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...
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...
Great leaders understand that imposing top down solutions often fails to produce the intended results. Even if the solutions are informed by the best intentions and employee engagement surveys, resistance is guaranteed. It’s befuddling. But when you take a...
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...
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,...
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...
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...