Work is probably the only place we are forced into relationship with others rather than having the freedom to choose. From day one in any role, at whatever level, there are people we need to relate to well to enable our contribution, to get things done, to create a culture where people feel valued, and...
Reflecting on the feast of stellar performances during the Olympics and with similar to come with the Paralympics, so many of the sports are focused on pace – how fast, how much they have improved, whether pace matters or whether winning a medal is the goal. Pace is a word we hear consistently, daily in...
One of the big steps in personal development and indeed leadership is our ability to access wisdom which the dictionary defines as ‘the ability to make good judgments based on what you have learned from your experience, or the knowledge and understanding that gives you this ability’. This definition though feels somewhat narrow as it...
We can learn much about self-leadership and team work from the sporting jamboree happening now in Paris. Central to the Olympics are two ideals – that of Corinthian Spirit which is the embodiment of sportsmanship; and the Olympic motto…’Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.’ For Corinthian Spirit in leading in organisations we can read ‘doing the...
Most of us will feel we have little time for contemplation or at best it’s done on the run. The dictionary offers several layers of definition of ‘contemplation’ ranging from ‘deep reflective thought’ to ‘seeking to pass beyond mental images and concepts to a direct experience of the divine’. Whilst from a leadership perspective, in...
Euro 2024 recently threw up a moment of hen’s teeth rarity when Portugal captain Cristiano Ronaldo, a player known for his single-mindedness and ruthless goalscoring, passed to a colleague in a slightly better position to take the shot. His actions shifted the outcome from likely to certain as the goal was duly scored. In football...
If we are honest with ourselves, each of us have aspects of our personality that we’d like to ‘soften’, aspects which we know can sometimes bring unhelpful impacts to ourselves and others. One of mine is impatience. This can take many forms from the mundane impatience with inefficiency and ineffectiveness, to the loftier and even...
When asked to describe the qualities and practices of leadership ‘leading by example’ is a phrase that will be often repeated. But does that cut it? We are in a time of election, not just here in the UK but across the world. European elections are taking place. India has recently completed its polls and...
Running a ‘Leadership Lab’ last week with 30 people was a truly inspiring moment. It was building on two international conferences where we are exploring the principles of ‘new’ Leadership. In the Leadership Lab participants spoke of how they had stepped forward, across an internal threshold to assume an even greater level of presence, visibility...
It’s a question many employees may ask themselves from time to time. In March the latest Gallup poll suggested a concerning drop off in engagement over the four years since the start of the Pandemic especially among young and middle-age workers. Older millennials actively engaged in their work has fallen from 39 to 32% with...