In Praise of Followership
Why high-performing teams aren’t just built on great leaders — but great team mates too. We talk endlessly about leadership — and often forget the other half of the equation. Followership. It’s not a popular word. It sounds passive. Junior. Less important. But in my experience, the best teams — whether on the battlefield, in…
Avoiding Ambushes: Leading Change Effectively
In private equity-backed businesses, change isn’t just a part of the job — it is the job. Delivering a value creation plan inevitably requires rapid evolution: new systems, restructured teams, revised strategies, and different ways of working. The challenge isn’t whether change is necessary — it’s how to execute it in a way that sticks.…
The Spectrums of Leadership
In the last article we talked about the Foundations of Leadership. These are the basic skills that you must have in place before you can start thinking about the spectrums. If you lack self-awareness or fail to understand the context of the situation you are in, then it’s hard to think about adjusting your behaviour. Leadership is all about behaviour but behaviour is based…
How to Create a Strategic Plan
The purpose of this article is to help you create a strategic plan. It will focus on the four following questions. Where are we now? Where do we want to go? What do we need to do to get theere? How do we measure success? We will use Barcelona Football Club as an example of a highly successful organisation with a clear vision and a strategy.
How Evolution shapes your thoughts
There is more than one way to answer the question, ‘what is coaching?’ But most coaches agree that coaching is about supporting and enabling the process of change and self-improvement. The way in which the coach achieves this effect might be different, but it will usually involve a combination of listening, asking questions, sharing insights…
Building Trust with the Triple H Exercise
One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how little executive teams know one another. One of the lessons my first Company Commander in the Royal Marines taught me was… ‘get to know your men, develop a strong understanding of who they are and what makes them tick. If you don’t know…
Developing People: Give them what they want, when they need it
The reason I have dedicated my professional life towards leadership development is because I know how much of an impact strong leadership can have on organisations. So much time is wasted because of… A lack of clarity on what we’re working towards Clear boundaries and responsibilities between people and departments Competing with peers rather than…
Are you stuck in the drama triangle?
What is the drama triangle? The Drama Triangle is model of human interaction which maps the different roles people play when faced with conflict. It tends to appear in families or groups where conflict happens regularly. Once established, the drama triangle plays out over and over again often with different people stepping in to take…
Resilient Thinking: Using Systems to drive Behaviour Change
This will be the fifth and final article that I am going to write on the subject of resilience. The first four articles attempt to understand the problem from a mental and physical perspective. Why do we have a resilience problem? The Impact of Evolutionary Psychology on our Resilience The Impact of our Environment on…
Being Resilient Requires Goals, Purpose and Presence…
This is my fourth article in a five part series, which attempts to break down the subject of ‘resilience’. This article will focus on the value of goals, the need for a purpose and the value of our attention which I sometimes refer to as ‘presence’. Goal Orientation How do you manage a project? You…
The Impact of our Environment on our Resilience
In my last article, I talked about the role of evolutionary psychology and the impact it has on your resilience in the modern world. This article will focus on the role of your environment. The picture below is often known as the Freudian Iceberg. It illustrates the point that the behaviour and results that we…
The Impact of Evolutionary Psychology on Resilience
This is the second article in a series that attempts to explain ‘why we have a resilience problem’. In my last article I wrote about how we are designed for a world that we no longer inhabit. I wrote about the slow process of human evolution and the impact that the last 200 years have…
Why do we have a Resilience Problem?
The reason we have a resilience problem is because we live in a world that we are no longer designed for. I appreciate that this is a simplistic explanation so there will be other factors and reasons involved. I want to outline what I believe to be the foundation of the resilience problem. Let’s go…
3 Tips for Effectively Communicating with Your Remote Workforce
If you’re in a leadership position at your company, you already know the value of having excellent communication skills—and how communication is essential for fostering your team’s productivity. Whether conveying important information to clients or disseminating tasks to internal teams, great communicators are able to share essential information while simultaneously inspiring and connecting with their…
