Is your middle management holding you back?
It is true that the very best leaders don’t make all the decisions; they don’t have all the ideas. Instead, they inspire and empower, unleashing the energies of their people to supercharge growth and performance. But the inspirational model of leadership is hardly guaranteed to succeed, not least because some people don’t want to be […]
6 habits for intentional leadership
Great leaders don’t just say the first thing that comes into their heads, or lose themselves whimsically down rabbit holes of distraction. They act with clarity, purpose and intent. The challenge is that leaders are always busy – there will always be more to do than your time and resources will allow – and busy […]
Why Self-Confidence is Making You Fail
*Originally published Nov 2020, updated Aug 2021 The Greeks ditched the idea of the flawless hero at least 2,500 years ago, and not just because it made for bad fiction. Real people inevitably make mistakes, even if they don’t always recognise them. For some reason though, we still gravitate towards the ideal, from Churchill to […]
Hybrid working: How to get the best from video calls
Originally published Feb 2021, updated Aug 2021 Pretty much every business in the country owes Dr Herbert Ives a debt of gratitude. The American scientist, who is perhaps best noted for his work in the 1930s on special relativity, led the team at Bell Labs that pioneered the world’s first video telephony system. It […]
Leadership lessons: building your war cabinet
Originally published August 2020, updated August 2021 There was lots of war talk during the worst phases of the pandemic. We were “battling” the virus, receiving reports from the “frontline” and such. It shouldn’t be surprising – politicians regularly evoke the spirit of past common struggles to unite people – but we should approach the […]
Making time: A very brief guide for CEOs
Students of time management will know the Eisenhower Matrix, which plots tasks by urgency on one axis and importance on the other. The simple genius behind this approach – popularised by the American General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower – is not that you do what’s urgent and important, and ditch what’s unimportant and […]
Gratitude: An underestimated leadership tool
Leaders in high-growth companies will know that you can’t take talent for granted. Good people always have a choice. They don’t have to work for you; they certainly don’t have to go above and beyond. A simple ‘thank you’ when they do so can be remarkably powerful, particularly when motivation might otherwise be flagging. It’s […]
Will you make staff wear masks?
Freedom Day has a ring to it, in a Daily Mail front page kind of way, and it’s easy to see why everyone’s looking forward to it so much. No one likes being told what to do, particularly if it’s burdensome – and 16 months of mask-wearing and maintaining frankly unnatural degrees of personal space […]
The failures of flat structures
Flatness is a very fashionable quality for a start-up. When founders talk about their nimbleness and adaptability, they often reference their lack of hierarchy as a cardinal virtue, and it’s easy to see why. The traditional model of organisational design – modelled on an army, with a strict reporting pyramid – can seem clunky and […]
How to assemble an executive A-team
A few years back, venture capitalist Hermann Hauser – one of the leading figures behind Acorn computers and chip giant ARM – neatly summarised the importance of having the right people in your executive team: “An A team with C technology wins over a C team with A technology, every time”. As anyone who’s tried […]
