Regenerative Leadership Retreat: Finding Purpose in Leadership through Connection, runs from 21 – 25 August 2022 in Switzerland. The application deadline is on 19 July. While connecting with like-minded peers, you’ll explore and realise regenerative leadership in your role.
When working with new managers, we make the distinction between management and leadership. Why? Well, organisations need leadership as well as skillful management to be successful. But the two things are often conflated, with disastrous effects. The essence of...
Are you summoning people back into the office? Or do you prefer them to continue working from home? Either way, you’re dealing with resistance. What should the work experience of the future look like? This question has opened divides within organisations. What’s...
Leadership talk is everywhere. And I’ve discovered that it's worth listening to people who have dedicated their whole career to discovering how it really works. I recently had the pleasure of listening to Bob Anderson, the founder of the Leadership Circle, speak...
At Choose Leadership, we always start from Purpose. Be it in our work with individuals, teams, or organisations. The reason is simple: Without a purpose, our clients drift. Purpose is the ultimate WHY – the reason for which something is done or created. When leaders...
That is what a wise man, my coach, said to me when we talked about grounded visionaries and what they need to succeed in creating the change they want. And indeed, a grounded visionary cannot be a compelling leader without the ability to create intimate...
Most people struggle when asked about their personal vision for life. They tell me about goals, about what they don’t want. They often linger on those things they desperately want out of their lives - the sooner the better. Often they wish they had a better job, got...
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.
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?
Last week, U.Lab started again, and after a few years of our first U.Lab experience, we are participating again to refresh our knowledge and experience in order to further progress on our own leadership journeys. The u.lab: Leading From the Emerging Future is the most powerful online course I have yet experienced, and I have participated in a good number of courses.
The rich programme brings together …
According to a large survey of multinationals by Gartner 69% of employees don’t believe in their leaders’ cultural goals. 87% don’t understand them. And 90% don’t behave in alignment with them.
Whoops!
Those same multinationals invest an average of 2200 US$ per employee a year into culture change initiatives.
What’s the first thought …
At Choose Leadership, we firmly ground our work in the co-active approach – when we are in conversations with each other or our clients, when we design our leadership programmes, when we co-facilitate workshops, and when we coach individuals or teams.
Both experiences have shed a light on our blind spots, have put us in touch with our deepest longing, and our daring. Along the way, we have created a strong community with people who don’t allow us to play small when we struggle, and who have our back.
We’ve been challenged to step up as leaders, to step into our lives’ purposes and commit to expressing them in the world. One of the direct results is…
We all have the tendency to step into the same role in any new group and endeavour. And there’s nothing bad about it per se. But when we sense our or someone else’s resistance, it’s an invitation to reflect and experiment.
So my default in any team is to ensure that things move forward: I make sure of a shared intention, commitment, goals, to dos, accountability, if noone else asks what exactly we want to create together, and how we will do that.
After a usually inspiring first gathering this role sometimes feels cumbersome, like pulling a cart on my own. Because the truth is that I love working with partners who have drive and create momentum, and when they don’t, I wonder:
Why don’t I just let go of this role, when I find myself pulling too hard?
Here’s the honest reason: I’m afraid…
After decades of working with organisations, Peter Senge from MIT has concluded that the level of experimentation is a make or break characteristic for organisations’ long term survival. And yet, experimentation is something that large corporations in particular grapple with. It’s not for a lack of awareness that innovation matters, nor or a lack of trying, as the trend of creating human centred design groups shows. However, a closer look at those mushrooming Design Thinking departments in large corporations reveals that …
“But what does ‘reactive’ look and sound like in practice? And does it really matter?” It is often the case that Reactive Tendencies become even more pronounced when the stakes are higher and when…
WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY. Reading about the origin of this “philosophical quote” made me laugh today, when reading Mark Mansen’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.”
What really stopped me in my tracks immediately afterwards, was …
Being reactive limits our ability to draw on the natural creativity and energy of ourselves and others. The goal of any organisation, therefore is to build the capacity of its leadership to creatively generate thinking, behavior and courses of action which arise not from a place of fear, but from a place of vision and possibility. But how?
Leaders often complain about resistance to change. But what looks like resistance on the surface is often a lack of clarity. It is simply not enough to share a vision and then to stand back watching others turn it into reality.
Change consists of…
Who are the leaders in your organisation? If you are a CEO / MD reading this, you may be looking at your Senior Leadership Team right now. If you are an HR / OD Director, you may be looking at your peers. But what about the people you are not looking at? Who’s in your blindspot?