July 16, 2010
Redundancy is nasty – even if it gives you the push you needed to start afresh. Redundancies in an organisation are also nasty for the survivors. They will often have to deal with:
feeling bad about the people who have been axed – survivor guilt
losing friends and team members
bearing the brunt of resentement and bitterness from people who [...]
June 21, 2010
As a leader, not only do you have to deal with ambiguity (see my last two posts) but you also have to be resilient and, more importantly, demonstrate and exemplify resilience to your team/people. The two go hand in hand.
I define resilience as ‘bounce-back-ability’, and the competencies (they are all a little different) are something [...]
May 28, 2010
Two recent examples of people dealing with ambiguity (or not) have struck me recently. The first is a shining example and the second points up the way that the media avoid it in their coverage of important events and issues.
First: the recent problems that we’ve had with the Iceland volcano ash and individuals’ responses to [...]
May 26, 2010
It’s hardly surprising in these changing times that tolerating or even thriving in ambiguous situations is a buzz topic in the management and leadership world. There’s a lot of ambiguity about the subject, too. I’m writing and developing coaching activities for it at the moment so have done lots of research. I thought I’d share [...]
March 31, 2010
In the last month, I’ve been asked this most basic of questions by two of my coaching clients. Strangely, no-one has asked it before. Even more strangely, given that I’m a coach and my practice is predicated on the idea that talking about things is beneficial, I didn’t have a pat response. So I’ve been getting my ducks in a row.
First [...]
March 9, 2010
The difference between being creative and being imaginative is that if you’re creative, you will have created something. It doesn’t have to be Art with a capital A – a painting, a symphony or a novel. It can be a creative report, a flowchart, an action or a way of acting.
Whatever it is, it [...]
February 7, 2010
OK. Let’s look at it another way. Here am I trying to define charisma – not to find out what it is but to find a way of expressing what I know. By trying to describe it, what I’m doing is unpacking and identifying the complicated strands and shades of meaning that make up my own understanding of it. [...]
January 21, 2010
‘Is a perception of you that can only be defined by someone else. It’s the unique effect you have on other people made up of energy (sparkle and forcefulness), self-esteem (substance), image (presentation) and communication in the widest sense (speaking, listening, making people feel special). It turns heads when you walk into a room, draws [...]
January 11, 2010
Today in Leeds I think the weather has turned a corner, from snow and ice to sleet and sludge. I’ve loved the snow, as much for the injection of bright light at the worst time of year as for the glee of the snow itself and of things being different. It’s affected my business of [...]
October 2, 2009
Yesterday morning I caught the thought for the day on Radio 4’s Today programme. The Rev Angela Tilby started out about the powers of the new Supreme Court, but the rest of the thought was to do with the use of adjectives. There is a bit in it about the use of Holy Holy Holy in the Bible, but you can whizz past that if you [...]