Last week a friend told me a story of a colleague she’s been encouraging to spread his wings and take on a bigger role. As a chap suffused with a healthy self-awareness he was doubting his ‘fit’ as he’d ‘never done half the things the role demanded’. He lamented that he was nowhere near [...]
“Jo – oh -oh!” oh good lord here we go my inner voices mutters as I hear the client graft a couple of extra and unnecessary syllables, Scooby Doo style, onto my sufficiently syllabled name. “Can you just…….?” I feel her metaphorical teeth sink in as the energy-care-attention suck [...]
The children huddled closer together, skin touching skin, seeking shelter from the curious eyes of the onlookers. They shuffled and bent their slender bodies into one another melding into a seamless bundle of body and cloth, sweat and limbs entwining forming a oneness against the many that had come [...]
Seduction A few months back I realised that I had been seduced by the glamour of the leadership and unwittingly bought in to a competitive, mass myth creation process: what is leadership? find the ‘answer’ to leadership, find the ‘answer’ to … life? Despite knowing the extent of its [...]
A shudder of sand dusts the tent walls as he flips over for the umpteenth time, sleeping bag mangling in the decision-burdened wakefulness of the long night. Backwards and forwards, body echoing mind – get on the river, or get out. Ke garne? The sleepfree mangler: Pat O’Keeffe: white-water [...]
There’s nothing new about VUCA. And nothing bad about it either Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous “The world is changing too fast!” “I don’t understand it – scary!” “Crikey –it’s all so vague” ‘Doomed!’ ‘Everybody [...]
Leadership is agency + recognition (no followers needed) Leadership is… Which leadership? Strong, authentic, dispersed, distributed, collective, authentic…. the list of collocations, of adjectival friends to leadership is an indicator of how confused we are about what this slippery word [...]
Reflecting on a recent leadership development program delivered in Peru that brought university leaders and Ministry of Education agencies together at this critical change point for Peruvian HE, I’m struck once more about the relationship-leadership nexus. How important it is to value and to [...]
Old world leadership in a new world of change and uncertainty Yesterday-today: the past lingers on The mainstream view of leaders and leadership (in the media, in organisations, the public, in leadership development providers) seems to be that leadership is vested in one individual (leader). The [...]
In my professional consultancy career to date working with organisations large and small in the private, third and government sectors; and un-organisations (for example the quake-hackers movement in Nepal) facilitating leadership development in various contexts I have experienced both new and [...]