What is optimism? According to Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur and teacher, it is both an attitude and a choice that involves context and focus. Simon Sinek speaks about the importance of leading with optimism, especially during uncertain times.
As we're discovering, we can’t just sit this one out, hunker down and weather the Covid-19 storm. There are significant indicators that there is an ongoing need to adapt and continue the process of reshaping organisations and redefining the work being done. Trying to protect existing ways of work in…
So you think you know yourself and members of your team? How aware are you of what really motivates and stresses you and them at work? What impact does behaviour have on the workplace and customers? What if there was a way to speed up the process of understanding yourself…
Leadership development journeys generally begin with learners gaining some self-awareness about their traits, styles, preferences as well as existing leadership capabilities. This helps them to focus on the development opportunities that are going to make a real difference to their leadership practice. There are a wide range of self-awareness diagnostic tools available.
Leadership starts with yourself – making sure that you’re personally well-equipped for the job and in tune with the demands, needs and issues of those you are leading and of the work that is expected of them.
Back in February 2016 I posted a blog titled Where is Leadership Going? In it I was tracking the history of leadership styles from the 1970’s to the time of writing and speculating on where leadership style was heading out into the 21st Century. I concluded that Joe Raelin’s Leaderful…
Leadership has been in the news a bit lately, for both good and not-so-good reasons. We have seen Jacinda Ardern ascend the heights of global leadership and struggle a bit locally with the performance of her colleagues and the Opposition. And we have seen Teresa May succumb to a leadership…
Nowadays, leading people well trumps expertly managing tasks. A new leadership style and practices are needed for business success – distributed, inclusive and collaborative leadership that invites and supports the team to participate in decisions, planning and actions – leading to better individual, team and business results.
My experience as both purchaser and supplier of leadership development solutions helps me to see the ‘zone of interest’ where the two parties can come together from their different perspectives on the leadership development solution that can be made to work in each case.
Science shows that feelings precede thoughts and behaviours, so the more adept we are at managing our feelings, the more effective we'll be in work and all facets of our lives. Organisations high in Emotional Intelligence benefit from more engaged employees and leaders, staff who are more able to cope with change, better team working, and greater collaboration.
We have and are seeing a massive shift in leadership style, driven by employee expectations, new ways of working, and in the communications technology used to support them both. No longer leadership as hero, but leadership as partner. This shift is so widespread now it can be viewed as the new leadership paradigm.
The results are finally in, and, YES, leadership development programmes really do work... Not only that, but the drivers that make for successful leadership development programmes have now been identified.
The success of an organisation depends on the people who work for it. Motivated, engaged employees are the foundation for success, with highly engaged employees producing better business outputs, more loyal customers, fewer ‘problems’, and superior financial performance. Engagement goes beyond employee happiness or satisfaction ...
If your organisation is investing in leadership development, you’ll want to know that you’re going to see some real benefits back at work. We’ve put together eight tips that will help to ensure that your programme is robust and that your participants are well set up to bring back new learnings to their teams, and in turn produce results for your business.
John Lees explains how quieter people can make a bigger impact.Why are so many career changers told to “get out there and sell yourself”?
In some labour markets, especially the UK and US, access to jobs has changed significantly. The UK, for example has seen a noticeable decline in conventional job advertisements.…
Wiser folk than me make a clear distinction between management work and leadership work. Some define management work as about accomplishing tasks and leadership work about relationship-based inspiration and energising of people. Others define management as about coping with complexity and leadership as about coping with change.
In my experience, most people say they can sum up a person pretty quickly, and for first impressions, most probably can. So why do I have so many clients disappointed with who they recruited and surprised when their first impression don't work out? Did they misread that person? Did the context of working with the person change so much that behaviours changed radically? Or do some underlying behaviours only reveal themselves under pressure?
As we all appreciate, organisations are systems of integrated parts, with leadership holding the tiller to guide the organisation’s journey. The organisation exists to achieve pre-determined business outcomes; leadership exists to change the organisation so it can more efficiently and effectively achieve that purpose. Today, leadership can be characterised as having four hierarchical facets; personal leadership, team leadership, organisational leadership and external leadership.
The art and science of leadership has been on the organisational agenda for almost 40 years now. Back then leadership started to reveal itself as something important and something different from management, which had been the dominant player in organisations since the Industrial Revolution. Today, leadership stands as the pre-eminent…
As a leader, you are out of a job if there are no followers prepared and willing to follow you. That is self-evident at the extreme end of the spectrum - when your team resolutely turn its back on you and follows another leader - but it is at least…
At ODI we’ve been concerned for some time about the effectiveness of New Zealand organisational leadership and we are not alone in that thought. We are also conscious of the variable quality of the response to that by the learning and development community.
At its simplest, sound organisational leadership is about…
In our business training and business consultancy practice we regularly advise clients on the best ways to develop the competency of their organisation. We’d like to share our approach with you here.
First though, we need to clarify what competency is. At the organisational level, core competency results from deploying specific…
I see many organisations that invest in leadership training for senior and middle roles, but not for managers and supervisers closer to the coal face – why is this?
I think it is because of a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of leadership and its pivotal role in organisational performance.
Leadership is…