In a cohesive team, the sum is more than the parts. You’re just one part, so how do you make this happen? Synergy is an outcome – a blend of individual contributions that’s a new idea, decision or action. Your contribution is still in there, just transformed. To synergise to actively make synergy happen, the executive […]
Influence
We experience Cialdini’s rules of influence relentlessly. His insights into how people are persuaded has shaped sales, marketing and politics. But how do you influence your closest colleagues effectively, collaboratively and in line with your values? The rules of influence – scarcity, social proof and so on – still apply. But here are some ways […]
Voice
How do you find your voice in a new team? Even top performers are intimidated when they are the newest addition to a team. Here are some ideas: Be confident. Trust that you bring value immediately. Validate this by checking the Chair’s expectations. Be assertive – somewhere between arrogant and diffident. Don’t try to ‘prove […]
Enable
No role is isolated. To succeed in any senior role, you must help your peers. That means reaching across the organisational divide and helping others who are expert in their domains, in ways that enable them to perform better. It’s an essential part of a successful executive mindset. How does that work? Start by seeking […]
Executive mindset
How does an executive actually think? The CEO and the executive team face tasks few others understand and often discover, on achieving their new role, that these tasks require an executive mindset that is subtly different from the mindset of a strong manager or technical expert. There are two issues: How does an executive need […]
Delegating
Advice for the time-poor urges us to ‘do, delegate or dump’. Delegating wisely is a core executive skill and key to a great career. So why does ‘delegating’ for one person look like ‘do or dump’ to everyone else? Delegating is a sophisticated task. To get a handle on how you do it, ask yourself: Do […]
Curiosity
I am curious. Always have been. Curiosity is more than human; it’s how nature thrives. It is the powerful partner to fear, nature’s other survival urge. Curiosity prompts the question, ‘I wonder…. ‘ and leads to one place. The Unknown. I have to keep an eye on it, as curiosity goes wrong too. A child […]
Self-care
The load is great and there is no one with whom to share it. You lead and care for others and can’t abandon them. This is when self-care is a survival issue, not a feel-good issue. Self-care needs only moments but those moments are slow and quiet, so they look like doing nothing and feel […]
Opportunity
You have a choice. Grasp an opportunity when it turns up. Position yourself where opportunity is more attractive and likely. Create opportunity out of difficulty. You have preferences and abilities when it comes to opportunity and others may judge you on your approach. By being clear on how you want to act around opportunity, […]
Resilience
Challenges change us. We cope, but feel the edge of failure. It’s only after, in failure or success, but alive, that we can see how our resilience works. We need to draw breath and reflect. Reflection is when something new emerges to sight, the thing that our resilience ignited. Something that endures. Even as the […]