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 […]
June 21, 2010
As a leader, not only do you have to deal with ambiguity 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 like: 1. Ablility 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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
September 10, 2009
When my memory first started to disintegrate I panicked. Not because of what it might mean (dementia? alzheimers?) but because I had relied so much on it and didn’t know how to do without it. Since then, Ive been studying the process in myself and in the people around me. I’ve arrived at some conclusions – some ridiculously obvious – which I’m passing […]
August 4, 2009
What is it with the world of work, corporates and organisations? The words passion and passionate are slapped on anything from IT models to supermarket products. Emotion or emotional, however, produce a corporate reaction like a scalded cat. Several things strike me about this. One: both reactions are emotional ones, thus creating an amusing irony. Two: passion […]