A survey I conducted three years ago found that 80% of CEOs and HR directors thought that the emphasis of reward, recognition and development needed to shift substantially away from the individual employee to the team. One of the main reasons was that, in a VUCA world, collective learning, adaptation and action were far more (more…)
Imagine coming to work each day and putting on an act, in order to fit in. Smiling at jokes that seem unfunny, putting up with background noise that interferes with our concentration, yet pretending it’s OK, because no-one else seems to find it a problem, nodding as if you understand exactly what’s required, when you (more…)
A study from Oxford Brookes University found 40 topics that occurred frequently in coaching assignments. In order of frequency at first meetings, they were: Notably absent from this list is systemic thinking, which may represent the lack of relevant skills among the coaches surveyed. The survey also did not address how the coaches responded – (more…)
Two coaches working together with a client team need also to be a team. Indeed, they need to role model good teaming behaviour. It’s now increasingly common for pairs of team coaches to seek supervision together, especially if they have not coached as a pair before. The range of issues they bring to supervision is (more…)
It’s said that “growing old is compulsory; growing up is not”. Our notions of adulthood and maturity are vague and often contradictory. The legal age of becoming an adult has nothing to do with the development of an adult brain. Our brain continues to reshape itself until the late twenties and then continues to change, (more…)
It’s one of those showstopper questions that people typically avoid asking themselves. Being busy doesn’t mean being productive. Technology often doesn’t help, because it creates distractions that make us lose focus on what’s important rather than what’s urgent. Here’s a routine to help you be self-honest about it. What’s the primary purpose of you being (more…)
When someone feels they belong in an environment, what they sense around them makes them feel at home. This can involve a wide variety of stimuli. Among these are: The visual environment: for example, how spacious or confined it is, the general decor, pictures and objects; or how people dress; or the amount of order (more…)
The remarkable thing about coaching clients putting happiness as a goal is that it is remarkable. The absence of happiness is hard to admit to ourselves or to others. It’s common to feel guilty about not being happy. So, the topic may not arise in coaching unless the coach’s intuition takes them there. There are (more…)
One of the reasons teams struggle to define their purpose is that they can’t work out at which level of aspiration the purpose should be. At a very basic level, pragmatic purpose is about relatively short-term accomplishments and survival. For example: “We’ve got to attract enough customers to stay in business”. Grounded purpose takes a (more…)
When domestic couples are too busy to spend quality time together, it’s a recipe for discontent and perhaps divorce. Relationships at work are different in many ways, of course, but if interactions are overwhelmingly transactional, the same mechanisms of disconnection, misunderstanding of motives and disaffection can easily occur. We spend roughly the same amount of (more…)