Leadership

Many leaders struggle with the urge to jump in and fix problems themselves rather than trusting their teams to handle the work. Whether you're a technical expert or came up through management, effective leadership means stepping back, enabling others, and resisting the temptation to meddle under the guise of being helpful.

Do you consider yourself a negative thinker and do you sometimes feel undervalued for it? This month’s blog looks at how to get best value from the ability to look on the dark side and how to do it well so you aren’t misunderstood or your contributions overlooked.

When you first go into consulting, everyone tells you it’s famine or feast.  So you learn to make the most of any feasting and prepare for the lean times.  Even the famines have their value: a chance to catch your breath, rest and renew and slow the pace before the next period of abundance.

Confession time – are you a manager and also a bit of a Fixer? Do you like to run a tight ship and keep a close eye? Whether you manage projects, people or both, you love that warm, fuzzy feeling of having solved someone else’s problem, taking a burden off their shoulders, making it your problem and then fixing it…

Next month we’ll be heading north of the border to deliver an opening keynote at the Chartered Institute of Fundraising’s Scottish Conference on Fresh Thoughts on Leadership.

Hello All. We first put this piece out in 2020 during the early part of pandemic.  Three years on, we noticed a renewed interest in it, with lots of you clicking to read it on our website.  It seems to chime with people in the light of the latest set of challenges the economic and political world is throwing at…

Humans eh?  You think we’d have cracked this giving feedback thing by now.  We start with the best intentions – give it often, be open to getting it back a bit too – yet when the pressure is on, we forget to make it a priority and fall back on pointing out the flaws in a rush and staying quiet…

At a recent away day, a team were trying to get a date in the diary for a meeting. Everyone kept saying “I can’t do that date, I’m working.” We were going around in circles until the team’s leader said “We need to rethink our attitude to meetings – when we have a meeting, that IS work!”