Leadership

Curate A High Performance Culture by Celebrating Small Wins Daily

Premise: I did a 100-day challenge of clicking a picture and sharing it on Instagram of something that I thought was beautiful. Now, I constantly see beautiful things all around me wherever I go. Being intentional about what we want to notice, results in our brains getting very good at noticing it all around us. Leadership works the same way. Culture is shaped not only by strategy and incentives, but by what leaders consistently notice, celebrate and tolerate. From childhood we are trained to find and focus on what is wrong instead of focusing on what is right. When we […]

Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Improv Comedy?

Premise It was a Sunday evening, and we had decided to go attend a theatre performance. It was not a typical performance, well rehearsed, with carefully scripted dialogues, choreographed movements or a strong background music. Instead, two people walked onto a bare stage and asked us, the audience, some simple questions to come up with a scene, a place, some characters and a situation. There was no script. No rehearsal. No safety net. They had to act out the scene and move the situation forward. An actor starts the show and says something absurd (since it is a comedy show). […]

Leadership

Shifting From Human Resources to Human Beings

Premise Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that globally, employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, matching the size of the drop seen at the height of COVID lockdowns. This level of drop has only happened twice in the last 15 years. Even a single percentage point increase in engagement can lead to millions of dollars in productivity gain. This made me think about the reasons for this drop and I believe that the answer is hiding in plain sight. It lives in two words. Two words that have become so deeply embedded in the vocabulary […]

Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Genetics and Epigenetics

Premise: Have you ever wondered why there are more and more re-orgs all around us. As a leader, you yourself might have restructured the org. You have updated the strategy. You hired better people. And yet — the same behaviors persist. The same challenges continue to plague the organization. Have you ever slowed down enough to think deeply about why this is the case? And how can we change this? Genetics and Epigenetics It is in this context that I think there is a lot that we can learn from the field of genetics and epigenetics. For decades, people assumed […]

Leadership

Exploit, Explore and Empower

There are three kinds of activities that we can do as leaders. Exploit: Engage best practises when you want to make the most of what is well know. You look to optimising for efficiencies. Explore: Identify next practises when you want to understand what works and what doesn’t. The end goal of all activities in this area is to end up in the exploit zone. You look to optimising for effectiveness. Empower: This is the high-leverage activity for a leader. When we develop the judgement needed to know the right time to delegate the power of this decision (to exploit […]