A recent workshop included participants presenting reports on their application of learning from earlier sessions. They're always rich and interesting experiences.
One of the presenters talked about introducing sessions into his leadership team meetings that focused more attention on "the fluffy stuff". The team he worked with were from "hard skills" backgrounds and were more accustomed to facts and figures. Focusing on communication behaviours, collaboration...

"Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act"  (Dr Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go.) Life is indeed a great balancing act as Dr Seuss's little book wisely reminds us. Sometimes it's relatively easy to maintain our balance. And sometimes it's anything but. Whether it's a change of role or a change of pace, a change in leadership or a change in place we live and work in environments that rarely stay stable for l...

This article is brought to you, as Sesame Street says, by the letter M. In fact, by three sets of the letter M. And by the idea of focus.
At the start of the year I wrote about focus, including one of my favourite quotes: "Your focus determines your reality". Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, has called focus a "super power" for working in the 21st Century economy where we daily face the challenge of information overload and constant distraction. Compounding this...

"What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem." This simple statement from Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch: How to change things when change is hard, is a useful reminder about not falling prey to easy assumptions about people's performance. Have your ever experienced the frustration of setting up a new approach (usually designed to be more efficient) only to have it resisted or ignored? (Shifts in records and reporting processe, attempts to crea...

Energy is a hot topic these days. We hear and read about energy shortages, about alternative energy sources and about the spiralling demand for energy. It's also a hot topic at the personal and organisational level. The Energy Project, in a survey of 150,000 people, found that "74% of employees are experiencing a personal energy crisis". That's worrying, but not surprising, given the increasing demands, uncertainty and stresses many of us face. Energy is critical ...