Influence 3

Working Identity

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 05:00:00 +0000

"Our working identity is not a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered at the very core of our inner being. Rather, it is made up of many possibilities ..."

Compassionate Leadership

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 05:00:00 +0000

“The key message of our research: for optimal leadership, wisdom and compassion must be combined. Wisdom without compassion can be ruthless, and compassion without wisdom can be naïve” (p4).

Succeeding through the middle

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 04:00:00 +0000

She calls it "Kanter's Law": "Everything looks like a failure in the middle." In a Harvard Business Review article in 2009 Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote that "Everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is just the middles that involve hard work." It's an interesting thought and the principle does seem to apply to most changes or new approaches we take, whether in our business or our personal lives. The initial decisions and commitm...

Want Do Be?

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 04:30:00 +0000

Is what you do who you want to be?

As we start into a new year, it's a useful time to be intentional about what we want to achieve in the year ahead: what's important to us, what has value, where our focus should be.

Time to pay attention

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 23:00:00 +0000

We live in an "attention economy"; our precious and limited cognitive resources are constantly being enticed, attracted, lured, tempted, assaulted, and distracted. it reminds us that our attention has value. And therefore, we give value to what<

The excellence of habits

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 03:15:00 +0000

"We are what we repeatedly do," said Aristotle. "Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." In the past two newsletters I've highlighted the issues of strengths and confidence. Each of these has been a significant theme in workshops and coaching this year. Another significant theme has been the power of habit - for both good and bad. Let's focus on the good in the spirit of both building on strengths and building and sustaining confidence as we pursue "ex...

Ingredients for confidence

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

"Confidence," says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, director and chair of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, "is an expectation of a positive outcome. It is not a personality trait; it is an assessment of a situation that sparks motivation." As I noted in the last issue, confidence (or more accurately, the lack of it) is an issue that arises frequently in leadership development workshops, assessments and coaching. From "imposter syndrome" to harsh feed...

Workshops - find out more

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 05:00:00 +0000

Develop your leaders and teams with a Situational Leadership®, DiSC, Emotional Intelligence or Communication @ Work workshop. Email for more information ... Check out our public workshop dates here ...

Strengths bring out the best

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 05:00:00 +0000

It's been a while ... six months, in fact, since the last newsletter. Across those months a few themes seemed to emerge from the workshops and coaching I've been doing. So I'd like to highlight and try to connect those themes in the next couple of articles. First, life is hard enough for many people without workplaces unnecessarily making it even harder. Second, confidence is fundamental to performance, development and resilience. It's also variable, tenuous and rarely as de...

Leading with the mind

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

"You have power over your mind - not outside events," said the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. "Realise this and you will find strength." It's advice that's nearly 2000 years old, and it still makes a lot of sense. But just because something makes sense doesn't make it easy to do. Exercising our power over our minds, like any worthwhile activity, takes practice and effort. It's most commonly called "being mindful". "Mindfulness is awarene...

Time to recalibrate

Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:00:00 +0000

New years often start with new (or renewed) resolutions. And that's good. Here's a slight variation on that: the idea of "recalibrating" ourselves for the new year. Indeed, consciously recalibrating ourselves any time we're approaching change or new opportunities: a new role, a new challenge, a new project, a new phase of a project, a presentation, a meeting, a new week, or even a new day. Two powerful personal calibrations that can be applied at both macro an...

What's the time telling you?

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 02:00:00 +0000

At some point when we were young we learned to tell the time. For those of us of a certain age that meant working out what the "big hand" and the "little hand" on the clock meant. In the digital age it's more a case of interpreting the numbers I guess. Being able to "tell the time" is an important skill. It helps us schedule, plan, monitor, and coordinate our activities with others. A sense of time helps us develop patterns of activity and daily rhythms. ...

Is that comfort zone past its use-by date?

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Comfort is a state we typically aspire to. Financial comfort. Physical comfort. Emotional comfort. Social comfort. We like our comfort zones. But ... (you knew it was going to get uncomfortable) ... "The more comfortable we are, the harder it is to change." As the world's leading executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith speaks with authority, having spent decades coaching successful people to get even better. To change. And that requires getting them outside their comfort zones....

