Thoughts

Before you check out for the year (at least in the southern hemisphere, where summer holidays beckon!), now’s a good time to reflect on what you’ve learned in the past 12 months. You’ve come a long way since January. What has living another year taught you? Here are three things I’ve learned this year: Experiment […]

A colleague asked me recently why I stayed so long with my last organisation, when clearly I was better off as a free agent. It would have been easy for me to rationalise my answers: the job wasn’t done, the market wasn’t right for me to move, I wasn’t ready. But, in truth, I was […]

This morning, driving through Wellington’s hilly terrain, I was playing ‘I-spy’ in the car with my eight-year-old son. He was trying hard to guess my word starting with ‘H’. After a few attempts (“Head”, “hands”, “horrible monsters…”) I decided to give him a clue: “They’re outside, and we are surrounded by them”. After a few […]

I’ve just spent the past week meeting with a range of leaders to debrief their 360-degree feedback. They work for the same organisation, which is going through a sustained period of huge turbulence and change (sound familiar?) As the week unfolded, I noticed an interesting theme emerging: the leaders who were rated the most effective […]

So, I’m in Taipei right now. As you do. Yesterday I spent the day working with a group of up and coming expat Kiwis, teaching and exploring strategies for charting successful careers as global citizens. The group was engaged from the word go, and the discussion was lively, rich and productive for the six hours […]

Last week, I was invited, along with a number of others, to a lunch meeting to help out a colleague who was looking for fresh ideas on where to take her career. The conversation was lively and engaging, and my colleague came away with a plethora of new ideas – in fact, way more than […]

Lessons from the Bush #2 In my last post, I wrote about my family’s experience of taking a circuit breaker: three months of living simply and adventuring in the Western Australian outback. Here’s another insight about living and leading from that amazing trip. We’d been travelling two months, and were happy, tanned and scruffy. We’d […]

Lessons from the Bush* #1 I’ve recently returned from an amazing three-month trip with my family in the wilds of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. After being back into the ‘real’ world (as some would say) for a few weeks, some interesting and useful insights about leadership and life have bubbled to the surface. […]

Busy? Sure! Getting stuff done? You bet. Learning? Hmmm… For most of us, the days can fly by, largely shaped by to-do lists, back-to-back tasks, and meetings. Business activities. Busyness activities. I assume the idea behind all of this is that if we get through all of the activities, we’ve done a good day’s work. […]

In the not-so-distant past, I got feedback that some people around me didn’t know what I stood for. Ouch. No one wants to get feedback like that, especially when you’re in a leadership role. It would have been so easy for me to get defensive and make it their problem. But I sat with the […]