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Sunflowers are fascinating specimens of nature, they face the sun as it rises in the East and follow it across the sky until it sets in the West. As a leader you may have noticed you have people in your leadership team who do the same with you! The Sunflower Bias was coined to explain how some team members always…
Changing strategy and changing culture are two of the most common areas leaders focus on to make an impact. The question is, where to start? Peter Drucker famously said ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ but that does not mean leaders should start with setting out to change the culture. In fact I would advise the opposite. A clear and compelling…
We all have a personal paradigm, a filter that enables us to make sense of the world around us. Its presence is reassuring, as without it we would be overwhelmed by the enormous amount of stimuli that surrounds us every moment of every day. Personal paradigms are essentially a collection of unquestioned assumptions and beliefs that for us are self-evident…
Strategy provides clarity, direction and focus for collective change work and I have written a lot about this topic in previous blogs. Check out ‘Strategy as a little black dress‘ and ‘Visions, missions and all that jazz’ as two examples. Culture by contrast is far more elusive and esoteric, made up as it is of unspoken ‘truths’, embedded rituals, incumbent…
Much has been written about the value of having a coach, mainly by people like myself who offer coaching as a professional service and who are looking to encourage more people to consider having a coach! Obviously I see no harm in this noble aim, however in this article I wanted to reflect on this topic through the eyes of…
Late July and August is a strange time in the business world. A quiet few weeks loom large as your colleagues take their holidays and the usual round of ‘regular’ meetings are interrupted and welcome gaps appear in your hectic schedule. This can be a discombobulating time for busy leaders used to rushing from one ‘important’ meeting to another, what…
If you are leading a service area, or a project, there are a couple of key questions you should ask pretty early in your tenure, they are: Who are my stakeholders? & What do they want? Pretty straightforward questions, or so you would think, but getting them answered can be far from straightforward. Tip#1 – Get others involved in identifying the…
Several years ago I observed something quite extraordinary. I was working with a leadership team helping them tackle their strategic, leadership and operational challenges and we were beginning to run out of ideas. I noticed I was hearing the same voices, saying the same things, reinforcing the current reality and witnessing the deflation of hope. Sound familiar? We took a…
There is a critical but largely ignored aspect of leadership success, the conversations that leaders have that are designed to engage, enthuse, direct and motivate their work colleagues to deliver sustainable improved results. The quality of conversation in an organisation is an accurate barometer to the quality of the thinking taking place and therefore largely determines the quality of the work that…
The job of a Change Maker, to borrow a much used phrase, is to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’. Despite the huge amount of change we are all exposed to in our day-to-day lives, the psychology of resistance has not changed one iota. Put simply, we still prefer what we know and are familiar with and we will…