Individual & team coaching and organisational development. My work helps you do yours better.
Are you a Digital Winner? This was the question posed by economists at Oxford Economics in its Leaders 2020 survey, which polled over 4,000 executives from around the world. Their aim was to study the impact of strong leadership on success in the 21st century digital economy, and the findings might come as a surprise. […]
The Hass Business School study I referred to last time ingeniously studied the relationships between high-powered individuals and team cohesion, creativity and collaboration. And in each of these areas, findings were pretty unambiguous: teams composed of high-powered individuals performed significantly worse than low-powered to neutral-powered teams. Hass researchers cultivated a sense of power amongst some […]
In Part One of this series, I concluded with the apparently baffling observation that while individual employee productivity and awareness may be excellent, it simply doesn’t automatically translate at the organisational level, which can in reality be zero or even negative despite the valiant efforts of engaged, loyal and motivated employees. To explain how, I’m […]
It is hardly a secret that effective relationships are any business’s greatest asset. Few would dispute this proposition, yet just as few act upon it. In too many cases, the business environment either fails to encourage the relationships that will help the company grow, or it is actively toxic towards them, destroying trust, increasing risk […]
Human teams are enigmatic entities: they collaborate on shared aims and goals at one level, and randomly reshape or reform those very aims and goals at another. Welcome to complexity theory. For managers, this can be something of a headache. Getting a project wrapped up on time and on budget appears to require disciplined oversight […]
Diversity in organisations needs to include intra-personal difference and a tolerance for constructive conflict. If an organisation’s future depends on its leadership pipeline and its staff’s talents, the right lenses for spotting potential really have to be in place. Last time, I suggested that diversity in organisations that didn’t force people to become clones of corporate identity […]
Conventional wisdom holds that truly agile, adaptive organisations encourage diversity amongst their talent pools. While efforts to reflect a wide range of diversity demographics in an organisation’s profile are essential (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity, religious conviction, sexual orientation, culture), it is also important to consider another facet of diversity for genuine organisational evolution and innovation. […]
When leaders want to make their organisations more efficient in realising strategic goals, many of them resort to behaviourist, carrot-and-stick approaches. However, there’s a big problem: despite all the scientific-sounding talk of “measurable” KPIs and clearly defined goals, many of these approaches fail to deliver. Most human beings dislike feeling manipulated in some way. But core to […]
In the 1990s, when academics and business leaders first began discussing the idea of applying complexity science to organisations and businesses, their enthusiasm failed to be picked up by the majority of managers. Managers were resistant to seeing the world as it really was (i.e. infinitely complex), preferring instead to wish this issue away in order […]
Returning to our young entrepreneur, my aim was to help him become aware of and then extricate himself from the implicit questions he was inclined to ask: his subliminal questions directed his attention and energy onto problems and negatives. In their place, I invited him to ask more explicit questions aimed at releasing his strengths […]