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.…
Discipline Wins: How Leading Measures Drive Performance
When I was going through Royal Marines training, the Physical Training Instructors had a mantra: “Give 100%, trust the process.” There was no talk of passing the Commando Course. No discussion about the final test or what it would feel like to wear the green beret. Just relentless focus on the next hill sprint, the…
Do you Plan Tactically or Strategically?
We are far better at planning for the short-term than we are for the long-term. Think about when you get in the car. If you don’t know where you are going, you tap in the details to a sat-nav system to tell you the route. You might have an advanced system that updates itself to…
Why High Performers Struggle with Feedback
Challenge and feedback are both valuable but often difficult to receive. Why? How can something that is good for you generate a negative emotional reaction? Challenge reminds us that there are many ways in which we can view the world. It reminds us that there are other perspectives out there rather than just our own.…
The Principles of Leadership
What Does the Word “Leadership” Mean? The word leadership is like the word religion, it means so much that it actually means very little. My neighbour goes to Church every Sunday, she could be described as religious… but then so could a jihadi fighting for Isis in the Middle-East. The broader the definition of the…
10 Questions that Uncover High Performers…
One of the challenges involved in building a high performing team is selecting the right people. You can’t build a high performing team with low performing people so who you let into your organisation matters. It is arguably one of the most important decisions you make especially if your team is small. Hiring someone is…
The Human Givens Approach
We have an expectation that people should understand us. Understand our perspective, our reasoning and our expectations from other people. The problem with this is that we rarely know ourselves. We don’t often know what we want out of life. We don’t know what makes us happy. And we rarely know why we behave in…
Six Thinking Errors – Which one is Yours?
There are six common thinking errors that people suffer from. These are examples of negative mental models that people have. I describe them as negative because they usually lead to a behaviour or a feeling that we don’t want. If you can understand them and watch out for the ones that you suffer from, you…
Are you an Unpredictable Leader?
Have you ever slogged your guts out on a piece of work making sure that every fact and figure has been checked? Have you ever written a report where you’ve really put the time and effort in to make sure the research and the conclusions ‘stack-up’ to some tough scrutiny? And then when you’ve shared…
How to Exponentially Increase Team Productivity
Last week, I wrote about personal productivity pointing out that not everything on the ‘to-do list’ has equal impact. I also wrote about planning using your energy levels and briefly touched upon the concept of ‘deep work’. I think that most people know about these concepts but if knowledge was the only thing we needed,…
2 Simple Tips that will Dramatically Improve your Productivity…
If you google ‘productivity tips’, chances are you will get lots of tactical advice, hints and tips that can help you cram more into the day. ‘Tidy your desk, work fewer hours, ignore your phone or even take a nap at work.’ My personal favourite is ‘get up early’. Bill Gates gets up at 0400…
How Shackleton built his High Performance Team
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated journey to the Antarctic in 1914 is legendary amongst survival stories. When disaster struck and Shackleton’s ship The Endurance became trapped in the ice, he led his men to Elephant Island before taking a small boat across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia. He then launched a rescue mission and returned…
How many Leadership Styles do you have?
Leadership is all about behaviour. It is what you do that counts not what you say because people remember how you made them feel rather than what you said. This is one of the reasons that it is so challenging because, you need to have the flexibility to change your behaviour depending upon the context and…
Would you pass the 10 Day Leadership Challenge?
There isn’t much point in running your own business unless you take advantage of some of the freedom that it gives you. You’re not a full-time employee so you can choose what you spend your time working on. Last week, I was lucky enough to be invited to the British Army’s Recruitment and Training Division,…
