On disengagement, the things people need from work, and the extraordinary cost of forgetting that businesses are made of people. What if people aren’t disengaged because they don’t want to work? What if the work, or what it has become, no longer feels worthy of them? I’ve been sitting with this question for some time. […]

The stories that make us powerless in the messy middle of management One of the strangest things about the messy middle of management is this: You can have considerable authority and feel remarkably powerless. I see it often in leadership development rooms. Managers who lead teams, make decisions, influence culture and have considerable authority of […]

Seven years of failing at social media has taught me rather a lot about succeeding with myself. I have failed at social media. There. I said it. And I’m not using failure in that fashionable way where someone tells you they failed because their launch only made R700,000 instead of a million. This is also […]

Sitting in rooms with leaders and subject matter experts, I’ve been thinking about permission lately.  Not the kind that comes from a boss, or whoever we may outsource permission to from time-to-time. The quieter kind. The kind that possesses and expresses our power in the realist and most practical way possible.  The kind we unknowingly wait […]

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn wasn’t how to leave corporate. I thought it would be. Goodness knows how I constantly braced myself for it for two years solid when I couldn’t get myself to take the leap.  What I’ve realised since, is that it was much more complex and challenging […]

There is a quiet irony to being human. Our minds spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to protect us. Calculating. Anticipating. Editing. Configuring. Forever asking, “What if…?” and “Just in case…” Every threshold beyond what is known can feel like something to survive rather than something to explore. Perhaps that’s always been true. But I sometimes wonder […]

Leadership is not the art of getting people to agree with you. At least, not good leadership. Yesterday, in a leadership session, a young, confident leader shared something brave. “When people don’t agree with me, I find myself speaking louder until they listen.” He paused. And then, together, we became curious. Because “until they listen” […]

Why so many capable adults don’t know what they feel until it spills out and spills over others “How are you?” A simple question.A normal question.A socially acceptable little ping between humans. And yet sometimes, when someone asks me this, my system behaves like I’ve been handed an exam paper in a language I never […]

There’s a moment in my work that I’ve come to recognise. It’s the moment where someone realises this is not about what they thought it was about. It usually comes quietly. Not with drama.Not with a breakthrough declaration.Just a soft, almost reluctant recognition. “Oh… it’s me.” I was working with a woman who could not […]

Last week’s post on resistance stirred something. My inbox told the story. Messages arrived from people who recognised themselves in that tight, foggy space where you know something is happening inside you but you cannot name it yet. The relief came not from fixing it, but from realising, “Oh. I am not broken. I am […]