Just a second ...

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We get 86,400 of them every day. Seconds. We barely notice them. But a lot can happen in a second. In one second our Earth will travel 29 kilometres on its trip around the Sun. Thirty stars will explode. There will be 40,000 Google searches. Ten thousand Cokes will be consumed. Three hundred websites will be created. Four babies will be born. Two people will die. More than one plane will take off. Your heart will (probably) beat at least once. It may not sound like much but that seco...

EQ and leadership style

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 03:00:00 +0000

I sometimes start leadership workshops with a simple question: "What's the positive difference this thing called 'leadership' actually makes?" Another way of thinking about it is to ask what we wouldn't have if we didn't have leadership. ypically, a handful of key words or terms emerge from the small group discussions: Direction. Support. Motivation/Morale. Development. Sometimes we engage in some debate around whether people need external motivation or w...

Reconnecting leadership

Wed, 09 May 2018 03:00:00 +0000

The rise of leadership as an object of our collective fascination has coincided precisely with the decline of leadership in our collective estimation," says Harvard Kennedy School lecturer and founder of the Center for Public Leadership Barbara Kellerman. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford Graduate School professor agrees. "I look at the data," he told the Financial Times. "So the data say engagement is low and trust in leaders is low; that isn't cynical, that's the ...

Seeking perspectives

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 23:00:00 +0000

Autumn leaves, bin chickens and perspective ... In Canberra recently, I took a walk outside to enjoy the crisp, clear autumn air, breathing in the change of season, and admiring the early falling leaves of autumn. They're not as common a sight where I live (and certainly not this early in the year) so I took some photos: leaves on the trees, leaves on the lawn, leaves on the path. I was fascinated by the leaves. And then I noticed one of the hotel staff sweeping the leaves off the...

Manage Your E-bank

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 20:00:00 +0000

We all have the same amount of time, but we also know that within that time we can get more or less done depending on our energy levels. And yet we tend to look at the clock a lot more than we pay attention to our energy account; we try to manage time when we'd be better managing our energy. Dr Alan Watkins offers a useful technique to help with this in his book, Coherence: The secret science of brilliant leadership. His work is based on the idea of coherence: "in essence, the...

Growth, time and attention

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Towards the end of his memoir, Shoe Dog, Nike founder Phil Knight tells of a conversation with the CEO of Nissho, Masuro Hayami. He describes him as "Perhaps the wisest man I ever knew". As they sat in a hot tub after a barbecue in the backyard of Hayami's beach house near Atami, Japan, Knight was complaining about the challenges he faced at Nike even after taking the Nike company public. "We have so much opportunity," he told Hayami. "But we're having a ...

Hits, Misses, and Wishes

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Around this time of year I often ask people I'm coaching to think about their "hits, misses, and wishes". It's a simple way of taking a snapshot of the year and framing some celebration, learning and planning in the transition to a new year. So ... What have been your "hits" this year? The things that have gone well, that have been successful, that you would mark down as achievements? What are you proud of? How have you improved? This morning I recei...

The humanness of strategy

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 04:00:00 +0000

Identifying, pursuing and enabling positive change presents a critical challenge for both individuals and organisations. On the one hand, we know that change, improvement and adaptation are critical. The world around us isn't standing still waiting for us to be comfortable with change. Stagnation and sameness breed irrelevance and decline. On the other hand, change and imagination invoke risk and the potential for another sort of failure. On the one hand, we are innately creative a...

Delivering value to your leadership customers

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 04:00:00 +0000

"It's not uncommon to find that 20% to 40% of the acts and activities of leaders at all three levels [top, middle, frontline] provide only questionable value to those above and below them. It's also not uncommon to find that leaders are underinvesting in 20% to 40% of the acts and activities that interviewees at their level cite as important." That means one to two days of effort per week every week is misdirected, wasted or neglected. That has to come at a cost. And ...

