Blog
Take a look at recent insights in leadership, strategy and more.
Is individual learning enough to deliver organizational learning?
You’ve heard it before. You might even have said it yourself... “Training doesn’t work.” or “When I get back to the workplace, I find it very hard to apply what I’ve learned.” These can be opposite sides of the same coin - a disconnect between individual learning and...
Does a focus on relationship skills weaken or strengthen our ability to be firm or even tough when we need to?
Do you come across people who seem to think becoming more skilful at relationships will somehow undermine their power, or what they think is their power? I do. Now, we always have conflict, at least in the sense of conflict of needs and wants. As soon as you have two...
Is our instinctive, defensive response to competition the right one?
When the going gets tough, when markets contract, when budgets decline, when promotion is rare, our instinctive response is to retreat and defend what we have. Parts of our brain that kept us alive in a more dangerous world respond vigorously to the threats we...
Organizational performance – it’s all down to “the human condition” in the end, isn’t it?
“Isn’t it just the human condition?” my friend remarked. We were discussing the difficulty of getting organizations to understand the problems they face and our reluctance as leaders to accept that we may be causing our own difficulties. “Yes” I replied, welcoming the...
What can we learn from a stalled career?
Carol still applies for senior jobs that come up, but she’s lost count of the interviews she’s been to over the years only to be disappointed. She doesn’t tell her family anymore when she’s in the running for a new position. They can tell though. Carol’s...
Are you stuck in other people’s comfort zones?
To grow, we need to step out of our comfort zone; to accept we don't know everything; to take a risk. We're familiar with that. But had it occurred to you that sometimes we may hold back because our actions, or intended actions are a frightening thought for someone...
“Soft skills” are an optional extra, right?
The silence in the room is profound. Joe sits out front with the coach who’s running the workshop. No-one moves as Joe processes the question he’s just been asked; the question that will resolve the issue he expressed. The silence seems endless, as we wait for Joe to...
Collaboration – Everyone’s talking about it but do we have the bandwidth?
Talk of collaboration is everywhere. We recognize that we need to work together more, even in a competitive world setting us against each other if we allow scarcity to be our driver. How well do we know how to collaborate anyway? Collaboration, and teamwork for that...
He might as well have said they prefer to underperform
"We're an organization that doesn't like to listen to other organizations," he said, also seeming to imply that they'd no intention of changing. That would be OK if they knew everything they needed to know. Except they don't. And their results prove it. And we pay the...
Who do we know better – old acquaintances or new contacts?
Julie frowns. She just can’t seem to get her old friend to take her work seriously. Susan seems more interested in talking about her holiday: “We don’t need marketing people at the moment. We could do with some help changing the organization though, but I don’t think...
It’s OK to blame the distant or the inanimate when things go wrong. Or is it?
Blame - common currency of the media. Some organizations are rather familiar with the process too, without usually using the word itself. The thing is... As an observer, with whom do you usually feel empathy - the person doing the blaming, or the one being blamed?...
The ego – are we its prisoner?
We don’t have to be talking about relationships for long before the subject of ego comes up. We blame other people. We rebel when we’re treated as “just a number.” We reject feedback and learning because accepting it would require us to change our sense of who we are....
How just about everything can be seen as a process of learning
The attendees gather - pleasantries here, a joke there, a side issue being dealt with over in the corner; teas and coffees organized. The person chairing opens proceedings and the participants settle down to the business of the meeting. It’s taken for granted everyone...
Is NLP too important to be left to NLPers?
“Politics is too important to be left to politicians.” NLP hadn’t been invented when that was said, so the quip had to be about the business of government instead. Actually, it’s misleading to say “hadn’t been invented,” because neuro-linguistic programming is an...
Why the economics of our lives have changed forever, and what to do about it
Coverage of Vince Cable on BBC News saying that the UK government hasn't yet managed (or really chosen) to communicate to the British people that their old assumptions about economic leadership in the world are no longer valid. In short, we're following now; not in...