Blog

In the words of that renowned management thinker, Tina Turner, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ I think quite a lot potentially. I watched the final of the cricket T20 World Cup last month. After the match, a TV interviewer asked the victorious Australian batter,...

The season of goodwill is nearly here again. Unlike last year in the UK, it’s not expected that there will be restrictions on families coming together over the festive period. That’s great news, right? Well yes, but perhaps not for every family. In this age of culture...

This is a great exercise for getting a team unstuck and for getting new ideas or perspectives onto the table to help push a solution forward. Experience suggests you need a team of at least 10-12 to make it work, but as a process, it also scales to a group of dozens...

Sometimes you’ve just got to go deeper to resolve a deadlock. This method works well for individuals or teams trying to move beyond a dilemma. Cartesian questions, credited to the logic of French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650), help the decision-maker(s)...

In my work with teams, I’ll often use the framework below as the basis for a diagnostic assessment. Devised by Phil Sandahl, it looks at productivity (the things a team needs to do to deliver results) and positivity (the atmosphere that informs how they go about what...

For the past few years, everybody seems to have been talking about psychological safety. It gets mentioned in just about every meeting I attend and is certainly a topic in every team coaching assignment I undertake. Everyone agrees it’s important. But strangely, in my...

There's never enough time. One day I might write about how cool it is to have a 'To don’t' list. A list of things at either individual, team or organisational level that you want to stop doing. Here’s a simple method to help teams identify what to stop, so they can...

In my work with teams, we’ll almost always spend time thinking about the team purpose. It’s a foundational activity. To be effective, every team needs to be clear why they exist as a team. Aside from having a common reporting line and frequently finding themselves in...

We know that feedback done well makes a huge impact on employee performance. We also know that too often feedback isn’t done well or isn’t done at all. It remains a potent tool, where the potential impact is out of all proportion to the time required for preparing and...

When a team or individual within the team is stuck, it’s useful to have a process up your sleeve that enlists everyone in doing something about it – rather than moaning or accepting things as they are. The key is to get things moving, even a tiny amount in order to...