My Comfort Zone
Tweet This Post Read More →
We must capture their hearts and minds!
This is a picture of an exchange we heard a few years ago in a client session. It’s so rich we just had to make a picture out of it. It is can be easy for leaders to lose touch with the cares and concerns of the people that work for them. By not connecting with what matters to their people, they lose the sense of reality about what’s going on in the wider organisation. In this picture, the leadership team, excited and motivated by their charts... [Read More...]
Who does all the work around here?
We see this a lot in organisations. Everybody thinks that the people above them don’t really contribute as much as they do to the success of the business. Result? Disengaged employees at every level. What about you? Who does all the work in your organisation. Why not show this to a colleague and ask them what they think? Tweet This Post Read More →
Why do I feel so empty?
Tweet This Post Read More →
We must capture their hearts and minds!
Tweet This Post Read More →
Congruence and leading change
How leadership incogruence obstructs change After many years working with organisations in change, two things have become clear to me: first, that many leaders see change as something they have to get other people to do and second, that many employees think their leaders don’t ‘walk the talk’ or practice the behavioural changes they preach. A typical change programme in today’s organisations may come packaged as ‘values-based... [Read More...]
What is engagement?
Engagement is Connection … The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has just published a new report by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke on employee engagement. We wholeheartedly recommend this report – it makes some great points and is filled with useful case studies. It’s very hard to get to the end and still avoid the conclusion that having an engaged workforce really does improve bottom line results. But what actually is engagement? ... [Read More...]
The time cost of poor communication
What I learned about communication from commuting into London every day … Two things I hate: Train delays and boring Powerpoint presentations. They both waste time, and not in an unrelated way, as I want to show. The metaphor of time as a scarce resource is a well integrated part of the Western worldview – we don’t just talk about how we waste time, but how we save time, spend time, how time runs out, how some time can be set aside, how... [Read More...]
Behaviour and theory
Economists and Sir Fred Goodwin … For some reason, the saga unfolding around Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension revelations last week made a connection in my brain with distant memories of economics lectures. The lecture in question was on the “behavioural theory of the firm”, taken from a book of the same name by Richard Cyert and James March. Before this book was written in the sixties, the main theory of the firm in economics circles was... [Read More...]
The meaning of meaning
What does a meaningful workplace actually look like? In my review of Gurnek Bains’ Meaning Inc my main criticism was that it barely said anything about representation, without which there can be no meaning. Unfortunately there wasn’t any space to develop the idea further, and as it probably sounds a bit arcane on first reading I want to spend some time filling in a few blanks. Back in the nineteenth century most scientists believed there was... [Read More...]
