These days everyone writes about leadership: behave this way, change this attitude, write things down, don’t write things down, be mindful, meditate, be confident (even if you’re not).  Everyone has a leadership program that invariably involves exceedingly expensive camping trips and lists of things you need to do or change.  But recently I was working with a company on developing their feedback style and culture with their staff.  In our discussion, it became really clear that the simple road to great leadership is the SMART acronym we know so well: Specific Measureable Actionable…Read more

Nearly every person I work with tells me their failures have led to a collapse of their confidence or that if they fail at this opportunity they have been given, it will mean the end of their job or even their career. But I read this morning that Warren Buffett had donated $2.9 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation despite Bill Gates’ announcement that “some of the projects we fund will fail”.   So it’s OK for Warren, Bill and Melinda to fail and lose a couple of billion in the…Read more

You can’t believe it’s come to this. The, otherwise, sensible person in front of you is defending an absurd position.  You can plainly see the issues they have failed to factor into their thinking but every time you raise one of them they become even more defensive about their opinion, more difficult to shift from their position.  And this doesn't make any sense to you – surely once they are made aware of the things they are ignoring, the assumptions they have made that are plainly wrong, they will change their thinking?  And…Read more

How many times have I heard people say to me “I need more hours in the day!”? Whenever I hear this, my first question is “What if you could do more with the hours that you’ve got?”.  Immediately I am told that would be impossible, which, of course, to me is just a more interesting challenge. So, what if you could?  And what is happening now that makes your use of time less efficient?  We have already talked in previous posts about managing emails and, certainly, time management in general is an important…Read more

These days it’s incredibly hard to stay on top of things at work . The ease of communication means everybody keeps telling us everything – even when we don’t need to know!  And as we move up that success ladder, because we are good at what we do, the increase in responsibilities eats into what little time we have even further.  It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.  It’s easy to feel we are always reacting rather than taking the initiative.  And then when we get home, we have to drop it all and make…Read more