Overcoming leadership loneliness As a CEO or senior executive it can be quite lonely at the top. The very nature of a hierarchical structured organisation means that senior leaders are often faced with the sole responsibility of making tough decisions and being held to account for these decisions. And they are often faced with [...]
Leadership is a gift This is, without a doubt, one of the best leadership talks I have had the pleasure of hearing. General Mark Welsh, Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, delivers a talk on leadership to the cadets at the Airforce Academy. General Welsh is humble, humorous, engaging, honest and compelling – [...]
Trust begets trust Trust - the foundation of a truly great team. The really effective teams have trust in each other, trust in their leaders and trust in their organisation. Laying the foundations for a team built on trust, goes a long way towards the long-term growth and stability of your business. In the [...]
3 Qualities for better leadership Well-known author and speaker, John C Maxwell quoted, “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them”. This statement echoes the balancing act that many leaders I regularly work with find difficult to overcome. When I stumbled upon Stephanie Chung’s article 3 [...]
Are you focusing on these four leadership behaviours? CEOs are beginning to realise how important leadership development is to the organisational health and growth of their business. The problem is, organisation’s looking to investment in leadership are often unsure of where to start. I recently came across a study that helps answer this question. [...]
Vision inspired leadership Leading is about believing. Believing in your vision, your people and your organisation as a whole. As a leader it is important to have strategic goals and targets, however if you do not believe in the underlying purpose of what you do, it will be difficult to maintain long-term motivation for both [...]
Dynamic leaders ask for help The principle, “To be a truly great leader, we must stand with our people, not above them”, is one that I truly believe in. This article by John Keyser at Common Sense Leadership discusses how leaders today seem to be spending time in endless meetings or in continual conversations [...]
The building blocks for a culture of accountability Time and time again I come across leaders who are struggling to hold their teams to account for their collective and individual outcomes. Some of these leaders have resorted to anger, others to threats and others to ignoring the issue, hoping that by some miracle the [...]
Over our last five blog posts, we have been exploring the concept of the Leadership tent, as introduced by Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman in their book “The Extraordinary Leader”. The tent represents the 5 key areas of effective leadership – Character, Personal Capabilities, Focus on Results, Interpersonal Skills and Leading Change. Today we will [...]
In their book “The Extraordinary Leader”, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman look at research on leadership skills. They demonstrate that not only can leadership be developed, but that essential leadership skills are relatively few in number. They found that very few leaders possess the entire essential skill set, nor do they possess similar patterns of [...]
