Earlier this week we learned that The Oldie magazine wanted to name HM The Queen its ‘Oldie of the Year’, an honour she declined in quite brilliant fashion. The letter from her private secretary read: ‘Her Majesty believes you are as old as you feel, as such The Queen does not believe she meets the...
We all know what it feels like to work in a team or group where there is a tense undercurrent, where the communication isn’t open and smooth and where competition or fear, or both, infect the dynamics. Of course it’s the responsibility of the team leader to pay attention to these things although often they...
I sometimes wonder if it’s a past life as some sort of self-obsessed dictator that makes me so passionate about the responsibilities of leadership in this lifetime (needing to deal with past karma perhaps). Whatever the reason, leadership, a much-used word and often misunderstood practice is something that in different ways we all have within...
Leadership is a word we all use regularly – sometimes because we have a deep-felt sense of what it means and sometimes as an expression of power or authority or maybe responsibility and accountability. As anyone who has ever thought deeply about leadership will know it’s a concept and practice that has more definitions, dimensions...
Being someone who sometimes (ok well maybe often) misses the moment to stop and celebrate the joy, success, achievement of a given moment because I have my eye firmly planted on the future and what’s still to be ‘done’, I have been reminded over recent weeks of the power of taking a moment to celebrate...
We can go on holiday. We can’t go on holiday. We can travel to green list countries but they might be on the watch list so they might have gone amber before the plane wheels touch the tarmac. We can mix with others…well as long as they are in our bubble, or they are six...
One of the things I’ve noticed as restrictions on our day-to-day lives begin to ease is how noisy the world has become, or at least my sensitivity is heightened. Whichever, it’s had me thinking about noise at a number of levels…the noise, for example, the media created around our PM’s wedding – where it might...
We are all guilty of it…wilful blindness. Those times when we can see that something untoward is happening and yet somehow we turn away, don’t speak up, find ourselves ‘resigned’ to the situation even knowing it’s less than it should/could be. Margaret Heffernan has written on this subject and her Ted Talk is a salutary...
Two years ago hybrid probably conjured mental images of cars powered by both electricity and fossil fuel. More recently hybrid is the word on most leaders’ and employees’ lips as a descriptor for our workplaces going forward. What’s interesting here is that if we strip back to the basic meaning of hybrid – anything of...
Have you ever considered what it could look like to be truly joyful in your work. What if those who lead were committed to cultivating a joyful workplace. Joy isn’t a word we often hear associated with the world of work. In fact, so often it’s the opposite – sometimes a huge sigh, for others...