What is your organisation’s story? Who wrote it? Who is telling it? If you’re in a leading position in your organisation and are puzzled by these questions, you may have a problem. That’s because if you don’t know your story, you’ve almost certainly lost control of it. Let me tell you a story. A year…
Do you trust your team? Remember a moment when you were working in a team and could express yourself comfortably, without boundaries, assumptions or, fear? Were you able to express your best ideas? Did you feel like creativity was bursting through your body and mind? That could be a momentum of psychological safety built in…
I do not know of a single organisation at the moment that is not going through change and adapting quickly to the COVID crisis. Much of the change is forced by the circumstances we face. Few organisations three or five year strategic plans had factored in a global pandemic. So it is no wonder that…
Regardless of the reason; a new year, a change in circumstance, feeling stifled or unfulfilled, a desire for something new, a mid-career change can be an exciting but daunting prospect. While taking a socially distanced walk with a friend in our local park, he shared that he was considering a career change after 25 years…
Why is leadership resilience so important? The global pandemic we are all experiencing is showing us that in our increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, leadership needs to enable agility, change, constant adaptation and collaborative innovation. More than that, it needs to also provide for the support and the trust many are currently missing: we…
In an ever more multi polar world our concepts of culture are evolving. In progress now is a shift, away from pre-eminently western ways of understanding the world towards worldviews that include diverse eastern and southern perspectives. In this world, the ability to ‘read’, see and sense these varied perspectives and respond to them, and…
I am of that generation (just) that assumed they’d have fairly simple career path. A directionless school career followed by a less than vocational degree, a few short-term jobs and a slew of post-graduate degrees finally landed me in a university lectureship. And that was going to be it, as I thought, until retirement. A…
It’s that time of year again when we are bombarded by adverts on TV and Social Media platforms – “New Year, New You!” “Become the person you’ve always wanted to be!” “This is your year!”. All in an attempt to challenge us to make New Year resolutions. The concept of January resolutions is not new. …
The global pandemic has tested leadership skills across the world like never before. It’s impacted every aspect of our lives. It’s scary, uncertain and exhausting. Organisations are grappling with how to adapt, transform and innovate and leaders are faced with tough decisions. The temptation for leaders is to adopt an authoritative leadership style to suck…
Leadership is a tough gig. Taking up a leadership position is one of the toughest roles we can choose but many of us enter into it without giving much thought to whether we truly want or understand all that comes with it. For some of us, leading comes naturally. For most, however, it takes significant…
2020 was unprecedented and throughout the year we heard from leaders sharing their recollections on leadership resilience as the year unfolded. One of the most memorable leadership resilience insights shared came from one leader, an older gent, with decades of experience in start-ups, comfortable in working with diverse teams, who described himself as accepting of…
‘The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented’, wrote Dennis Gabor, a Physics Nobel Prize Winner, in 1963. Here we are in December 2020, at the end of the calendar year Some may think ‘thank goodness!’, however the uncertainty of this year may well continue into 2021. During the first lockdown in 2020,…