Making Achievement a Habit

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 07:00:00 +0000

It wasn't that I forgot my new coffee KeepCup this morning. I just haven't yet developed the habit of taking it with me. (It was a Father's Day gift.) More important than coffee cup habits are the habits that either enable us to achieve our aspirations or hinder us from pursuing them successfully. And that's a central point of Bernard Roth's book, The Achievement Habit. "Fear of failure," he says, "often keeps us in an unsatisfying routine. Instea...

A culture of confidence?

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Amy Edmondson has been studying teams for many years. Early in her work she was intrigued by the apparent paradox of the highest performing medical teams also being the ones that had the highest rate of reported negative incidents. How could that be?
It turned out that these high performing teams had a culture that encouraged them to put up their hands when they noticed a problem. Rather than cover up mistakes or let concerns remain silent, the members of these teams spoke up confid...

Wonderful Warsaw ...

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 06:00:00 +0000

It's not every week you get the opportunity to visit somewhere as far away or interesting as Warsaw, Poland. But that's exactly where the Center for Leadership Studies asked me to go in August to work with a wonderful group of facilitators from across Europe and even futher afield. It was a great opportunity to share the Situational Leadership approach and support the development of training professionals. And Warsaw looked a picture in the late summer ......

Bridges aren't made of fluffy stuff

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 07:00:00 +0000

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...

3 Steps for the Places You'll Go

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 07:00:00 +0000

"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...

Managing three levels of focus

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

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...

Make it easier

Tue, 23 May 2017 07:50:00 +0000

"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 Rules

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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 ...

Who's running your day?

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 05:00:00 +0000

This little card was a timely reminder for me; maybe it will be for you too. The challenge, of course, is how? How do you manage to run your day and not let it run you? Logically, you have to find a way to get in front of things. So, here are three simple suggestions for increasing the amount of each day that you run. Start mindfully. We know that mindset is crucial to performance. So it makes sense to get that right first thing. Even if it's only ten minutes at the sta...

Building Swift Trust

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 06:00:00 +0000

There's an African proverb that says: "If you want to go fast, travel alone. If you want to go far, travel together". It goes to the heart of working cooperatively and collaboratively. We know that together we can achieve more. And we know that working together requires the essential ingredient of trust. It's essential for team performance, for collaboration and for managing effective change. But there are a couple of real challenges to this ideal. One is this sor...

Do you value your focus?

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 02:00:00 +0000

"Your focus determines your reality" is one of those quotes I find myself coming back to time and again. Whether it's managing attention, seeing things in context, prioritising, or interpreting experiences, focus shapes our attention, our actions and our attitudes. We are becoming increasingly aware that focus is essential to managing ourselves and our work in a complex world. The human brain receives 11 million bits of information per second from the environment but can ...

Valuing the power of everyday influence

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 21:00:00 +0000

Whether we think about value at the organisational, team or individual level, value is at the heart of our performance, contribution and effectivenss every day. It's a key to sustained success. Indeed, it's a key to survival. But value is not just something to consider through the lens of business or organisational strategy. Value is not simply about price or function or savings or systems. Value is also an everyday activity, reflected in nearly everything we do. And, important...

Connect. Communicate. Collaborate.

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 06:00:00 +0000

Getting to collaboration is a process. There's no doubt that collaboration is a key to organisational and team success. No one is as smart as all of us, and we bring groups of talented people together because we know that harnessing talent is the most efficient and productive way to achieve our goals, adapt and grow. A McKinsey article noted that: "Nearly 80 percent of the senior executives surveyed in a 2005 study said that effective coordination across product, functional, ...

Situational Leadership® Workshops

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 06:00:00 +0000

While most Influence 3 workshops are conducted on-site for client organisations, occasional public Situational Leadership® workshops are offered throughout the year. Our next public Situational Leadership® workshop will be in Sydney on Thursday 27 October.

Focus for Success

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:00:00 +0000

It's probably not surprising that one of the most high-value and important principles of productivty and performance is also one of the most challenging. Focus is the "open secret" to improving performance and productivity. But in the context of our information-overloaded, constant interruption and fractured attention working environments it's hard to maintain. Which is why it's important to .. focus on it. Over five years, the Gensler organisation surveyed 90,000 p...