you?
- You build the right team to get it done by Building Strong People Foundations:
- Explaining what role people have and what problem they help to solve
- Setting expectations and helping people live up to them
- Understanding people’s goals and helping them achieve it
- Explaining what success looks like
- Ensuring everybody knows what everybody else does – and how they can all help each other.
- You make these behaviours habitual and adopt a philosophy of productivity that suits your work and business ethos
- And you learn your way through the journey. There is always a way to be better
Culture is nothing more than Group Habits
Releasing Agility always requires a culture change, yet most companies approach this by trying to “coach” their way to a new way of working rather than addressing the real and obvious problem – ineffective management.
The reality is that company culture is nothing more than group habits – it’s what people do everyday. Agile frameworks and coaches don’t change this (at least not very quickly). The best way to encourage different behaviours is through management.
If you want to change a culture, you must change behaviours.
People must therefore change their behaviours – and this is never achieved by awareness pieces, slogans, powerpoint slides and company Ra Ra.
It is achieved through HR initiatives rolled out by managers who encourage behaviour change by setting the standard, giving feedback and dealing with low performance. This is the role of Management.
I believe in management – even in agile teams.
Why Cultivated Management?
There are a lot of Management, HR and Agile sites out there. Many of them are very good. Many are not.
Here’s how I may stand out from others:
- I’ve been a manager for a long time and learned the hard way by making many mistakes.
- The knowledge I share is based on experience, not just theory.
- I have been a Manager and then Vice President in HR at a startup that went from funding to acquisition.
- Our recruitment costs were less than 8%, retention was remarkably good, engagement levels were 80% plus and we built the kind of culture where people would tell people how amazing it was to work there.
- I’ve done Tech Agility, Agile HR and digital transformations.
- The Cultivated Management Releasing Agility method works.
- I put communication at the heart of everything in business:
- I joke that 99% of business problems are because of poor communication – I’m likely not far from the truth
- I studied communication science at school, A’ Level and Degree (BSc) and I still study it today
- I teach an award winning communication workshop
- I blog, write books, do Keynotes and run training and workshops – always trying to be better than I was before whilst helping others thrive as managers and leaders
- I focus on making information simple and easy to digest.
- I help bridge the gap between HR and Management to empower you for maximum success
- I focus on YOU and your organisations problems – not the latest agile scaling methodology or framework
- I have high standards – I hope you and your company do too.
- I’m nice 🙂
Some things about me:
- My style of leadership and management is communication focussed, energetic and inspiring. I sometimes struggle with detail. I value curiosity, learning, strategy, customer service, good communication skills and a focus on being better.
- I have three sons who are amazing.
- I live in Winchester, UK (I’m originally from Sheffield).
- I started my career as a Tester, then an Engineering Manager, then a VP of HR and now as a Director of my own company.
- In 2010 I wrote my name on a piece of paper and listed all of the things I wanted to do with my life. I’ve achieved many of the things on the list – but I’m still working it.
- I love cars and current run a classic Mazda MX5 and a BMW 640d.
- I run a podcast called Parent Brain.
- I write books to chill out.
- My only real super power skill is my ability to observe and study people – and then make changes to my own communication style to suit the moment. It’s proven a very handy skill indeed.
- I ran The Social Tester blog for many years.
- I’m an International Keynote speaker
Cultivated Charity
Every financial year I donate at least 5% of my revenue from books, courses and coaching from Cultivated Management, and my other business, Parent Brain, to charity.
I believe strongly that every person has the right to the best quality of life they can, even if that life may be short.
At least 2.5% always goes to Naomi House – a hospice in Winchester for life limited children and their parents.
The rest goes to a different charity each year.
- 2015 – Unicef (paid)
- 2016 – Pencils of Promise (paid)
- 2017 – Saving Linnea (paid)
- 2018 – WWF (paid)
- 2019 – All to Naomi House