Yesterday morning, I saw Sally Helgesen talk about her new book, “How Women Rise”. I went with 2 ladies I work with who I thought might find it interesting. For me, I was hoping to better understand some challenges that many women face in rising to senior leadership roles, so I could think how I and the leaders I work with can help overcome them. I’ve been to many of these talks. I love hearing core concepts directly from the author and asking questions. Which I did yesterday.…

It can be sadder than it is aspirational. I see many families, including mine at times, and especially those with kids, stressing over everything. And joy disappears as everything else becomes the priority. Many companies do the same. Everything’s important. Everything’s a priority. I recall sitting in board meetings where we’d discuss our 11 priorities. Times like those, we’d do well to remember John Maxwell’s quote: “You cannot underestimate the unimportance of…

I remember the first time I had to deal with a team member who wasn’t meeting the needs of his role. We’d gone through the support, the training, trying to find another role. But ultimately none of that worked. So I took the next step. Which was to sit on it for a few months. I was terrified – we were such a “nice company”, a “people company”, and had built up a reputation of treating our team well. Firing someone would shatter that in one fell swoop. It…

I’ve been privileged the last couple of days to go with some of my clients to 2 talks about recently launched books. First, Nir Eyal’s “Indistractable”, which lays the case and an approach to move from from distraction to traction. Essentially, this is how to spend our time and attention with more intentionality on the things we want to focus on. A few of us then went to a talk by Naomi Klein on her latest book, “On Fire”. her perspective on the urgency of the…

You’ve seen a lot about how purpose is good for profit. It can be. Sometimes it’s not. But regardless, pursuing purpose on that basis is a dangerous road to go down. The more we talk about companies needing to lead with purpose and values because this is more profitable (which I hear A LOT) – in other words, the more we justify purpose on the basis of its impact on profitability – the deeper we make the doctrine that maximising profitability remains business’s primary…

I had a tough decision to make, and I sought the advice of a senior member of my team. He told me what he thought. As he was more knowledgeable in that space than I was (or ever will be TBH), I went with his advice. It didn’t work out. As we reviewed what happened, he said the sentence that kicked me in the guts. “I told you that because that’s what I thought you wanted me to say.” I was devastated. He’d gone against his (superior) instinct, to tell me what he thought…

In our drive for structure, we should always remember that structure is there to support an outcome, and is not an end goal in its own right. Leaders and consultants alike are guilty of creating frameworks and matrices. McKinsey’s famous MECE (mutually exclusive, completely exhaustive) is a wonderful triumph of the intellect over the real world. Organisations are messy. People are messy. Paths are not linear. The structure is useful as a model, but the best leaders know when breaking them…

“Out of office” is an interesting game that too many of us play. We set up the autoresponse religiously when we go on holiday, then still surreptitiously check our inbox while we’re away. Before we know it, we get sucked into the inbox and suddenly we’ve lost hours. For some, a reply gets sent out as a part of the “real business people don’t do holidays” game, or its close cousin, the “see how hard I work even when I’m on holiday” game.…

“Good leaders don’t hide their emotions. Be vulnerable. Be authentic.” Simplistic tosh that continues to do the rounds in the industry that is training the next generation of leaders, and undermining their ability to lead effectively. The challenge is that there is a lot of nuance to this that is lost beneath the headlines, and most people, sadly, only read the headline and then regurgitate it. The phrase I probably use most commonly with the leaders I work with is that “Leaders…

Treat your team as individuals, rather than your company as a “people business”. I’ve been rereading two books by Oliver Sacks, “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. Both are wonderful books, as enjoyable in the second reading as they were when I read them first over 2 decades ago. I’m struck by what Sacks, following the lead of one of his mentors in neuropsychology, Alexander Luria, terms “romantic science”. Not romance…