There’s an enormous amount of focus on leadership, and this is understandable. Good leaders make a huge difference as they improve organisations and the wider world, while bad leaders can leave an ugly mark of bad results and damaged people. There’s much, much less focus on followership, about 1000 times less it would seem! My […]
How Teams Can Embrace Positive Conflict
Conflict is a bad thing for a team, right? No, not right. Quite wrong actually. Show me a team where everyone always agrees and I’ll show you a team that’s falling a long way short of its potential. When teams avoid conflict these are some of the results: Growth and improvement will be limited, […]
Life Lessons From Leicester City FC
In 2016 Leicester City Football Club won the English Premier League. The Foxes, as the team is known, started the season at 5000 to 1 odds. They narrowly avoided relegation just one year earlier, and had a player list that was just a fraction of the value of teams like Manchester United. This was one […]
Starting Team Meetings with a Human Moment
Here’ a question for you if you’re a manager or a team leader. How do you spend the first 5 minutes of your your weekly/ fortnightly team meetings? We get straight down to serious business (e.g. we share project status updates) We talk about something work related but fairly light (e.g. we share good […]
How Not to Treat Workers Like Robots
Automation has enabled modern organisations to make giant leaps forward. This has led to significant benefits such as improved reliability, greater accuracy, faster results and reduced costs. However, with automation comes a risk – that the people who work in organisations may begin to feel like robots rather than the real live human beings they are. To feel human […]
How to Safely Remove an Elephant From a Room
We all know the term “the elephant in the room”. This phrase usually refers to a serious issue that everyone knows about but doesn’t acknowledge or mention because it’s difficult to discuss or deal with. Examples of elephants hanging about in rooms are all around us. I bet some of these sound familiar: […]