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...
As leaders we know it’s our job to help people develop and release their potential. When it comes to skills and tasks, we generally do okay at helping them to ‘do better’. But what about truly releasing our collective inner power by building a culture of openness, transparency and confidence by sharing more behavioural feedback...
I’m wondering how different change might look and how well it might sustain if we started in a different place. Change often starts with the conviction that change is needed—generally because things aren’t going as well as desired. Missed or declining metrics (like profits) become the burning platform. And while everyone in the organisation can...
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...
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...
One of the key factors that we promote and seek to develop in high performing teams here at azzur is the ability for senior execs to work in the collective space, in which they move beyond their functional specialism and into being a ‘board’ where every member is truly functioning across all disciplines. This isn’t...
When things go wrong it is, perhaps, human nature to seek the source of the fault, to lay blame, to want to know why it happened and who or what was responsible. It’s an all too easy road in organisational life, especially with the pressure to deliver results. Yet, it’s a road that can make...
Developing a coaching style in our leadership is a sure-fire way to developing and empowering others and to increasing capability and capacity in our teams and organisations. Moreover, it builds trust and relationship. Some leaders find this shift in practice relatively easy to accomplish. For others it takes a little more time and effort, not...