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Change Coaching Emotional Intelligence Leadership Mindfulness Motivation Personality reflection

Tips for getting the best from your leadership coaching

If you are a leader, a business person or just want to learn to be more effective at work, executive coaching is one of the best investments you will ever make in yourself. A good coach helps you gain clarity and provides a safe yet challenging environment for you to practice self awareness and to […]

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Brain Science Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork

Praise – the cost-free incentive

What is the best way for a manager to motivate employees? The traditional answer would be to give them a cash bonus, but studies have shown that cash bonuses are becoming less effective. The practice has become so common that most employees now expect it – it’s just a part of their salary expectation. That […]

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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

Incorporating fun into the workplace

Is your workplace having fun? As counterintuitive is it may seem, incorporating fun into the workplace can create a big boost in productivity. Indeed some of the most successful companies in the world are also some of the most fun places to work. Mind you, not every employer wants to follow Google’s example and start […]

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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Teamwork Values and Behaviours

4 key characteristics of effective leaders

I have spent many years working with, observing, teaching and coaching leaders. I have also heard many stories from employees about leaders they have loved to work for and those they have not enjoyed as much. There are some key themes that I have observed in leaders who are highly effective and get the best […]

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Emotional Intelligence Leadership Mindfulness reflection Values and Behaviours

The importance of values

I have been working a lot with clients on values recently and it led me to doing a new values elicitation exercise for myself. I last defined my values in 2004, as part of coaching I was getting to help me through a particularly challenging and draining work situation. I was interested to see if […]

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Change Emotional Intelligence Leadership Mindfulness Motivation reflection

5 reasons leaders need time out!

In working with leaders, and facilitating leadership programs, one of the key things I am hearing is that leaders are increasingly critically time poor. I had the pleasure of spending 2 days recently with a group of women leaders in a program and the key theme that came out was how valuable it was to […]

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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Organisational Culture Teamwork

The leaders tool kit – 6 management styles and when best to use them

This is an article I wrote for Leaders in Heels. It got an extraordinary response and obviously resonated with their readers, so I thought I’d re-post it for readers of my blog. Management styles and when to use them is a topic every leader can take something from. Think back on your career and the […]

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Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork Values and Behaviours

Managing conflict at work

Confrontation and conflict between people is as old as…well…people. Any time you have humans operating together there are going to be times when people disagree, don’t get on, have differences of opinion or just plain can’t stand each other! So how should conflict be managed in teams? It is a mistake to think that no […]

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Change Emotional Intelligence Employee Engagement Leadership Motivation Organisational Culture Teamwork

You can’t make people give you discretionary effort

I was meeting a business contact for a coffee recently and we started talking about getting the best out of people. My contact works in an industry that can be quite hierarchical and rules driven and can struggle to engage people. The question we talked over was “how do you get people to work harder”? […]

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Change Emotional Intelligence Leadership Teamwork

Building your resilience

Whether you are gearing up for a business transformation in 2013, spending the holiday season with demanding relatives, or even getting ready for the apocalypse at the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21 (*smile*) here are some tips for building your resilience. Firstly, resilience is the ability to bounce back or recover well […]