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Fresh Leadership Perspectives: Insights, Trends, and Strategies for Today’s Leaders
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Align Your Strengths to Your Business Life Stage
Discover how to align leadership strengths to your business life stage to unlock growth, resilience, and long-term organisational impact.
Beyond the Crucible meets When Leaders Are Lost.
I recently had the immense privilege and pleasure of being interviewed by Warwick Fairfax and Gary Schneeberger on the Beyond the Crucible Podcast. Hailing from the Fairfax Media Dynasty, Warwick’s name is synonymous with status, wealth, influence, and the very public demise of the family company in 1987.
The Alignment Advantage: How to Multiply Leadership Impact Without Burning Out
Learn how alignment transforms strategy into results, boosts leadership capacity, and drives sustainable impact without exhausting your team.
When Leaders Are Lost
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Read our latest article and explore our resources for actionable strategies, thought-provoking book reviews, and the latest leadership trends. Rooted in evidence and real-world application, these insights are designed to support and inspire leaders at every level.
Is your hard work giving you or costing you what you really want?
The demands of building a business, managing a team, leading an organization, running a family, or just having time for yourself are constant. There are always goals to set, plans to implement, and problems to solve in order to make our vision of success a reality. It can be exhausting and overwhelming. For the most part, we feel like we are balancing the competing priorities of our home and work life well. However, there are times when we can feel our capacity is being stretched to the point where we cross over from positive to negative stress.
The short-term fix that can create a long-term problem
Stress and fatigue are understandable at certain times of the year – think of the mad rush in anticipation of the holidays, or the lead up to rolling out a major change initiative. But what if exhaustion is starting to creep in earlier than expected? What do you do when you find yourself looking at the calendar and quietly despairing that you’re expected to keep up this pace all year?
The subtle way your childhood affects how you lead
We all enter adulthood with thought processes and behaviours learned and adopted from childhood. This is true of every person, whether in a leadership role or not. Children learn and absorb lessons about life through overt teaching by people in their world – parents, grandparents, teachers, peers – and through more subtle ways by observing how others “do” life and interact with each other and the world.
Is your personal brand trustworthy?
As we step into 2022, whether boldly or with some reservations, there is a degree of uncertainty about how this year will unfold.
Over the holiday break you may have paused to reflect on the goals you want to achieve, what really drives you to succeed, who champions you in your pursuits, and what success looks like in your personal and professional life.
Too busy to reflect? That’s exactly when you need to.
The end of a year is often considered an opportune time to reflect. As we wind down for the year and transition from a hectic pre-Christmas schedule to more of a holiday pace, there are moments that present themselves as invitations to stop and take stock of the year that’s been. Reflecting on key moments of joy or loss, successes and failures, and reevaluating what’s most important to you, is a powerful tool to sustainable success in every area of your life. Why? Because our experiences shape who we are, what we pursue and ultimately become our life story.
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
The answer to this question can be quite revealing. Do you jump out of bed, ready and excited to work on the day’s projects? Or do you feel rising levels of stress and anxiety the moment you start thinking about your “to do” list? You may prefer to stay in bed pondering what life would be like if you were doing something else.
Why being ‘lonely at the top’ isn’t good for you, or for business
Our careers, and lives, are a culmination of many choices that when added up over time, create our life’s trajectory. Not many people start out their career planning to make some of the choices and sacrifices they have to achieve success. Often it is only when they get to their desired destination that they look back at what their success has cost. Most often, it’s important relationships. And these are not always easy to restore.
What does success mean to you?
Like skipping to the end of a good book to find out what happens, imagine you are able to fast-forward to the last chapter of your life. Looking back over the course of your existence – the choices you made, your patterns of behavior, the quality of your relationships – would you consider it a success? How would you measure or define it? It’s similar to that rather confronting question posed by former Harvard professor, Clayton Christensen – “how will you measure your life?
How time plays a bigger role in your success than you might think
You’ve set SMART goals for yourself and your team. They’re specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic. You’ve even set the deadline for when you’d like to tick them off your list. But have you ever considered that the time frame you put on your goals is a big factor in whether or not they get accomplished?
How do I mobilize my team when working from home?
As the world edges out of lockdowns, businesses are continuing to adapt to new working practices. Many teams may still be finding their feet in the new hybrid working environment where team members are more geographically dispersed with less opportunities for face-to-face contact.
What to do when life moves the goalposts (again)
Studies show that more people are pursuing safety rather than taking risks as the pandemic continues to impact businesses and economies around the world.
A survey for consulting platform consultancy.uk showed that the pandemic’s impact will result in more people being risk-averse in future years, even after lockdowns ease. However, what appears to be the safest path has its own inherent risks.
Goal setting: Your roadmap to success
An idea you wake up with is unlikely to be achieved in a day. So how do you get to where you want to be?
How can I improve my decision-making?
You make thousands of decisions every day—ranging from smaller insignificant ones, to those of great importance. But have you ever stopped to think about how you make decisions?
Why is it that some leaders find it easier to make certain decisions than you do? When you are confronted with a difficult decision, do you go with your instinct or do you seek consensus or approval from others?
What does Intel’s powerful microchip have in common with the Volkswagen Beetle?
Heavy fog found me sitting in a crowded lounge at Sydney Airport when Tony and Carlo asked if they could join me at my table. After we had introduced ourselves, our conversation surprisingly turned to the anxiety many young people experience in relation to career choices and the future of work. This quickly led to a discussion on the pace and pervasiveness of change.
Humility goes a long way for leaders, but it is not enough to get results
Unfortunately, when humility is absent, leaders lose the ability to listen and focus on what is important. Jim Collins describes the resulting behaviors as “arrogant neglect”, and that when this happens, organizations enter the first stage of organizational decline (Collins, 2009, pp. 29).
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