When you have an underperformer on your team, it points back to your management. You need to make your expectations clearer. In this week’s blog we share how you can find out for sure whether your team members can answer the first of last week’s 12 questions great managers ask: Do you know what is expected from you at work?
Hot mess reactiveness, decisions and choices, chocolate and vanilla ice cream, managers and leaders. Throw in trying to order some dinner, a bit of football and a friend of mine, and there’s a lesson in leadership in there somewhere.
Co-leading helps you run further.
It works in any context.
The key to not getting hijacked by assumptions is to use clean language and share what you are hearing and making up.
Creating engaged, interactive, and fruitful online meetings is notoriously difficult. Many believe that it is impossible. But online meetings are the future. And we have beautiful news for you: It just needs a little training and good planning to create an online event which has every participant fully present and contributing to a shared goal whilst enjoying the many networking opportunities throughout the meeting.
“Inspire, Engage, Align” are not a leader’s biggest challenges.
Mastering the Inner Game is what’s notoriously difficult.
There are many ways to overcome your demons. Here are just three. …
Imagine yourself in a meeting. Someone says something that you are sure will lead to yet another failed change initiative. But the others don’t really listen to you. The thought assails you: “This project is another car crash in the making.” This thought will either have emotions wash over you and have you turn from a leader into a victim. Or you disrupt it and stay on top of your leadership game.
Your mental fitness determines which way it goes. You can build it with simple 2 minute exercises. This week’s blog shows you how to create your own mental workout.
Leadership requires bouncing back from being reactive as quickly as possible. And this is where emotional mastery comes in. Emotional mastery is likely the number one reason why most people in leadership positions fail to lead. To understand how our emotions are created, what information they hold for us, helps leverage them for creating what we long for. Like many others, I’ve held myself back from pursuing my dreams for fear of failing, until…
Summer break has officially ended.
And if that’s a confusing thought for you: You are not alone!
The present might feel just a bit too much like the past six months.
Uncertainty is still everyone’s paramount experience.
All the more a reason to focus on what you can control and to choose what you are reseting into.
Team reset might be needed after re-entry from remote working into office life. After a few months of social distancing, conflicts might have cooled down. To avoid them coming back, leaders can take a few simple, but powerful steps to reset their team culture …
A friend of mine has been struggling for a while with habits that undermine what he really wants. He wants to let go of them as they are dragging him down, but he just cannot seem to shake them off. Earlier this week, he sent me a message: “Perhaps I just need someone to tell me what to do. Do you think I should get myself a coach?”
It was a good reminder that many people think of coaching as consulting. Instead, coaching is…
Elvis Presley had The Jordanaires. Bob Marley had The Wailers. Bruce Springsteen has the heart-stopping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, death-defying, legendary E Street Band.
Great musicians who create great music often have a great band to support them. So do great leaders. Who’s in your band?
Self-care IS energy.
And it’s easy when life is stable and we have time.
But we constantly experience change. What then?
Change is a time crunch.
And in exceptional situations, we intuitively do the wrong thing.
How is this relevant for your team? …
Take your relationship to your smart phone:
You consciously avoid letting it’s battery run down!
When power is low, you plug it in, because if it turns itself off, it cuts you off.
Well, you and those you lead are similar. Except that lots of people find themselves in a vicious cycle as they work from home.
Which is why leaders have a duty to start the conversation about energy and resilience now.
To reshape an icecube, you first have to melt it. Only then can you pour it into a different shape to then refreeze it. What’s true for ice, is true for any organisation. It seems simple. However, as you likely have experienced first hand, most change initiatives fail. that’s because the unfreezing of “how things are done here” never happens. That’s why now is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape your organisation into a better place.
This lockdown has battered our daily routines like a sledgehammer!
For instance: Everyone who knows me well, has seen me strive to eat super clean, because it keeps me sane and focused. And the past few weeks of the Corona lockdown have created a vicious cycle of me stuffing myself with food after dinner, like STUFFING. I have not yet found a way out of this hole, but I’m on it.
So this week’s blog is directed to myself more than to anyone else. But you might find it useful to, if you have been tired, or grumpy, or bingy lately. So read on if you need to shift something in your daily routine to get back that energetic self of yours …
When my values turn from chasing one another to chasing me, I can go mental. And these days, I find myself quite challenged, with ongoing school holidays, so much work that wants to get done, keeping up with calls to my mother and my friends, and needing down time.
This has led me to reflect on my values, to evaluate how I spend my time, and to re-create balance – until the next re-evaluation…
If we don’t collectively come out of this crisis changed, then we have wasted a great opportunity. How to make the best of the time you have as you manage less people and need to have less meetings during the lockdown? Look at your values. Here’s why values matter greatly.
