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...
Tenacity, resilience, powering on and through are qualities long admired in the workplace. The challenge we face is to be clear to what end and with what effect. If it’s just about staying upright and moving forward on what can feel like a treadmill of relentlessness we may be wasting these qualities, and energy, on...
The current news agenda is awash with stories of deficit in ethical behaviour among leaders – the Vietnamese businesswoman convicted this week of siphoning £billions from a bank she owns 90% of, multiple fraud cases against an ex and wannabe again US president, and the Post Office scandal rumbles loudly on. Ethics and morals can...
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...
In 1864, shortly after the American Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln, said in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins: ‘We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood … It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but...
We know relationship can be tough as we navigate the many idiosyncrasies of the human condition. We can find ourselves ‘at odds’ with another person, another group or team, another organisation for any number of reasons and this can lead to a hunkering down, a sense of moral outrage or injustice, the blame game and...
There’s a big focus on the feminine in leadership in these times and rightly so. International Women’s Day brought the focus onto women from a gender perspective – inviting us to think about the qualities and successes of women across the globe. The intensified efforts under the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion banner in organisations is...
I came across a definition of love the other day that was offered by Burt Hellinger, the godfather of family constellation therapy. It is a definition that offers food for thought in a leadership and organisational context. LOVE = SEEING + DISTANCE – JUDGEMENT This definition of love offers much food for thought and some...
If like me you are a fan of period dramas you will have a visceral sense of the hierarchy associated with the notion of service – a system where the so called lesser are in service of the so called greater. Even though in many ways (though for sure not all) our society in the...