As we head into a new year we may be reading about the challenges leaders have identified as most important for the year ahead. These will often be couched as the top five/ten leadership dilemmas for 2025. Though given the climate organisations are operating in – social, environmental, economic, political – there are many more...
The idea that there is a price to pay for everything can feel a little harsh and yet if we think about it, it’s true. Not necessarily in the sense of money but in the sense of consequences. Every choice we make, every plan we set in motion, every relationship we invest in sets off...
Curiosity doesn’t tend to be top of the competence pile when it comes to leaders or employees but perhaps it should be for it is a quality that drives the best possible outcomes and fuels progress. Of course, curiosity is a mind-set and it often gets parked in the interests of speed, efficiency and meeting...
Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organisations wrote “an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development.” This is a powerful and indeed significant statement when we consider our levels of investment in leadership. Investment not just in the obvious sense of ‘training’ but, in particular, in the deeper sense of what we really mean...
A recent blog from Seth Godin spoke of working to make things better being achieved in small steps rather than big bang, improvement coming incrementally and by repeating and repeating the steps. Of course, we can give impetus to those steps in the objectives or intentions we set…a process that’s a regular feature of organisational...
Wherever we look we’re surrounded by examples of service – the purely transactional of a service provided for which we pay (smile optional) through to the more noble and life impacting work of health and emergency services and the armed forces. In our own lives, when we really think about it, everything we do is...
When we speak about teamwork and building a high performing team, it can be easy to be lulled into a false sense that it’s a walk in the park. That by undertaking a few team building exercises the group will achieve optimum performance. For sure, team building activities are useful and have their place in...
Taking things for granted is a very human thing. It happens for many reasons including feeling comfortable in our current place/mind-set, being too busy to stop and notice things around us or maybe because we are too self-absorbed or arrogant to open to something different. There can be opportunities to get the wake-up call, shift...
Elections create change. Organisations are in constant change. Family life with its ups and downs can be destabilising. If you are a lover of change you may take all this in your stride though this tends not to be the case for most of us even if we don’t always admit it to ourselves or...
Growth and performance are staples of the business lexicon – goals to be pursued. Yet how thoughtful are we when we talk about growth, how considered are the thoughtforms that drive our actions? Often it can be about squeezing more from the existing structure in its current state. And that path may be costly –...