Use the right tool for the job
I am going to talk about two things that have happened this week. On the face of it they may not appear to be related, but if one moves away from the detail – the ‘what happened’ or the ‘what is’, to the abstract where you might explore themes and lessons learnt, they are very closely related.
Firstly, it is about kitty litter as a tool….
I had just come from a coaching session with a client. This is the second thing I want to talk about. We had been discussing employee engagement surveys….
“I don’t know”
“I don’t know” is not an acceptable answer. This blog is a simple story about a young consultant who ran out of ideas and said it. And then it is about an unexpected prod and a vote of confidence from an unexpected quarter that not only saved the day but shaped a life.
Hope Is a Strategy (Well, Sort Of)
As I get deeper into coaching a client about her career, increasingly we centre on her values and interests, which brought us to consider ‘hope’ as a factor. What is the taste and feel of her hope? Until we understand that hope is essential to her moving forward in her stagnated career and life, we’re fiddling. […]
Being a Leader is Hard, so WHAT (are we going to do about it)?
The corner has been turned on the complexity of leadership. The true skill is in achieving simplicity: Simplicity with the clarity that can come only from a depth of curiosity and reflection. It is true that it is harder to be simple with clarity. It requires regular and full attention. Being a leader surely requires constant and deep reflection to develop and maintain clarity of vision and purpose. It is hard to do that alone.
That is why leadership coaching has become such a precious and sought-after service.
In my flow? In my flow!
This blog started in
my head as I was watching an interview with Peter Sellers on YouTube, having lunch.
“The only time that you’re really happy is at the time that you’re doing it. Not when the film comes out; not when you’re preparing for the film; but at the moment you’re doing the take on the
floor. When you do it and that moment comes out of you and when you’ve done it and you remember that….that’s the time when the achievement – the full sense of achievement comes out.” –
Peter Sellers in a 1974 interview with Parkinson.
I vividly remember the first time I realised that I was ‘in my flow’ as positive psychologist Csikszentmihalyi
labelled this experience a couple of decades after Sellers identified it. I had received an ambitious commission from my former employer, SABMiller, to design
and write a course on supervisory/managerial skills that they wanted to roll out to all their breweries across Africa.