"One of the best paradoxes of leadership is a leader's need to be both stubborn and open-minded. A leader must insist on sticking to the vision and stay on course to the destination. But he must be open-minded during the process." Simon Sinek
Read MoreAre you familiar with the daily bombardment of email, text, instant chat and social media while trying to get real work done? Don’t worry, Jason Fried, the CEO of base camp, has some tips for us all, especially those who work in small team environments and want to find better ways to concentrate. I picked up these lessons from the Harvard Business Review podcast, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in business or organisational psychology.
Read More'Managing out' refers to when management makes an employee's working life so unpleasant, the employee decides to hand in their notice. Some employees aren't aware that this is a management tactic, even though they may be the victim of it.
It's quite difficult to legally sack a worker if the management of a company is unhappy with them; that's why they have to use covert strategies to make life unpleasant for the individual. This process could include: criticising an employee's work repeatedly and never giving them credit; not supporting them in learning or developing; keeping them out of communication loops; ignoring their requests or making their life at the company difficult in general.
Now, let's think about what it's like for both parties involved.
Read MoreIn his book published in 1969, Laurence Peter proposes the Peter Principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
Many promotion decisions are beyond logic, such as promoting an engineer to a manager because they are an excellent engineer. The decision is made based on the employee’s performance in an engineering role, but engineering and management are completely different sets of skills and should be treated as such.
Read MoreThese are the slides for a women in leadership workshop that I facilitated in The Hertie School, Berlin.
Read MorePlato was a clever guy, a philosopher and mathematician in Classical Greece, and the founder of the first academy in Athens, the first centre of higher education in the West. His teacher was Socrates and his most famous student was Aristotle. Although Plato is long gone, and despite science having progressed so much since his lifetime, some of his lessons are still unavoidably true and relevant to modern life.
Read MoreWould you steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? You probably would. Why? People often break their values to meet their needs. But what are these needs? The following paradigm is very useful for identifying what motivates us to do what we do. We are motivated to meet one or more of our 6 human needs at any one time. So what are they?
Read More1. Write down your vision at the top. (e.g. Change jobs, lose weight, run a marathon etc.)
2. Then, break the process down into small steps starting with what you need to do in 6
months, then 3 months, 1 month and finally 1 week.
3. Be very clear about the steps to achieve this and seek advice from professionals if needed.
4. See the examples above for more information and tips.
