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.