Want to be highly effective as a leader? Be coachable
When moving up the corporate ladder, many leaders lose the ability to be coached. Seniority, both in level and age, impacts the level of coachability negatively. Despite having plenty of experience, this paradox makes it difficult for them to adjust and learn new things. They develop blind spots. And yet coachability is key for any leader, regardless of age or level, to be an effective leader. In fact, research by Zenger and Folkman,...
Your impact is your legacy
You may have a lot of strategies for the business, change initiatives, cost saving, or growth. So why not have a strategy for your impact? Do you know what impact you are having at work? Do you know what kind of ripple effect you create around you? Do you know how you make others feel? For the last 25+ years, we have worked with many hundreds of leaders around the world, and we have taken great interest in the importance of leadership...
5 things generous (=successful) leaders do
Having team members who don’t freely and generously share what they know is a challenge most teams face. And yet, a team can't afford not to share their thoughts, ideas and experience. Sometimes people don’t make the link between lack of generosity and not getting as good a result as they could have. And yet, the link is real. Workplaces need to be generous places. As a leader, you can show the way for what generosity means and what...
STOP chasing perfection
A reporter once asked a very successful businessman:“What is the secret to your success?”The man replied: “Two words”.“And they are?”“Right decisions”“OK, I see—and how do you make the right decisions?”“One word”“And that is?”“Experience”“I see, and how do you get experience?”“Two words”“And what are they?”“Wrong decisions” We love this story. In it the perils of chasing perfection are perfectly described. So many people have...
Be a storyteller
The very first book we wrote was a business novel called ‘The Team Formula – A Leadership Tale of a Team Who Found Their Way’. We chose this format because we feel so strongly about the power of storytelling. And the impact was staggering – we have lost count of how many people have told us “you could have been talking about us, I recognised so many of those situations!” And that’s the beauty of stories, they make theories and ideas...
Four ways to improve social health
Health is important for us all, at work and in life as a whole. We often think and talk about it as physical health and mental health. But what about social health? This could be described as team health, collaborative health, connectedness health, belonging health, networking health – basically anything that talks about the health that our social interactions (or lack thereof) create. People spend so much time in a work environment,...
