You are doing battle every day. Sometimes it can feel like a constructive use of energy. Sometimes it can feel hopeless. How often do we stop to really ask ourselves just what we are battling for? Heroes, knights and mercenaries all had/have their reasons for their battles. As leaders we are more than mindless cogs...
Okay. That’s not actually true. But it’s heartening that we have just seen the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. Japan has its first female Prime Minister in Sanae Takaichi. And the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the incredibly courageous leader of the opposition in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado, despite lobbying...
Too often optics drive the narrative. We’re seeing this daily from global leadership and in the micro in our own organisations and teams. Performance trumping substance, truth and trust. And trust is surely the thing here. Much of social media is eroding the ability to discern truth from fake content. The growing capability of AI...
In organisational life system is often taken to mean a process by which things get done – various steps, specialists, teams/departments involved in creating a product or delivering a service. When things go wrong we look for the break in the system. Conventional wisdom suggests looking for an individual responsible for the failure. Their competence...
We speak of communities of practice, and some organisations will have a group or communities dedicated to people related themes such as diversity, LBGTQ+ or faith and yet we rarely think about community as the backbone of the organism. Yes, there will potentially be share of mind dedicated to the culture and yet even that...
Generosity. It may seem a little old fashioned, out of kilter with the pace of our world, the attention needed to get things done. Yet it is a quality and an energy that is transformative. Being generous with our time and attention elevates not only the quality and openness of our conversations but also the...
‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same’ (from Rudyard Kipling’s If) When one of the world’s leading female tennis players lost a major championship recently, she very publicly attributed the loss to her poor play rather than the winner’s skill. Only on reflection did she realise...
The current trend to create our own ‘mini-me’ doll image through AI will undoubtedly pass as something else captures our imagination. Of course, it’s a bit of fun and probably light relief in turbulent times but it is also a helpful reminder of where we might usefully put our focus. How good could our leadership...
In our interactions with others we can often assume that we are all having the same experience, viewing the situation similarly and extracting the same data. The reality is we are having entirely different experiences, picking up on very different things, seeing, and hearing, with different (literally) eyes and ears. If we imagine this in...
I’ve attended a few online sessions in the past couple of weeks. All of them promised learning (even in the fine print) yet turned out to be sales webinars aimed at getting people signed up for a range of support services or development programmes. Scanning the meeting Chat showed others were also feeling less than...