Overcoming Resistance to Change

We live in a world with accelerating pace of change. For all us leaders, this accelerating change comes with the necessity to respond to these changes in a coherent, strategic and urgent ways. This translates into starting and leading change initiatives within our teams. So much so that there is change fatigue that has started to set in. This fatigue often leads to resistance to change. There are many other reasons for the resistance to change. Tired leaders who forget to involve the teams in their thinking about the “Why”, “What” and the “How” of the change initiatives. Tired communications […]

A Leader’s Super Power: Delivering Unprovoked Positive Antecedents!

I was reading a blog post written recently by Adam Voigt about UPA’s and I wanted to share that with all of my readers. Adam is first and foremost a skilled classroom practitioner and a highly successful Principal.  Earning his first Principalship at the age of 35, Adam has personally led full school turnarounds and also the design and establishment of a brand new school as its inaugural Principal. His audience is primarily school teachers and school Principals and maybe me. I find that a lot of what he talks about can also be applied to the workplace, irrespective of […]

Leadership and Happiness

One significant impact that Covid-19 had is that it has caused a sudden explosion of the importance of wellness all around us. The contrast between working from home and working from our offices has been stark. This has also initiated a lot of great conversations about mental health and the importance of the role of emotions within the business context. While this focus in the cultural zeitgeist is new, the research and our knowledge about the role that emotions play in our work place is not new at all. There is a lot of good research that have found that […]

Achieving and Sustaining High Performance

I had the opportunity to watch Gilbert Enoka present at one of the events that I was participating in. He has a long history of success as a mental skills coach with New Zealand’s corporate and sporting elite. He is internationally renowned for his 19 year history with the All Blacks (New Zealand Rugby team), first as their mental skills coach and now as manager. He has been with the All Blacks for over 250 tests and during that time the team has won back-to-back Rugby World Cups, one Laureus Award (for the best team in the world), 17 Bledisloe […]

The Power of Stories

Premise: Earlier today, I watched a keynote presentation delivered by Jonathan Gottschall on the Power of Stories. He made me sit up and think about stories in a new light. You can watch his keynote here. As leaders, one of the most important tools that we have in our arsenal is the use of stories. We use stories to communicate our ideas, to rally our troops, while leading change and influencing how people show up to and actually do their work. And I think it is important to understand all aspects of the stories that we tell so that we […]