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...
Watching great leaders in action is one of the most effective ways to enhance your own leadership. So I often ask my coach clients:
⏩ “What leader has most inspired you?”
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...
The art of Taiji teaches us that leadership is a harmonious blend of humility, adaptability, and a mindful connection to the collective energy.
Explore how a remarkable Taiji instructor, Becky, demonstrated these leadership qualities.
In today’s change weary environment, the latest top down initiative easily triggers cynicism and fear which inform questions that all come down to this:
What’s the real agenda here?
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...
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”.
If you are looking for a deep dive into complexity theory, then this book is not for you. If you want a fuller understanding of its impact in the world, it is well worth the read. Different practitioners share how they have made use of and experienced the framework, and David Snowden, if truth be told.
Collective intelligence trumps the combined intelligence of individuals. This has implications for leadership. Leaders need to shift from 1:1 solution finding to leading from the system. Let us show you a great resource for learning by doing how this can work for you and how you can uplevel your team’s problem solving capacity.
There is a wicked question all leaders must eventually confront: How can we best address the needs of the organisation while addressing the needs of the individual? Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin’s “Unleash Your Complexity Genius” points a way forward to both better engage with and apprehend the world around you and inside you.
What to expect from the resource. Power: A User’s Guide (PAUG), authored by Julie Diamond, delivers exactly what it promises on the tin: a guide to how to connect to, and draw on, your positional and personal power. It is much more “How to Win Friends and Influence...
We are deep in the messiness at the cusp of innovating how we can better work together. And it turns out that if you want to understand how modern work has become alienating and exhausting, and how to fix it, you can take inspiration from an unexpected source: modern hunter-gatherers.
Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (2002) is a classic framework to better understand why a team may not be delivering hoped for results. It is a means of diagnosing what might be wrong, and it offers remedial steps which allow a team to move forward more...
It’s that time of the year again. No Mo May is over and the grass can be cut. The bees are flourishing. And the year is almost halfway over! Man alive, where is the time going? Indeed, where is the year going? June is the perfect time to step back as a team and share...
The first co-leaders I worked with, my Mom, was known to say “Two heads are better than one.” She would say this when we would be working on a particularly thorny arithmetic problem, looking for an article of clothing or book that I had invariably misplaced, or trying...
“Well, we busted out of class, had to get away from those fools…” And so it began in Dublin: three hours of pulsing songs from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The next day, while nursing sore feet over a coffee, there was one image of the evening that I...
Our commitment to not mowing our lawn until the end of May has thrown us into a curious leadership conflict: we want to provide dandelions for wild bees whilst also trying to fit into our neighbourhood. We’ve found that our inner process and our actions in this...
A conflict between two team members can turn a whole team toxic and unproductive. Empathetic listening helps to get to the root cause of the conflict and to help conflict parties to exchange perspectives and resolve the conflict together.
Whether you’re leading a team, a division, or an organisation, I’m pretty sure you think that you have to have the answers in order to be seen as a strong leader, inspire trust, feel that you deserve your position. Yet in a complex environment, that belief...
One of my favourite ways to work with clients who are navigating complex contexts is through “balance” coaching. Co-active balance coaching is about finding and standing in perspectives which serve the client – perspectives which create possibilities, rather than...
The conversation got up this week in Choose Leadership HQ about complexity and leadership. Dave Snowden defines complex systems as ones with some constraints, but where everything is connected, except we don’t know what the connections are. We can assess probability...
When change leaders get caught up in resistance to change, they fail to shift the organisation towards the desired destination. That’s why they need to build their muscle of…
How do you distinguish between a team and group? And is that distinction even meaningful? Yes, and it matters, because “team based working” is so prevalent AND not every group labelled a team is actually a team. According to Katzenbach and Smith, a team is a...
The very leaders who need to drive change in their organisations are getting weary of imposing yet another change initiative on their organisation. But as a leader, you have no choice.
Do you feel like the heron or the hippo? Have you ever wondered why your leadership team’s change initiatives keep getting blocked? “Darn it, why won’t they change?” “ACME Consultants promised this would work.” “We followed best practice!” What if it wasn’t their...
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” We live most of our lives on automatic pilot. That is as true of individuals as it is of teams. Our teams tend to operate without being aware of the water they are swimming...
What’s the secret sauce of innovation? Lots has been written to answer that question. Our take is: There is no secret sauce. That is, there’s no “one size fits all” kind of sauce out there. There’s only your own secret sauce. And its particular flavour depends on
Last week, while working with front line managers, I stumbled across something important. It happened when I asked participants to describe a manager / leader / boss that they had worked for and for whom they had had respect and admiration. They used words like...
When Michelangelo had created David, a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture, someone allegedly asked him how he had chiselled David from the marble. Instead of talking about techniques and process, it is said that Michelangelo answered:
“I saw David in the marble, and carved away everything that wasn’t him.”