Not our fault

A teenager died in the weekend after attending the King’s College Winter Ball. Much has and will be said about this tragedy, but three things said by leaders from King’s caught my eye: We can’t babysit the students 24 hours a day. True. We don’t need an inquiry to see how the Balls are run. Mmmm. They weren’t drunk and there were no drugs. Right.

A letter to the editor in one of the Sunday newspapers caught my eye too. The writer, a mother from Masterton, said that she didn’t try to be friends with her children when they were growing up, that she saw her parenting role to role-model behaviours that she wanted to instil into her children. Continue reading “Not our fault” →

Smile for leadership

Do you smile? I mean really smile. Well that’s probably the wrong question. It’s a question about being happy in your leadership.

If you are then you’ll smile. That’s contagious and the team will notice and it’ll pass around like a virus. I’ve very rarely got bad service or not have a problem solved when I’ve got a smile.

Average age 79.3 and they're all smiling - are you?

Not a fake one, but one that comes because of what’s going on inside.

So smile this Monday for leadership. If you can’t then we’ll keep working on it. Come back here soon!

I’m role-modelling with some new headers on this blog that change when you refresh.

Stephen

ps It’s Mum at her 80th in April with her siblings and spouses.

I love the movies!

I try to go the movies  a couple of times a week.  It’s Sunday, which is a great movie day, so here’s a listing of some of the movies I’ve seen this year (I know there’s more but this is a start) with links to blog entries where I’ve mentioned the particular movie.

Why? I felt like it! And they influence my thinking, and hence my blogs.

Stephen

Uncommon language

I just found this draft blog sitting unfinished. Well, not just unfinished, not started apart from the title. So I wondered, what could it have been about? Any clues? It was drafted on 19 April and looking back at my calendar, I had a farewell lunch and a meeting with Restorative Justice Waitakere to discuss an upcoming governance workshop that I subsequently delivered. It was a Tuesday so I might have gone to the movies so maybe it was to do with that.

Friday afternoon is often a day for catching up on things that have slipped by in the rush of the week, so I’ve been doing some of that today. My team have been very busy getting ready for next week’s Strategic Thinking for Leaders workshop and it’s almost ready. Good feeling.

This week in one of my client meetings, the client said that they were interested in leadership development – the soft stuff, real leadership development for real people. Eureka! Something has changed lately in the language I am hearing from potential clients. Strategy is important, but leaders are wanting authentic leadership development and expressing that in the language. Like I heard this week.

So that’s what the blog’s about. The uncommon language of leadership development. Often expressed as desired but when you dig, it’s management that’s talked about – getting the job done. Leaders need to do both, but focusing on authenticity will be a very special place to start and create followers. The management of getting the job done will likely follow too.

My last meeting of the week this morning was discussing a two-day senior lead-team retreat to be held next month: “So you want to do a half day of strategy at the end don’t you?”. “Actually I don’t now, let’s keep the whole time for real leadership development. We can do the strategy later after we understand ourselves and have a team vision”.

Uncommon language, slightly more common this week. Perfect!

Stephen