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...
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...
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...
Back in the day when Tesco was sweeping all before it its then CEO Sir Terry Leahy talked about setting audacious goals – many of which the business delivered. I was reminded of this idea in a recent conversation with @GuillermoRogel who talked about asking people to consider for themselves what a ‘10 X bolder’...
It’s a strange term isn’t it – ‘edgewalking’ and yet a very powerful concept for the role many leaders need to be undertaking in organisations in these times. If we consider the boundary line between the old and the new, the current reality and new changed state we find the line often occupied by edgewalkers....
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...
One of the primary responsibilities of leadership is to be focused toward the future. In this respect the future not as a series of business strategies or revenue growth but as a focal point of the inner growth of the whole group that one is leading. I hesitate to bring this next point in, but...
Most people don’t tend to think about shapes or geometry in relation to leadership. And yet if you think about it we have many linear, square and oblong shapes that pervade our organisational spaces especially in business. The boardroom table, the office desk, the rows of desks. Perhaps it’s driven by space efficiency but I...
In many psychometric surveys designed to consider aspects of leadership, there are often questions that reveal the degree to which a person naturally gravitates toward the front of any group. Not because of ego but because of an inbuilt or developed sense of responsibility, accountability and, what we eventually come to call leadership. Even when...
There are, as we know, a plethora of leadership models, frameworks, qualities and quotes that define leadership, and we can be forgiven for being somewhat confused about what the definitive description of leadership really is. To come to new answers or insights on this question it is important to elevate the thinking beyond the conditioning...