When People Doing the Right Thing Stand Alone
As we grow older, experience bends and reshapes the things we believe. Sometimes we see the reshaping and are consciously aware of where it takes us. Sometimes we only realise long after the fact that the bending happened. I have a long list of items that have been bent and reshaped in my consciousness. I am pretty sure that some of them are not yet in my conscious mind. I was recently reminded of one of my reshaped opinions when I was asked to speak at the University of Johannesburg’s annual Corruption Summit.
There was a time in my career when a younger version of me stood before professionals and told them that they must do the right thing—even when they had to stand alone. I said it with conviction, because it was the right thing to say. But, with more life experience under my belt, I now understand that I had a too narrow view back then.
Culture Before Catastrophe
Growth does not simply make an organisation bigger. It changes the social system through which work gets done.
Recent work with a client in a growth phase reminded me how important it is to be intentional about shaping the right culture for the organization as early as possible. To the credit of the founders of the organization, they did not wait until the culture had become toxic before they recognized that they needed to work on the culture of the organization. They saw the signs of a growing company reshaping itself as new people entered, and immediately reached out for assistance. That was a refreshing experience for me. Normally I get called in when the organization is already in trouble, and when it is far more challenging to turn a dysfunctional or toxic culture around.
When Ethics and Compliance Cast a Shadow
Some topics are not easy to write about. Not because we do not know what our views are about them, but because we know how easily the views may be misunderstood—especially by those who prefer a version of pristine ethics and compliance that does not allow for shadows.
I know. Ethics and compliance shadows? That is where you land when you take the liberty—perhaps a little audaciously—of borrowing a concept from one discipline and applying it to another. I have borrowed from psychology and found the result illuminating enough to risk a few furrowed brows.
Menopause Is a Leadership Issue
Since it has become clear that organisations that are deliberate about ensuring diversity in leadership tend to be more successful, many organisations have been trying to strengthen the pipeline of women into senior leadership. They invest in development programmes targeting women, are intentional around targets and succession plans, as well as mentoring of women in the leadership pipeline. Then, just as many women reach the point at which their experience, judgement and influence are at their most valuable they hit a wall. A natural biological transition suddenly makes remaining at work considerably harder – and the organisation is often entirely unprepared for it.
When Leadership Wounds the Conscience
The last thing I expected that day was an apology. For a few seconds that felt like an eternity, I was at a loss for words. The young man sitting opposite me had just admitted that he had helped fabricate stories about me because his boss had instructed him to do so. I remember my anger. What I did not understand then was the injury he had suffered himself.
When reputational damage penetrates the skin of an organisation
That conversation fundamentally changed the way I think about organisational reputation…
There are two stories about organisational reputation that occasionally surface in my memory. They stuck with me primarily because I was somehow in the thick of things. These stories are stark reminders of how negative organizational reputation has an impact on the innocents in the organisation. Reputation is never confined to the boardroom, and ethical failure always creates collateral damage.
Why Generic Executive Coaching Falls Short at Board Level
I have watched many individuals in NED roles glance at coaching and dismiss it as something for executives, not for themselves. “Generic executive coaching won’t help me with board-level complexity.”
The Most Dangerous Assumption in Leadership: Believing Your Perspective Is the Truth
The first time the penny dropped for me, I mean really dropped so hard that I had no other alternative but to bring it into sharp focus and build clarity around it, was when I found myself in a conflict that spanned global borders.
Outsourced morality
It is incumbent on each of us to constantly evaluate whether our moral compass is still pointing to our true north. We need to continually ask ourselves whether our actions are informed by our own beliefs that we carefully considered, before we concluded that they are fit to be used in our moral compass. How certain are we that we are not just believing what we are because those around us believe it? Or, that we are believing what we are because those who we have crowned with a halo believe it? Applying one’s own mind is paramount if we were to avoid the temptation of outsourcing our morality to others.
Fear can be your friend or your enemy
Whether we like it or not, we were not designed to be fearless. Fear is an emotional response connected to a basic need we all have – to feel safe. In the evolution of the human brain, this had been encoded for a very good reason. Our fear response is designed to trigger an action from us. If it’s a lion, we run. If we were to convince ourselves that we should not show fear and stand our ground, the stand we take is probably going to be immaterial to a starving lion. His fear that you may also be a threat, would most certainly be overridden by his fear of starving to death. Human beings are in any event rather defenceless without our modern weapons.