Making the transition into a leadership role for the first time is one of the toughest transitions to make during a career. Why? It requires not only a whole new set of skills, but also a mindset shift to make the transition effective. A tough ask early in your career. The worlds between a team member role and a team...

  Some years ago we learned an important lesson about juggling: Tossing the ball is much more important than catching it. If you’re good at throwing, the catching happens easily and you can keep more balls in the air without dropping them. We spend a lot of our time at work in catching mode. In dealing with the incoming emails,...

How much does a tonne weigh? It’s common practice to describe a heavy object in tonnage. But no one has any idea how much a tonne is.  We can lift a kilogram block of cheese so we have an idea what a kilogram weighs.  As we can’t lift a tonne of anything by ourselves it becomes such an abstract concept. ...

Not if, but when. You and your team have already given up on carrier pigeons, telex machines and you’ve probably no longer got any typewriters at work. The software and smartphone apps you’re now using have probably improved your productivity, your accounting and even aspects of your decision making as an individual or as an organisation. My guess is that...

I want to become a better interviewer. In fact, I’m quite obsessed with it at the moment. The irony of this is that for the longest time, I placed little or no value whatsoever in the practice of interviewing … I honestly didn’t think it was that important. I was wrong. As I talked about in my last blog on this subject,...

What makes an effective leader? This question is a focus of my research as an organizational scientist, executive coach, and leadership development consultant. Looking for answers, I recently completed the first round of a study of 195 leaders in 15 countries over 30 global organizations. Participants were asked to choose the 15 most important leadership competencies from a list of...