In a cohesive team, the sum is more than the parts. You’re just one part, so how do you make this happen? Synergy is an outcome – a blend of individual contributions that’s a new idea, decision or action. Your contribution is still in there, just transformed. To synergise to actively make synergy happen, the executive […]
Voice
How do you find your voice in a new team? Even top performers are intimidated when they are the newest addition to a team. Here are some ideas: Be confident. Trust that you bring value immediately. Validate this by checking the Chair’s expectations. Be assertive – somewhere between arrogant and diffident. Don’t try to ‘prove […]
Enable
No role is isolated. To succeed in any senior role, you must help your peers. That means reaching across the organisational divide and helping others who are expert in their domains, in ways that enable them to perform better. It’s an essential part of a successful executive mindset. How does that work? Start by seeking […]
Delegating
Advice for the time-poor urges us to ‘do, delegate or dump’. Delegating wisely is a core executive skill and key to a great career. So why does ‘delegating’ for one person look like ‘do or dump’ to everyone else? Delegating is a sophisticated task. To get a handle on how you do it, ask yourself: Do […]
Curiosity
I am curious. Always have been. Curiosity is more than human; it’s how nature thrives. It is the powerful partner to fear, nature’s other survival urge. Curiosity prompts the question, ‘I wonder…. ‘ and leads to one place. The Unknown. I have to keep an eye on it, as curiosity goes wrong too. A child […]
Self-care
The load is great and there is no one with whom to share it. You lead and care for others and can’t abandon them. This is when self-care is a survival issue, not a feel-good issue. Self-care needs only moments but those moments are slow and quiet, so they look like doing nothing and feel […]
Resilience
Challenges change us. We cope, but feel the edge of failure. It’s only after, in failure or success, but alive, that we can see how our resilience works. We need to draw breath and reflect. Reflection is when something new emerges to sight, the thing that our resilience ignited. Something that endures. Even as the […]
Renaissance
Covid lockdown time is flat time, disconnecting us from our past and our future. What have we been nurturing while cocooned in this flat time? Art. Art is bursting out. Art is our soul giving us the cure for flat time, for lost past and future. Art marks this moment, this Now in which we […]
Gratitude
Be grateful. Best to be slow with it. Slow enough to see afresh what’s already before you. All that you take for granted changes when you’re seeing clearly into everything to be grateful for. It’s what I see when looking over water, to the horizon, seeing the irresistible ebb and flow that have been the […]
Perfection
Some of us (Ok, me, and others like me…), were conditioned to believe that a perfect outcome is possible. Whatever the field, perfection is something we must strive for. It’s an idea that won’t go away. It’s the ideal twin to the other utopian world view – doom. Doom and perfection both drive us to […]