Leadership

Do you know what is happening in your business? Not what is supposed to happen, but what is actually happening on the factory floor? For many managers and leaders, it may have been a while since they actually experienced what it is like where the action happens. Where the products they sell are manufactured, or [...]

Is your team having too many meetings? Do you ever come to the end of a workday and feel stressed because instead of getting any productive work done, you have spent nearly the whole day in back-to-back meetings? Ben Laker and his team recently conducted some research across 76 companies into the impact of reducing [...]

Some innovation teams and creatives seem to never want to let go of their favorite ideas, even after they have proven that they are not going anywhere.Yet there are also individuals and teams who have the opposite problem.They may start on one idea, yet before they can make meaningful progress, or especially when things begin [...]

Permission is given. Responsibility is taken. If you want to be a leader for change, and enable creativity in your teams, you need to take responsibility of what they might come up with. That also involves taking responsibility and ownership for the impact the change might bring. Both positive and negative. This is why so [...]

If you work in a team, you may have heard me talk about the importance of Psychological Safety before. Developed by Professor Amy Edmondson, it is a principle which shows a team that they can speak up when things are not going well, and foster a culture of collaboration and progress on challenging tasks. While [...]

We already thought of that, and it didn't work. How often I have heard that statement from teams when we have discussed potential new innovation ideas. It is often repeated by people who have been in the organisation longer, and who may have had a similar idea previously. They mean it as a warning to [...]

Often when I am giving workshops or keynotes around creativity, especially in a corporate setting, I will ask the participants to anonymously vote on whether they are creative or not. You would be surprised how many people believe that they are not creative. And a series of surveys by Adobe in 2012 and 2016 show [...]

What are you hoping to achieve next year? No, I am not talking about what you and your company's high level goals are: ... Increase market share ... ... Improve profit margins ... ... Be innovative ... I am asking what specific ambitions you and your company have for next year. Especially when it comes [...]

Where in your business or your team are you willing to bend the rules? Would you be willing to tolerate a sale where the margins were below your team's KPIs, just in order to get the revenue from the sale? And would you punish a different team member if they wanted to use those same [...]

With today's always-on workforce, we get tasks thrown at us constantly. And now that people can access work emails and instant messages on their Smartphones, lines can get blurred as to when these tasks are expected to be received, and completed. Especially if we want to portray ourselves as hard workers and build a reputation [...]