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.)
Theresa May on the Trust Crisis – ‘A Change has Got to Come’
October 14, 2016
We live in interesting times. Every day executive leadership is in the dock. Scrutinised. Criticised. Vilified. Take the last month as an example: Deutsche Bank shares have fallen over 50% this year and the bank’s CEO recently wrote to all employees desperately trying to shore up confidence in the beleaguered bank. In the email he stated, ‘Trust is the foundation of all banking’. Is it? Really? Then why had the bank just been fined $15bn dollars by the US courts? Meanwhile, in the cinema the latest blockbuster is not a Cold War thriller or a Disney spectacular but ‘Deepwater Horizon’ – the sad story of corporate manslaughter in the Gulf of Mexico.
Read more ›Big Sam & Habit No.6 – Choosing to be Humble
September 28, 2016Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of listening to Martin Glenn, CEO of the FA, as he championed a ‘women in leadership’ FA programme on which I am coaching with the Institute of Directors. What struck me about Martin was his humility. He was casually dressed, informal and self-deprecating in his assessment of the challenge the FA faces in bringing more women into the football boardroom. For an Oxford-educated, white man of a certain age it was not what I had expected.
Read more ›How to reclaim email sanity in three simple steps
August 4, 2016The first habit of building trustworthy leadership is choosing to deliver. As one CEO I interviewed put it, ‘Trustworthiness is doing what it says on the tin’. One of the behaviours I discuss in ‘The Trusted Executive’ that is critical to developing a reputation for delivery is to make sure you have an effective system for the management and delegation of tasks. For most of us this starts with making sure we are proactively managing our inboxes rather than becoming victims of an insatiable and relentless email horde.
Read more ›The Road to Rio: Three Powerful Leadership Lessons
July 22, 2016The road to Rio has been four years of dedication, hard work and suffering for thousands of athletes around the world. In the UK, I have been supporting Team GB coaches from the worlds of rowing, diving and Paralympic target shooting as they have led teams of athletes hoping for gold medal glory in the coming weeks. Working with Olympic sports coaches offers valuable lessons for those of us leading businesses. Here is my triathlon of top tips:-
Read more ›Trust Crisis: Why brexit supporters trust no one
July 6, 2016‘If the heads of banks and multinationals support ‘remain’ it must be wrong for the rest of us’. Those eighteen words, quoted in a recent IEDP article, sum up the trust crisis that abruptly reared its ugly head in our recent EU referendum. The shock of looking in the collective mirror, and realising it had a big crack in it, has provoked a national wave of distress, sadness and self-examination.
Read more ›Choosing brave leadership in a world where nothing can be hidden
June 15, 2016In the popular cult film, ‘The Matrix’, our hero, Neo, is confronted with a stark choice. He can choose between living in the computer-fabricated world of the matrix (blue pill) or be unplugged from the matrix to wake up to painful reality of his true existence (red pill). His mentor, Morpheus, sums up the choice with the following words:-
Read more ›Wozniak or Jobs? Which Steve are you?
May 31, 2016In the film ‘Steve Jobs’, there is a tense stand-off between Apple co-founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The scene is prior to an Apple product launch and Wozniak is berating Jobs in the middle of a theatre rehearsal. Frustrated by Jobs’ stubborn and arrogant nature, he throws his hands in the air, turns and walks up the aisle to the exit. Then he pauses, spins on his heels and shouts out, ‘You can be decent and gifted at the same time, Steve. It’s not binary’.
But, can you?
Read more ›Three simple and essential questions about how to win trust
May 12, 2016- What is trust?
Our academic colleagues have been debating the definition of trust for over thirty years and they still haven’t reached a final agreement. However, all definitions of trust agree that it involves these three components:-
- Risk – to trust someone involves making ourselves vulnerable
- Hope – when you take the risk of trusting someone you hope they won’t let you down
- Reasons and Feelings – I make a decision to trust you partly based on the evidence and partly on my feelings
