Leadership & Team Management

In a lot of companies, there’s a wall where three or four values are posted: integrity, innovation, team spirit. They get picked at an offsite, printed up nicely, and then everyone moves on. These statements are usually sincere; the problem is how rarely they describe the culture people actually work in. A company culture shows […]

We like to repeat that a good leader « resolves conflict ». A reassuring phrase, but one that smuggles in a strange assumption: that conflict is always a problem to be eliminated. Yet teams with no visible conflict have usually just learned to keep quiet. Patrick Lencioni, in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, captures this in

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023, 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted by 2027, and six people in ten will need training—while only half actually have access to it today. The figure has become a sales pitch for course catalogues. But stacking up training sessions solves nothing if

It’s easy to confuse motivating a team with rewarding one. The year-end bonus, the meal vouchers, the offsite in the countryside: so many levers we pile up, hoping engagement will come back in return. Yet what gets you out of bed motivated on a Monday morning rarely comes down to last quarter’s bonus. In some

Search for « qualities of a good leader » and you’ll land on the same list of seven to ten words: vision, charisma, resilience, listening, integrity, boldness. Presented as a checklist, as if leading came down to stacking up flattering adjectives. The trouble with these lists is that they confuse what we admire in a leader with