Category: Leadership
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DO WE NEED TO MEET OR IS AN EMAIL OK?
These days we tend to communicate online a lot of the time. Anyone with a young person in the family will know that the portable supercomputer they call a phone and keep on them at all times of day and night is NOT for making phone calls. It is for tweeting, snapping, gramming, TikTok, WhatsApp,…
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WHAT GOT YOU HERE…
A few years ago I was working with a CFO who had come to me for advice on how to deal with her direct reports. She felt that they were not meeting her expectations, that she had to closely monitor them and their work, that she couldn’t trust them to do it her way, that…
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THE ART OF THE ‘DIFFICULT CONVERSATION’
As a manager you will have had occasions I’m sure where you knew you needed to have a chat with someone in your team but you just didn’t do it. These situations can pop up at any time and often we might let the opportunity to address the issue slide right by. Why do we…
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HOW DO YOU MAKE YOUR COFFEE?
The office has a coffee machine for anyone to use, its one of the perks (pun intended) of the workplace. We want everyone to be on their A game, and a caffeinated team is a productive team right? That’s a theory anyway. The coffee machine is one of those that has the water reservoir at…
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HOW LONG IS TOO LONG IN THE ONE JOB?
One of the biggest issues for employees is “lack of career advancement” opportunities in their organisation. Almost every employee engagement survey will score poorly on this metric. Most people want to be able to progress and advance within their own organisation. It’s understandable, this is the place where they are building their expertise and technical…
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THE WORST MANAGER IN THE COMPANY…
One of the latest buzzwords floating about the internet is “Radical Transparency”. This means different things in different organisations, and while for some it means sharing the inner workings of the company with all employees to give them sense of ownership and involvement for others it amounts to little more than publicly naming and shaming…
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MY NEW BOSS IS BULLYING ME…
The new boss has just started and while we are all going to miss Alison, the team is feeling pretty positive about things and looking forward to what this new guy, Michael, is going to bring to the table. We’ve come through COVID relatively unscathed, we’ve enjoyed working flexibly and we’ve continued to deliver against…
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7 ATTRIBUTES OF GREAT BOSSES
Most managers would like for their team to like them, personally, as a person. Nobody likes to be disliked and we are all more comfortable with being the popular boss rather than the unpopular one. And if we can’t popular, appreciated and admired can we at least be respected in our role? There was a…
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IF YOU ARE GOING TO ASK THE QUESTION…
I’ve worked with a number of organisations who regularly conduct employee engagement surveys. These surveys typically have somewhere between 40 and 90 questions and cover a range of topics including: Employment Conditions, Career Objectives, Conduct and Performance, Manager Capability, Leadership Capability, Communication and Consultation, Development Opportunities, and so on. The point of these surveys is…
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THE MECHANICS AND DYNAMICS OF LEADING TEAMS
I was listening to a great podcast this morning about working with high performance sporting teams, and it got me thinking about leadership in any situation, including the workplace. There was a discussion about the mechanics and the dynamics of the team and here is what I understood that to mean. The Mechanics This is…
The Workplace Coach 