Ever feel like your team has one foot on the gas and one on the brake?One moment they are buzzing with ideas, and the next they are stuck in their inbox like it is quicksand? You are not alone, and there is a brain-based reason for it. Leading a team is not just about...
Have you ever wondered how you can bring hope and optimism to your team without wearing rose tinted glasses? In the brutal environment of a Vietnamese POW camp, two men survived under the harshest conditions, but with very different inner compasses. Admiral Jim...
Are you feeling the pressure to lead during uncertainty without knowing what to say, promise, or do? STOP. The most important thing your people need from you is likely not what you think it is. It’s not authenticity. Not strategy. Not even vision. It’s hope. According...
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” (William Faulkner) Because the past doesn’t just live in memory, it lives in our nervous system. It lives in the “parts” of us that learned to protect, perform, please, or power through in order to survive and succeed....
“Don’t give scandal!”Growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Canada, this was one of the teachings drilled into me. For the non-Catholics reading this: scandal can be understood as either an action or an omission that leads another to sin or moral error. To give...
An adult male Indian elephant weighs between 2500 and 5000 kg. That’s the equivalent of a Land Rover Discovery on the lighter end or a Cadillac Escalade on the heavier. Have you ever wondered how such a powerful creature can be restrained and held captive by a small...
Hey, newly appointed managers and emerging leaders. If this is where you find yourself now, it doesn’t have to be that way: Maybe it’s that conflict you have been avoiding The feedback conversation you have been procrastinating Keeping your hand down when you have...
Brené Brown recently quoted America Ferrera, who said: “I can’t be the leader I am meant to be without all the parts of who I am.” She was talking about identity and integrated leadership. And about the importance of being able to bring all of who you are to your...
It’s a Wednesday, which means it was a bootcamp morning. Given that this body of mine is into its 50th+ trip around the sun, I want to take care of it by exercising, but doing it in a way that respects the miles on the odometer. (I don’t get that with the clicks) This...
Guilt – something even people who were not raised by Irish catholic parents can experience.
But what if guilt wasn’t all bad? What if it could be a useful emotion for a leader? How might that occur?
So I am in my thrice weekly morning boot camp. I’m moving to the last station in the circuit - the ski machine. My backside is starting to drag. It’s been a long session. And just as we were about to start, the song on the speaker switches from a Run DMC track to...
Most managers know WHY leadership is important. What they wrestle with is WHAT leadership looks like in the different situations they find themselves in, and then, HOW to lead in that moment. My leadership style has been profoundly shaped by my experience of the...
I am currently participating in a transformative learning experience, Coaching with IFS, powerfully led by Guthrie Sayen and Barti Bourgault. The programme is about discovering how to model and foster Self-leadership to create a culture of healing and awakening. The...
I have been thinking a lot about safety over the past months. Amy Edmondson has done groundbreaking work on the topic of psychological safety. And I deeply appreciate how Timothy Clark has expanded the conversation with his four levels of psychological safety and how...
“I’m an ENFP!” I was ecstatic. I’d found my Rosetta Stone. I was 15. Funnily enough, I needed more. This was just the beginning of my journey to better understanding who I was in the world, and more importantly, who I wanted to be, and also who I was supposed to be.....
I was recently working with a group of Senior Researchers, Post-docs and Laboratory Managers from across Europe. The topic: difficult conversations. A popular topic for leaders, new and well seasoned. What makes a conversation difficult? That’s partially individual,...
I recently wrote about the challenges that leaders face when attempting to listen generatively. We spend too much time downloading (to reconfirm what we already know, i.e. not really listening) or listening factually (to confirm or disconfirm what you already know,...
“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” Bill O'Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance, famously said this. It underscores that not only does it matter what leaders do and how they do it, but that their interior condition,...
David Whyte’s 1996 poem, All the True Vows, from The House of Belonging, calls us forth into the world. Its first line, “All the true vows are secret vows”, poses an inquiry for leaders: What are the secret vows you have sworn? These vows are no idle covenants. They...
I have always misheard one of the famous lines in Simon and Garfunkel's “The Sound of Silence”, as: “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, Tiananmen falls.”, rather than as “and tenement halls.” Just as I have always deeply misunderstood the...
“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” This quotation from Margaret Atwood has been in my ear, like a song you hear that you can’t stop humming. It landed in December and hasn’t gone away. I shared this with a friend who recently lost a parent and they remarked...
“That’s not me! I would never do that! And yet, I did do that, didn’t I?” And so a leadership journey begins. It is not uncommon for coaching clients to experience themselves saying or doing something which generates a feeling of embarrassment. While they share what...
One of the most common refrains we hear from new leadership coaching clients is “Wow, it’s really great to be able to step back and talk about me in the context of my work and organisation. No one else ever listens to me like that, including my boss or partner." When...
Photo by Kevin André on Unsplash The component required for leadership to shift from being a noun to a verb, is agency. Agency is someone’s ability to act or take action. Without it, you may be aware, but you lack choice - you’re stuck in stasis. Why...
Regina Vogel and I spent time this week with a group of young leaders who will be a crucial part of a Theory U initiative in the Irish public sector. As we engaged with them and got to know them, we noticed that they were conscious of their newness and that others...
You’ve likely heard the old chestnut “There is no ‘I’ in TEAM.” Whether said in jest, or in dead seriousness, it is simply not true. If you want to have a team which can navigate complexity and uncertainty, you need to recognise that it is filled with ‘I’s. Why?...
I have been reflecting on two quotations for a few weeks now: First, Bill O’Brien’s “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” And Carl Jung’s “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will...
Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance, observed of his efforts to lead transformational change in his organisation, that “the success of an intervention depends on the inner condition of the intervener.” To make clear what this means, O’Brien is making the...
Change is about an external, situational event: something old stops, something new begins. Transition is about the psychological reorientation which takes place inside of us as we adapt to the change. The distinction between the two matters because this is where the rhetoric of change and psychological safety and DEI and leadership meets reality.
Brian Emerson & Kelly Lewis have written a short book about a complex topic, polarities: paradoxical situations in which two seemingly opposite yet interdependent states need to coexist over time in order for success to occur. Why? Either/or thinking creates binary worlds and narrows our options to “this or that”.