TIP: This is all the JB blogs, except those in the category JB-TTEF-Hand-Sort, in descending date order and paginated. (This is only visible if you’re logged in.)
Optimism is True Moral Courage: How do you make it catchy?
March 5, 2015
I am working with a client whose optimism both terrifies and inspires me. They are surrounded on all sides by difficult circumstances, challenging prospects and dubious possibilities. Yet at each coaching session they show up with excitement, conviction and enthusiasm. How do they do this? Why don’t they fall over in a heap like the rest of us? What is the ‘x’ factor that allows them to keep choosing optimism over ‘giving up’ or ‘getting frustrated’ or ‘blaming everyone else’?
Read more ›The Red Pill: How much truth can a leader take?
January 9, 2015‘This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.’ Such are the words of Morpheus in the cult film ‘The Matrix’. Morpheus offers our hero, Neo, a stark choice. Those of you who have watched the film know that Neo took the red pill. Neo chose to face the facts. But what choice do we make in our coaching and leadership? How much truth can we take?
Read more ›Trust has Become the Agenda
June 5, 2014‘Trust has become the agenda’. These were the most telling words spoken by Justin King, the outgoing CEO of Sainsbury’s, at a recent leadership event I attended. Justin bemoaned the loss of trust in the UK supermarket sector following the horse meat scandal of 2013. He also chided his CEO colleagues for not identifying the small number of ‘rotten apples’ in the CEO community and urged them to get on the front foot to communicate the positive value that business brings to society as a whole.
Read more ›Creating a sense of purpose through the triple bottom-line
May 1, 2014According to Nick Craig and Scott Snook in their recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article ‘From Purpose to Impact’, fewer than 20% of leaders have a strong sense of their individual purpose and even fewer can distill their purpose into a concrete statement. As of Monday, the members of my Vistage advisory board are not guilty of these particular leadership sins. Indeed, they have gone one step further than writing down their courageous goals by sharing them with each other and challenging themselves to take the first step towards their achievement.
Read more ›Leader as Coach or Coach as Leader ?
March 24, 2014When I resigned from my last corporate role as international managing director in Logica in 2004, I thought that I was giving up a career in leadership to pursue a career in coaching. Yet the more that I research leadership I am realising that I gave up a career in heroic leadership to pursue a career in post-heroic leadership. I am also realising that, as well as running training courses for traditional heroic leaders to become coaches, we need more courses to train experienced coaches to become post-heroic leaders.
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