Take Away Line All of us have these little annoying loops that go round in our minds. They can sometimes appear almost paranoid. But can we think of them as purposeful in anyway? Sometimes they can mask a bigger concern, distracting us from tackling that bigger concern. Here’s a coaching tale of working with these…
Take Away Line Half-hearted praise does as much for self-esteem as casual criticism. If you want to build the confidence of your people, they need to feel recognised not praised. And that’s about how you engage with them. Whole-hearted and fully present engagement may sound ungainly as a phrase, but it’s the trick to build…
Take Away Line An organisational community can be torn over questions of change. All too often, as in the case presented here, resistance can be configured as a monolith to be crushed or avoided. But working with an organisational leader to deal with resistance, considering it as a source of intelligence while thinking of the resisters as…
Take Away Line It’s generally well worth looking below the surface when faced with a consultancy assignment. What’s asked for can be odd, appear wrong, but beneath the surface, there may be a more than valid request for help, but expressed in a way that masks the deeper challenge. Framing this challenge in medical language,…
Take Away Line If there’s anything we can learn from the collapse of the banks and other major institutions, it’s that their boards have to be more than a mere shadowy presence: their input matters. The consequences of weak governance can be hard to spot until it’s too late. Underpinning weak governance is ignorance –…
Take Away Line As the group at the ‘top of the shop’ in their organisations, there is an easy and natural tendency for boards to become somewhat closed off, like a closed system, impervious to signals of how it may be going. Only by opening up can a board develop. The ‘royal road’ to excellence…
Take Away Line Good governance, along with its great governance and weak governance counterparts, is only partly a describable condition – and in this blog we have a go at that – but it is also an outcome from a set of processes to help a board discern how well it is doing and responding…
Take Away Line After a year of exciting and challenging international assignments, alongside the more typical ones in the UK and other European Countries, it’s time to roast a Christmas chestnut and reflect on the learning that they have brought in their wake. So, in a Christmas stocking full of tall stories from far lands,…
Take Away Line Rattling through the bush on a long journey can be a great way to reflect, discuss and formulate. On one journey in the Madagascan Highlands, we talked about how to choose the right leadership development programme, developing a simple typology of four types aimed at helping those new to these ideas a…
Take Away Line The European Union is supporting the development of civil society in a number of its neighbours, seeing their stability and prosperity as in our interest as well as a good thing to support. Solidarity in action. But developing civil society in a country that has often been reported as being nervous about…
