How Personality Can Help Protect Public Health (And Your Business)

Last weekend, I did something I never thought I’d do. I donned personal protective equipment to run a basic errand. I put on gloves and a mask, and in spite of the warm spring weather, I even wore long sleeves to cover as much of my skin as possible. It felt like I was walking […]

The State of Remote Work

Working from home is a not a new experience for many employees. In the United States, 50% to 70% of jobs can be done from home, but the number of remote workers is actually much lower. This trend is mirrored around the globe. That is, the actual number of remote workers trails the number of […]

Leadership Matters

The quality of people’s lives depends on their careers. The quality of people’s careers depends on the organisations in which their careers are embedded. The success of these organisations depends on their leadership. The effectiveness of the leadership depends on the characteristics of the people in leadership roles. Ultimately then, personality drives leadership, leadership drives […]

Leading into the “New Normal”

As governments around the world are under increased demands to reopen, leaders everywhere are making decisions in the face of staggering uncertainty and conflicting information. In many ways, the decisions that first closed down businesses and quarantined cities, although certainly difficult, were much easier exercises in short-term decision making and execution than those that leaders […]

Look for the Helpers: Humble Leadership in Times of Crisis

Many people are involved in a basketball game: A coach provides strategy, a shooting guard is agile, and a point guard assists in providing direction. In the heat of the game, the coach knows when to put in strong players, when to bench someone, and when to encourage every player to step up and give […]

Managing Stress with Strategic Self-Awareness

Feeling the Sunday scaries? At the start of each workweek, we prepare ourselves for the stressful situations we are likely to face throughout the week. With the recent pandemic, the stress we are feeling is unprecedented. As we try to go about the workday facing new challenges in an abruptly virtual world, the way that we manage […]

The importance of staff development during an economic downturn

To say that these are interesting times that we are living in is an understatement. Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen panic buying at supermarkets; a rout on global stockmarkets; racism and bigotry rearing their ugly heads; all coupled with a disturbing lack of leadership by many of our global leaders during […]

Managerial Competencies and Organisational Levels

I was talking recently with a very smart psychologist about IBM; I noted that IBM’s stock has gone down steadily for the past six years, and he said: “IBM is well managed but poorly led.” This perceptive observation assumes that managers’ jobs change as they move from supervisor to manager to executive. I have always thought […]

Crisis Mode: Assembling the Ideal Team for a Task Force

From 2008 to 2011, I worked as the leader of the human resources team at a Fortune 50 company. During that time, I had a challenging experience at one of the company’s manufacturing plants, which employed 1,200 people. Immersed in a list of negative key performance indicators, my challenge was to recover governance while facing […]