Executive Coaching for New Leaders: Navigating the first 90 days
The first ninety days in a new leadership role are rarely what people expect. Energy may be high, interest and curiorsity promote a desire to listen rather than instruct. And yet, within weeks, many new leaders find themselves navigating something they were not quite prepared for - th …
How Does Your Team Experience Your Leadership?
Why should anyone be led by you? It is an uncomfortable question, but a useful one. Leadership is not only visible in big moments such as strategy presentations, restructures or crises. It is felt and experienced every day in the small signals a leader sends: what they pay attention t …
How Our Personalities Shape the Meaning we Derive From Work
Not everyone finds meaning in work in quite the same way. For some, meaning comes from achievement and progress. For others, it comes from relationships, contribution, or the sense that their efforts matter to something larger than themselves. Research suggests that personality traits …
The Human Need to Belong: Why Teams Matter for Meaning and Wellbeing
Human beings are not designed to thrive in isolation. In our work, we see strong evidence that wellbeing is shaped not only by what we achieve, but by who we achieve it with. In work, this is one reason teams matter so much. A healthy team can do more than deliver results: it can stre …
A Leader's Long Shadow...
Good team leadership does more than set direction. It shapes the emotional tone, behavioural norms, and level of trust within a team. Over time, people tend to take their cues from the team leader: what gets noticed, what gets rewarded, what is safe to say, and what is better left uns …
Reconnecting with the Meaning of Work
It is not unusual for work that once felt energising and deeply meaningful to lose some of its appeal over time. Many people experience this and immediately ask themselves a difficult question: it this still worth it? The answer is not always straightforward.
Why Team Leaders Must Guard Against Groupthink
One quality of strong team leadership is the ability to create conditions for clearer thinking within the team. One of the greatest risks in any team is groupthink: a pattern in which the desire for harmony, loyalty, or speed suppresses challenge and weakens decision quality. Janis’s …
Getting a new team to fire on all cylinders...
New teams often start out pleasant rather than productive. People are careful, courteous, and reluctant to challenge one another—especially when they’re still working out the unwritten rules. To a lay observer, this can look like harmony; in reality it can become polite conformity, wh …
Meaning at Work - a Path to Learning and Growth
Viktor Frankl’s work remains one of the most practical foundations for thinking about purpose in modern organisations. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl argued that people are motivated not only by comfort, reward, or status, but by a “will to meaning” — the need to experience what …
Why Does A Team Need A Common Purpose?
When a team is busy and under pressure, it’s easy for “what we’re doing” to crowd out “why we’re doing it.” Individuals get lost in their tasks and quickly become detached from the ambitions of the team and their leader. However research consistently shows that clarity and alignment a …