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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Storytelling
Did you imagine it would be this way forever?
I’ve confessed before that for someone who is making a career out of helping organisations to change, I don’t half make heavy weather of it sometimes in my own life. I love the present hard, while taxing it with all my anxiety around the future to come. I’m like my littlest boy who loves holidays so much that he starts fretting from day two about how sad he’ll feel when it’s over. Years and years ago, when our children were babies and dark winter afternoons felt interminable and hair-tearingly boring, even as everyone told us to treasure them, a dear friend gave me the simplest, most game-changing gift. She used…
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Sometimes I don’t even know the question
We all know the experience of being around someone who doesn’t ask any questions. In some social circumstances, it can be an introvert’s dream scenario – I have lost count of the number of drinks parties, dinners, wedding receptions I’ve been to where I’ve been able to hide in plain sight – just ask a couple of questions of the right people, and they’re off, and you’re home and dry. Not asking questions is more common than you might think. It’s not necessarily because someone is full of their own sense of importance or their own narrative – though I read somewhere that on average we spend 80% of our…
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Business writing, Confidence, Humanising business, Leadership, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Uncategorised
Leaving things half done
Where I grew up, you worked hard. You cleared your plate. A hard day was a good day. Sick days were for wimps, lay-ins for layabouts. If you were banging your head against a brick wall and it wasn’t working, you just needed to bang a wee bit harder, a wee bit longer. I am about to leave a job that I have loved and have worked very hard at. In leaving, I’m going to be leaving a whole heap of things undone, and of the many things that are hard about this transition season, it’s perhaps this that I have wrestled with most. I would like to have somehow…
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Uncategorised
Rethinking Energy
Of all of the themes in the book that I’ve had cause to think longest and hardest about this past year, it’s the theme of energy.Everywhere I turn, I encounter leaders who are overwhelmed and exhausted. In the UK at least, this seems even more acute as things start to feel objectively a little better – I suspect because we’re out of adrenalin and crisis mode, some numbness is wearing off, and the reckoning of all that we’ve been through is beginning. I speak to leaders who feel that they are too thinly spread, and have been for a long time. They have violated so many of their own boundaries…
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Agility, Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling
Rethinking Agility
My fifteen year old son is a goalkeeper. During lockdown, his training has been via zoom calls and has involved setting up ludicrous obstacle courses across the living room, so that he can practise changing direction in a fraction of a second, or leaping from a standing start onto a high box. He is working on his agility – the first thing to go, apparently, if you don’t practise for a while. I wonder if some of that loss of agility is also creeping into our psyches, into how we lead, and into our organisations? At first blush, you’d think not. Haven’t we all been congratulating ourselves on how well…
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Business writing, Confidence, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling, Women
Rethinking Confidence
Some days I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing. I eat cake for breakfast and shout at the children, and my hair looks crap. Some days I look at the length of my to do list, the unanswered emails, the state of my kitchen, and realise I am profoundly unqualified for the role of Living My Own Life....
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling
Rethinking Evolution
I have two daughters, aged 12 and 10, who like to define themselves as pretty much polar opposites of each other (though in truth, they are perhaps more similar than either of them cares to admit.) One of the differences between them is that one loves to bake, and the other loves to cook. Baking Daughter loves to flick through recipe books on a Saturday morning, to find a glossy picture of something delicious. She’ll note down a list of everything she needs, take money and a shopping bag, walk to the shops, come home and lay out all the ingredients. She’ll pre-heat the oven, weigh and measure, whisk and…
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose, Storytelling
Rethinking Belonging
For the first time in my life, I saw the truth … that Love, Meaning and Connection are the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire –Viktor Frankl The first big theme that my book focuses on as a source of both risk and opportunity during change is the idea of Belonging. The chapter in my book that tackles this theme, begins with an unequivocal research finding that still blows my mind– namely that the single biggest predictor of our health, happiness and longevity is our sense of connectedness to one another. This past year, we’ve all of us lived the truth of that, have we not? It’s…
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Business writing, Humanising business, Leadership, Organisational change, Personal Reflections, Purpose
An island in an ocean full of change
There’s a George Ezra song, Pretty Shining People, that was released in March 2019, the same month my book was published, and, of course, several months before we had even heard of Covid 19. In the song, Ezra has his character sing: Man, help me out. I fear I’m on an island on an ocean full of change.Can’t bring myself to dive in to an ocean full of change.Am I losing touch?Am I losing touch now? And then, in the lyrics, his friend Sam replies: Why, why, what a terrible time to be aliveif you’re prone to overthinking …. As earworms go, it’s catchy, and as a pithy statement of…
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Herrings and peanuts
My year of huge change and what it has taught me – part three of a reflection in three parts. In this final part of a three part blog reflecting on my year of transition as a leader, I’d like to focus on understanding. Together with belonging and confidence, which I focused on in previous parts, understanding has proven to be one of the striking components of my BECAUSE model when applied to my own experience. In the chapter on Understanding in my book, I describe navigating my way around a Danish supermarket trying to buy what I need … The simultaneous delight and slightly terrified lostness that comes from…
