First Brexit uncertainty, then pandemic. And next, Brexit for real. All in all, pressures on the economy right now are universally downwards. The result, we hear, is that unemployment will rise. But why must that be so? Is it inevitable? And how should managers change to better manage their firms through short periods of unsettled trading? Here we set out the arguments.

There’s no rule about how many people one manager should have reporting to them. For effective leadership the leader must build the dyadic relationship with every follower. If the manager has too many direct reports his or her leadership will weaken while too reports with too much time on each few stifles. So what's the ideal reporting structure?

The crux of an article in The Guardian is that the woman author, a journalist, has found out that a man who reports to her and whose work she manages, is paid £20k a year more than her. She feels that she has been treated unfairly and that she should have held out for more when she negotiated her salary. And she describes how her emotional response has transitioned through the five stages of grief. Here we discuss the issues and ask, "Is £20k difference discrimination or just reasonable?"

Many managers deliberately mix internal and external recruitment in the hope of selecting the best person for the job from as large a pool as possible. Simply, consider internals first, in isolation. If any internal can do the job – judged by a fixed bar - they go forward with an internals-only contest. Because any one has the ability to excel, a variable bar selection can be used to rank them. Anything else is just wrong, damaging and here’s why.

• Reviewing the current approach to recruitment and selection;
• Identifying exactly where and how this old approach is broken;
• Underpinning the new approach, starting with job purpose;
• Building the new approach as a process from job to jobholder; and
• Illustrating the elements of the process, setting the scene for other webinars.

This webinar/video is about how a manager might go about developing everyone in his or her organisation together. It starts by suggesting that such pan-organisation development depends on the use of a statement of what's to be done - the competency framework. And will illustrate an example of a framework for a 50-person organisation.