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Quick Reads: Empowerment
There are 2 varying perspectives of empowerment across industries, organisations and business literature. From one perspective, empowerment is when employees take ownership of their own strengths, motivation, development, goal setting and search for opportunities to progress. From the other, it is when the organisation’s culture and leadership behaviours actively develop trust, share power,…
Quick Reads: Management of Things
Throughout recent posts we have been touching on a few different elements from our 6 core domains of organisational leadership. 👥 We’ve looked at PEOPLE, with respect to beliefs, attitudes, and behavioural observations.💬 We’ve touched on COMMUNICATION in the scope of listening, feedback and feeding-forward.🧭 We’ve briefly observed LEADERSHIP through…
Quick Reads: Capability Development
Something that can plague leaders is a default assumption that everyone else already knows what you know. (Indeed, there are also leaders who assume the opposite or fluctuate.) This can lead to a range of unhelpful perspectives on reality. There are certainly times when professional and/or external services for development…
Quick Reads: The Leadership Freak-Out
It is a simple function of being human and holding responsibility for a task, and it can be debilitating. It happens often, in all kinds of situations. In the midst of an activity, during a meeting, alone on the drive home. Even in safe, trusting and fun practice environments: An…
Quick Reads: Feedback, but also feed-forward
Why wait to feedback on the past? AFTER the fact. A lot of the time, that’s how we operate. Responding to situations that have occurred, fixing things and putting out fires. An interesting example of this is feedback. There are some useful models around to help us structure feedback to…
Quick Reads: Leadership and Management
Don't be fooled, leadership versus management is not a thing. Discourses using this language to describe and assess varying interpersonal behaviours do little for anyone looking to understand how to best lead a group of people towards a collective goal.
Quick Reads: Leadership Styles
Focused on leadership styles? You might be missing the point. You may hear and read comments like "command and control has no place anymore", or "authentic leadership is the key for performance". But this type of rhetoric can be confusing and sometimes completely misinformed.
Quick Reads: Listening, how good are you?
Chances are, you suck at it. But it's ok, our brains are just dumb and need some guidance. Making connections is something our brains are wired to do, but it doesn't necessarily help our ability to really listen well to others. The meaning we establish from what people say, and…
Empowerment: How organisations miss the point
At one point, I felt like sticking a fork in my eye the next time one of the leadership team mentioned the word empowerment. Why? Because the word was being thrown around like propaganda and the only real outcome from their empowerment initiatives was simple duck-shoving of responsibility. That is,…
The power of coaching to accelerate the self-leadership journey
Coaching is powerful. Put simply, coaching is the process of supporting someone’s development in a direction determined by the coachee (i.e. the person being coached) and through methods of active listening, providing feedback and asking questions. Coaching is based on the philosophy that every problem comes with a solution; and,…
Purpose, what we could be doing with it
Purpose. It is a word that gets mentioned a lot, especially in organisations, and would be high on top-buzzword-lists along with transformation, leadership and empowerment. Often we will spend a few minutes defining purpose as part of a process for team building or objective setting activities. Purpose can be synonymous…
The 9 positive psychology practices to lead yourself through a crisis
“Do unto yourself as you would do unto others” A slightly twisted version of the famous Golden Rule, and one that is possibly more important now than ever. Research shows that the way we talk to ourselves is generally more critical and cruel than we would to others. We tell…
Communication, where do we go wrong?
Communication is often cited as one of the main issues or contributing factors between good or bad experiences with leadership or in the workplace in general. You don’t have to search very far on the internet, in organisational behaviour texts or research papers to read about the relevance of communication…
Self-leadership starts with you – but what exactly is self-knowledge?
‘Know thyself’ was the first of the Delphic maxims inscribed at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, ancient Greece. But this piece of wisdom and advice may date back even further than 2000 odd years, with its roots having been traced back to the classic Chinese ‘Tao Te Ching’ forming…
Micromanagement: Why it’s so easy to slip into
I cannot stand being micromanaged. It riles me. I have had to take many a long walk outside in the fresh air to regain composure and the use of my prefrontal cortex following the impacts of micromanagement behaviour. Even now, writing this article I can feel the associated emotions as…
3 Gateways to maximising your potential
Are you kicking goals at work? Living your best possible life? Because it seems that that’s what everyone is talking about these days. Don’t get me wrong – I love a good vision! I just prefer them when they come with instructions, practical advice. What does it even mean to…
Behavioural Expectations: the conversations we really need to have
Behavioural expectations are often thought about in the context of general behaviours within an organisation. They can be understood as an overarching set of rules and principles aiming to guide a consistent standard of accepted behaviour by all employees or members. Sometimes included in employment contracts or when joining a…
Why better self-leaders make better team-leaders
If you’re managing a team, maybe you’ve already been inundated with some form of leadership training in your career – but are you a competent self-leader? The term ‘self-leadership’ was first coined in the 1980s. Somewhat synonymous with self-mastery, it evolved from the field of professional development and organisational behaviour…
Organisational Leadership: What is it really?
Organisational leadership doesn’t focus on the application of any particular model, tool or style. Every model, tool and style will have some form of effectiveness in some type of situation. Organisational leadership focuses on the core purpose of creating the optimum environment that allows and inspires people to perform. It…