From Potential to Practice: Creating the Conditions for Efficacious Leadership
In our workplaces today, leadership is being asked to do more than deliver results. Leaders are expected to navigate complexity, foster engagement, support wellbeing, and help people adapt to constant change, in addition to managing their own humanity. Yet despite [...]
Managing Differently in the Digital Era
Achieving power, exerting influence and maintaining control have long been the domains of executive leaders. We've all seen how information and expertise – critical tools in wielding power and influence - traditionally resided at the top of organisation [...]
Modern Tools for Modern Times
As an academic and facilitator for nearly 30 years, I have a love/hate relationship with the ubiquitous “course evaluation survey” students are asked to complete. I love feedback! On the one hand, I love receiving feedback on what they liked/disliked about [...]
Don’t get Burnt by the Burning Platform
The ‘burning platform’ is a well-known metaphor for igniting personal or institutional change. It’s based on the idea that change needs a spark – a very big one – to ignite the process. Without a burning platform, the change process flames out. Burning [...]
Shifting the Paradigm Shift Faster
Besides the many ideas and innovations Kurt Levin advanced as one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th Century, he once commented “there is nothing so practical as a good theory”. Shifting the paradigm from teacher centred to student [...]
Humanising Organisations: Ideal to Reality
I’ve long believed – and research consistently shows - that adopting humanistic management principles and practices such as empowerment and treating people with dignity and respect generates positive economic value for organisations. Mental Health and [...]
Employee happiness depends on the boss
I’ve long been interested in the relationship between employee job satisfaction and work-related performance ever since I read about the famous Hawthorne studies conducted by Elton Mayo, a Harvard professor and generally regarded as the founder of the [...]
Calling all leaders – the environment needs you!
As a leadership and management commentator, I don’t normally blog about climate change and the environment. However, in my view today’s most pressing and complex leadership challenge is climate change and the environment. The world needs leaders from all walks [...]
Cutthroat Cooperation or Friendly Competition?
Conventional wisdom dictates that competition - regardless of whether it’s in the classroom, on the playing field or between business rivals – is good because it builds character, boosts productivity and delivers better outcomes. The degree to which the [...]
Breaking out of the mold requires perseverance
I recently attended a “Toxic Masculinity” workshop sponsored by a local baseball club that had tragically lost 2 of its members to suicide in the past year. Bill's Story The purpose of the workshop was to help men redefine what it means to be a man and learn [...]