Research shows: Leaders who are aware of and act in alignment with their personal values are less stressed and happier. What’s more, their peers, team members, and managers perceive them as more effective than other leaders.
So if you find yourself with a bit more time on your hands, this is a great opportunity to reflect about the values that drive your leadership, your business practices, and choices.
If you don’t know where to start, this blog provides you with a 3-step process, including guiding questions that get you started on your journey of growing your leadership.
This week is different. The focus is turning from self to other, from home office to team. Our aim was to explore how to hold remote working, virtual meetings, and the anxiety generated by COVID-19 and still connect and function as a team to deliver results to customers. Rather than replicate offline meetings online (that would be a cruel blow indeed), this new, virtual paradigm is the opportunity to create better results from fewer, shorter, more intentional meetings.
Covid-19 is a stress test that allows EVERYONE to practice leading in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). No one expects you as a leader to solve this on your own. Everyone knows that cracking this hard nut requires tapping into your team as a creative resource.
This is the time to harvest collective intelligence without the shame of not having the answers.
This is the time to co-create solutions in powerful virtual meetings.
This is the time to experiment with how to engage and include everyone in your team – in an interactive Zoom meeting.
Heck, this is a time to turn dreaded information sharing meetings into interactive, co-creative, heart based get togethers!
Join us in our free 2-hour webinar and experience how to lead engaged meetings online.
One of my favourite podcasts is Adam Grant’s WorkLife.
And this week’s topic of procrastination is touching on a phenomenon amongst innovative and caring people like you who dream of stepping up to contribute something meaningful to society, but never share it with anyone but their coach.
You are not alone!
Procrastination is part of the human condition. But why?
If you’re interested in anything related to couples, you’ll have likely heard about The Gottman Institute which has turned decades of relationship research into easy-to-read classics, like “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. The Gottman institute has identified 24...
We have experienced self-doubt and procrastination as constant companions on our journey to following our true passion. Our work had brought us certainty and stability, and that meant safety. To give that up took passion and clarity about what we were going to...
At the core of leadership are two interdependent ideas. The first is to be responsible for one’s world. This spurs me to constantly ask “What does this situation require?” It is about getting clear on what is needed to ensure that I or my team / group are on purpose. The second idea is to be response-able. This requires me to…
Leadership is not so much about staying creative. It really is more about recovering to creativity, now, … and now, … and now. As we are creating a workshop for a larger organisation, we are looking into creative and reactive tendencies and how they make or break our leadership in any given moment.
But why are we reactive in the first place? We’ve written about this before, and usually, this is where we speak to the patterns we’ve acquired in childhood. Today we want to look at this from a different perspective:
Your values shape …
As the wave of advice around New Year’s resolutions is ebbing, this year’s alleged “quitter’s day” is approaching fast: Based on 822 global online activities in 2019, It has been scheduled to be January 19th.
According to this analysis, most New Year’s resolutions will give way to reality by 19th of January, including the two most frequent resolutions of healthy eating and exercising. But what does that matter?
There are people follow through with their intentions for the coming year. And why should you not be one of them and turn your shoulder on January 19th.
I am as bad as anyone on following
We are one week into the new year. Happy 2020!
Are you still making more time for your friends and family?
Are you still showing up more fully as an inspiring leader at work?
Or have you, like me, given up on New Year’s resolutions altogether?
I gave up on
As 2019 is coming to a close, lots of people are going to be setting goals for 2020 soon. And those might be based on their assessment of 2019.
There will be plans to go travel and, after a full on holiday season, a lot of people will plan to loose weight and hit the gym twice a week.
We often set our goals based on what’s missing in our lives and allegedly would make us happier, better people.
It’s natural, as our brains are wired to give more attention to the negative than to the positive. That’s why we bring more attention to negative news.
But it is much easier to create lasting change by…
Structure is what allows creativity to flow. It makes space for it. Because here’s the thing:
You might have a genius idea out of the blue some day.
It’s just very unlikely.
Your killer idea …
Structure and creativity are often seen as enemies. And most people love either one or the other.
Creativity might scream chaos at you. Structure might look like a straight jacket. But what we can all learn from successful writers, humorists and any other creators is this:
In an increasingly complex world, appointed leaders simply don’t know enough to decide what is new and better. Leadership is a group sport, not an individual heroic activity.
Ed Schein
Faced with complex problems in uncertain and ambiguous situations, the best of leaders find themselves stuck in analysis paralysis.
Does that happen to you?
Perhaps you’re even struggling to come to terms with…