A guest post by Ian Windle
Leadership is not obvious to many of us. How we act (not what we say) will make the difference to staff motivation and engagement, lead to changes in productivity and innovation and critically affect our credibility and success as a leader.
Lazy leadership is selfish.
I first found myself using the phrase ‘lazy leader’ when talking about the coffee station conversation. It’s Monday morning and after you’ve opened your laptop, you go to the office coffee area. Your boss is there getting a coffee. She asks: “How was your weekend?”
You start telling her…
A guest post by Grace Marshall
“Writing doesn’t always look like writing. It looks like pondering, staring out of windows, ruminating, running down rabbit holes, reading, researching, talking, gesturing, laughing, crying, wandering and wondering, getting lost and being found.”
The words “I’m struggling” are familiar to every author. So it’s no surprise, and probably annoyingly fitting, that writing a book about Struggle was — you guessed it — a struggle.
Knowing that at the time gave me a little comfort — it’s all material, as they say — but here are a few lessons I learned along the way, which…
A guest post by Frederique Murphy
I started writing my book during the first lockdown, and as a keynote speaker, the pandemic meant that all my events had either been postponed or cancelled, and I missed being in Flow. You know when you are ‘in the zone’? That state of peak performance, fully immersed and focused? Flow is a psychological concept of Positive Psychology. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is most influential in the field and his research and breakthroughs with Flow are well known.
There is a strong connection between a writer in Flow and a reader in Flow. The same way…
An article by Alison Jones for Training Journal
You’ve seen them, of course, the coaches and consultants who smugly announce they’ve ‘published a book’. But what they wave under your nose looks suspiciously like a bound copy of their training notes.
The fact is it’s easier than ever to publish a book, but it’s as hard as it ever was to write a good one.
So what do you need to keep in mind if you want to write a business book that enhances your reputation rather than diminishing it? Here’s a three-point plan:
- Start with the reader
- Find your…
by Rob Kerr
Not so long ago, if you were made redundant your response was to look for a similar job. If you were feeling adventurous you might look for a comparable role in a different industry or sector.
Today, though, many of those businesses are in the same position — reducing their staff numbers or desperately trying to accommodate the people they have. The competition for the small number of vacancies available is fierce. And the ongoing economic uncertainty means this situation may not improve for many months.
So how about starting your own business instead?
If you’ve been…
What does writing look like? Monty Python famously imagined it as a spectator sport, ‘local boy’ Thomas Hardy making a start on The Return of the Native in front of ‘a very good-natured Bank Holiday crowd… he is writing fluently, easily, with flowing strokes of the pen as he comes up to the middle of this first sentence…’
Today we probably think more of someone banging furiously on a keyboard, a cup of coffee cooling, forgotten, by their side. ‘Just over 3,000 words today,’ they might announce, smugly, as they get up and stretch their cramped limbs.
That’s writing.
Well…
by Marianne Page
How you show up as a leader then depends on how you answer this question: ‘Is management power or is it responsibility?’
I watched a lovely conversation the other day between Captain Tom Moore, and the former England football captain, David Beckham. Naturally they talked mostly about the phenomenal fundraising exploits sparked by the promise of a £1 donation to the NHS if Tom walked a length of his garden. £40 million later… !
What really grabbed my attention was when the conversation turned to leadership, and Captain Tom shared his thoughts on captaincy and what it…
This article documents the entire process of writing my first business book, The HERO Transformation Playbook, along with all of the hard lessons, pain, frustration and creativity, I’ve had along the way. And now I want to share them with you and offer a guide to help you write your business book more effectively and efficiently than I did!
In this article, I cover:
- Understand your motives for writing a book
- Decide on your book content
- Pick a book style
- Choose your publishing mechanism
- Assemble your writing dream team
- Choosing your audience
- Understand the book writing process
- Launch your book
- …
A guest post from Andy Salkeld, author of Life is a Four-Letter Word (out 14 May).
Medium really is a defining word of my life right now.
It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s just in the middle.
I have a feeling many people will be feeling like this a lot of the time right now. We’re living in completely unprecedented and uncertain times. None of us know how this will all play out and from time to time that uncertainty can all get a little too much.
Six years ago, I was diagnosed with depression.
Four years ago, I…
I was chatting with Jude Jennison, author of Leading Through Uncertainty: Emotional Resilience and Human Connection in a Performance-driven World, at a virtual campfire recently following my virtual writing retreat, when she casually mentioned: ‘You know, having the book saved my business these last few weeks.’
Of course I asked her to explain, and she kindly agreed to this interview…
You have a business that’s fundamentally experiential, working with teams with your horses to help them embody leadership: how have you been able to adapt that model in the current crisis?
Firstly, there can be no substitute for the emotional…
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