Articles
Senior Team: Are you operating at your optimum?
Many senior leadership teams consider themselves high-performing when they consistently meet or exceed business targets. But even when business results are satisfactory, these teams often operate below their full potential. The reasons can be multifaceted,...
Why is high performing teamwork so tricky at the top of an organisation?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein In my years of working in organisational development, coaching senior leaders and teams it's become increasing clear to me that the challenges leaders and senior teams...
Boosting Clarity, Unity and Agility
The foundation of strategic speed is clarity. A well-formulated strategy should be comprehensive, clear, and supported by a strong rationale. Most importantly, it must be mutually understood across the team and the organisation. I’ve written previously that in order...
Who owns organisational culture anyway?
I’ve no idea if you have thought about this, but someone asked me this question recently: ‘Who actually owns organisational culture?’ Spoiler alert: It's not as simple as pointing to the CEO and the exec team or the HR department. The Classic View: Top-Down Ownership...
What do High Performing Teams actually do?
Why are high performing teams important for businesses? That was a question I heard asked of a colleague who referred to me on a recent podcast as someone who knows a bit about this subject. In a nutshell, high performing teams are important because they achieve...
Leadership Development Consultants of the year 2024/25
Super delighted to have won this years Leadership Development Consultants of the Year award. We've never really bothered to enter awards in the past, choosing instead to focus on client work and partnering them to come up with the best solutions to their performance...
How do you get a handle on authentic leadership?
I believe it takes courage to be an authentic leader. I first came across this idea of courage in leadership in Kevin Cashman’s book ‘Leadership from the Inside Out’ years ago. It’s a brilliant idea. Courage being the foundation of authentic leadership. The courage...
Want to Build Psychological Safety at Work? You go first.
It was National Inclusion Week, last week. And as we know it’s one of the four dimensions in which psychological safety at work is perceived by others. So I thought it was a perfect opportunity to have a chinwag with my good friend and colleague Scott Chambers in...
Mediating team conflict is good, but watch out for the pitfall.
Let’s face it, tension or conflict in a team can pop its ugly head up from time to time. The issue is what to do about it. One of the essential responsibilities of team leaders in shaping the dynamics of a team is mediating team conflict when it arises. But...
Why are we still not getting it right with employee engagement?
According to Gallups latest State of the Global Workplace 2023, only 23% of the world’s employees reported themselves as engaged at work. Wait a minute. It’s worse than that. The report finds that 59% are ‘quietly quitting’ and another 18% are doing this loudly. Which...
How does my personal style impact on the way I lead my team?
Human beings are creatures of habit. And we all have our behavioural ‘comfort zone’. The problem is that people’s habits and behavioural comfort zone sometimes coincide and sometimes they are different. People’s reactions, whether positive, neutral or negative, are...
Nurturing the Team’s Emotional Culture
What emotions does the success of this team depend on? It’s a great question, seldom asked. The teams success is usually perceived as a combination of collective knowledge, skills and behaviours, agreed purpose and processes needed to perform. And they form part of...
What on earth can team leaders actually do about employee engagement that HR can’t?
It seems a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Team leaders – at any level – will have a tremendous influence on the sense of engagement experienced by their team members. And yet the vast majority of employee engagement factors tend to be driven top down and HR led. They are...
So you want to reshape your culture. Where do you start?
Why can starting the journey to reshaping your organisational culture feel so daunting? For me, the answer is simple. HR professionals who are tasked with spearheading this transformational endeavour can face numerous challenges and sometimes navigating these...
360-Degree Feedback: Is it more trouble than it’s worth?
A recent conversation with a client got me thinking about precisely this question and in particular when and how do organisations use it. Surprisingly, some clients express a lack of interest or readiness for 360-degree feedback, which prompts me to question the...
Free Guidebook
The Engagement Habit
130 ways to amplify your employee engagement and build a committed enterprise!
