When Soft Skills Become REAL Skills

All human beings have similar wants and needs.  We want honesty, respect, integrity, and trust.  We want to belong to something bigger than ourselves and to matter. The current state of global affairs and their effect on every level of our lives has exacerbated these needs, highlighting their deficit in our personal and professional lives.  When we…

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Honesty. Respect. Integrity. Trust.

All human beings have similar wants and needs.  We want honesty, respect, integrity, and trust.  These four are intricately linked together.  We want to belong to something bigger than ourselves and to matter. Wanting honesty, respect, integrity and trust is about wanting to live in an environment in which we feel safe.  It’s about wanting…

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Who Decides Whether Leadership Is Successful?

World leadership styles have given me much to consider over the past few years.  Increasingly so in the past few weeks.  I’ve observed multiple varied demonstrations of leadership and peoples’ response to it, trying to strain out the lessons that we can apply to how we lead in our smaller “worlds”. In my mind, leadership on…

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Your Authenticity Is a Gift

Authenticity is a quality we hear more and more about these days, and it’s become the gold standard for leadership.  Robert S. Kaplan, Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School says, “Authenticity is critical to leadership.  That means trying to be yourself – this involves some self-disclosure, admitting what you don’t know and…

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The Case For Honesty

All of us are constantly trying to balance our needs.  When we are out of balance, our behaviours, responses, and decisions are all governed by trying to get back into some sense of balance.  With any luck, we find and choose healthy ways to rebalance ourselves; but balance we must, even if we have to…

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Creating Cohesion Out Of Chaos

When I first started translating the Crew Resource Management skills that flight crews use into other business teams, I thought I was sharing strictly communication skills.  I very quickly realised that you can’t address human communication without coming smack bang up against culture, and that together, communication and culture are the grease that allow the…

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That Which Binds Us Together

It’s always been a central belief of mine that focusing on what draws us together is key to building a powerful team.  As soon as you put two or more people together, each brings their viewpoint, perspective, beliefs, values, life experiences etc to the table.  As primal beings, we’re programmed to look for threats, and…

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Honesty, Respect, Integrity & Trust

We’ve spoken lately about a few things that affect our ability to show up as an effective team member.  Last week, we asked you to Speak Up & Speak In – to think about expanding  your big picture view, be more aware of the things around us that affect our team and our outcomes, and…

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Are You Leaving Too Many Blanks?

Let’s talk this week about clarity, and dissemination of information.  If there’s one ultimate destination for communication and unity of spirit, it’s clarity.  If there’s one way to get there, it’s paying attention to what information you disseminate and how you do so. Lack of clarity results in so many things.  It means your team…

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Leaderful Culture & Clarity

This quote is one I saved many moons ago, which I think should be attributed to Danny Silk, but I’ve been unable to verify that. It talks about how leaders create the culture in their team, and how that culture needs to encourage a safe space for two way communication.  Seldom do we pay attention to…

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