The siren song of multidisciplinary leadership teams and how it goes wrong I was talking to a friend from Google the other day of the new leadership structure their organisation has adopted. They call it leadership quads. Where every area has a group of people from four different disciplines co-leading…

Why we keep failing to hold people to account for poor behaviour I was having a conversation with a former female colleague about things she’s seen at work. She had many examples like this: a female colleague was forcibly kissed and groped by a male colleage. They complained to HR…

And a framework to understand why The meeting started with the senior manager in the room saying “it’s really important that we have clarity on this”. This, in itself, was a warning sign because people shouldn’t need to say they are being clear. If you have to say it then…

What happens when you lose context, autonomy and accountability in the work environment — Imagine you’re walking along a street, and suddenly everyone is running in the opposite direction to you, screaming. What should you do? From an evolutionary perspective, we are programmed to gravitate to the group of people fleeing danger. These days, more of us might head onwards, readying our phones for…

Which style of leader are you? Generals and gardeners are two very different types of leader. The General is about giving orders, holding people to account and rigid discipline. The Gardener is about creating an environment where things can grow and flourish within boundaries. What kind of leader do most…

What Victor Lustig can teach us about getting our way I don’t have many heroes but Victor Lustig is one of them. If you look at him, he doesn’t have a face that can inspire trust and yet he may have been the greatest con artist who ever lived. This…

The first big inflection point of management and how to handle it Over the years I’ve had a lot of coaching conversations with managers. Whether they be managers I’ve appointed, managers I’ve been coaching, managers I’ve trained or managers I’ve inherited. …

The more you have the less use it becomes Whenever you make someone a manager you should ask them why they want to be a manager. A lot of the time you’ll get answers such as: “I want to progress my career” “I want the authority to get things done” …

What a doomsday cult can teach us about our ability to admit we’re wrong One of my favourite stories is the birth of cognitive dissonance. The science of human beings’ inability to admit they are wrong. It’s a story of a 1950s cult called the Seekers led by a lady…