What if something happens to us?

This can be good or bad, a stroke of good fortune or an affliction.  How should we respond?  There are four ways.  By far the most useful is simply to accept what has happened, keep it to ourselves, adapt as we need to and then continue to live our lives.

Less healthy is to keep it to ourselves and, if it is good fortune, preen ourselves on how clever or deserving we are.Or, if it is an affliction, ruminate on: why me? It is so unfair; I don’t deserve this!

Read More

Increasingly, we see humility as an attractive quality in leaders, a quality that inspires confidence that the leader cares for their followers.

But what is humility?

Read More

A recent book (Nine lies about work) makes the point that leadership isn’t a ‘thing’ because we can’t measure it and whatever set of traits or skills or competences are put forward as being essential, exceptions can always be found. However, followership is a ‘thing’, we can (easily) measure it.

Read More

Providing feedback is a tricky thing.

Negative feedback almost always puts the other person into the frame of mind where learning is not possible – their sympathetic nervous system (fight-flight) is triggered, they go into the red brain - and their whole being focuses on that, not on learning.

To stimulate learning we need to give positive feedback and, as we know that more learning takes place when we focus on our strengths, then providing feedback around what is going well makes sense.

Read More