It’s a question that I start every workshop or speech with, ‘What is culture? What does it mean to you?’ Culture is being talked about more and more, which should come as no surprise, given that it is the single biggest reason for team and organisation success. Up until around…

Regardless of the organisation that you work for, standing still is not an option. Change is required to stay competitive and capable of delivering products or services in line with strategy. To make the change stick, these projects need to be well planned, well managed and deliver the outcomes that…

Cultures very rarely turn toxic overnight. In almost every instance where toxic cultures are investigated, there were signs that it was rotting, sometimes for years. Undertaking surveys to look for the signs is one thing, but working continually to eradicate the signs of culture rot is something else entirely. It’s…

Sociocultural anthropology, shortened to social culture for the purpose of this blog, is the study of traditions, customs, laws, politics, family structures, lived experiences, belief systems and gender studies in relation to global societal diversity. Through research, anthropologists are able to demonstrate ‘that different people living in different environments will…

Culture is still something that senior managers love to talk about, but also avoid investing in. It’s an interesting dichotomy. They want high performance and results… for next to no money or time investment. HR and People leaders continually scrabble around trying to create learning programs that provide the best…

The principal responsibilities of a manager are to inspire and motivate the people on your team and work with them to build a culture that supports productive work. This is often not explicit in your job description, yet it is the expectation of every senior executive! …

It happened again last week. Twice. During separate culture workshops, people complained about the number of emails they received and the number of meetings they had to attend. My response to this complaint almost always invokes silence. ‘Why don’t you stop doing these things to yourselves, then? Instead of complaining…

I remember the sports team that I follow winning a match once having had a player sent off. Coming out of the ground my brother and I joked that we should play with less players every week! Of course, in reality, if any team did that, whilst they may manage…

In the clickbait arena of LinkedIn there is one piece of content that regularly appears and that is the ‘Leadership List’. You know ’10 Things That Every Leader Must Do’, that kind of thing. (And in the spirit of openness I’ve been guilty of similar posts myself in the past!) Before I talk more about the list, I also want to acknowledge the other regular leadership content: The Lessons — Something topical based on what’s currently in the news. ’10 Leadership Lessons You Can Learn From Barbie’ (Wear more pink?).