By Ian Sampson Janice sat in her office with the door shut staring at her screen for a moment. “Why am I so disconnected,” she wondered. ” I’m living at work, the cat won’t acknowledge that she knows me anymore. My Board members are tetchy with me and my best friend is offhanded when we meet […]
Misleading Conduct #13: Control Your Own Schedule And Create Chaos With Others
By Ian Sampson Leaders get to their exalted position by learning to skillfully manage time. After all, time is all we have. So the leader’s time is valuable and needs to be managed. This is usually done by a PA who is often a person who has to be at the leader’s beck and call 24/7, helping […]
Misleading Conduct # 8 – Playing Favourites
No matter what size or type of business they lead, leaders will most likely interact with dozens, hundreds or thousands of people in a month. Most of them will fall into various categories: executive team members, customers, stakeholders, media, etc. The best way to mislead in interactions with the members of each group is to divide […]
Misleading Conduct # 7 – Micromanaging Your People
Mis-leaders focus on the insignificant. They go deep into the organisation and tell others how to do their job. Mis-leadership through micromanagement is guaranteed to make people fearful on several levels: They will fear that you think they can’t do their job; They will be afraid that you are up to something, but they won’t […]
Are Thorny Problems Drawing Your Full Attention From Your Cause?
Can you relate to this? You are part of an Executive Leadership team in an organisation – maybe the CEO or a Senior Executive – and have hit a problem that is seemingly so intractable that it is consuming an inordinate part of your work time and possibly keeping you awake at night. As you […]
Stop Stressing About Innovation, Just Continuously Improve
By Chris Gandy Executive coaching in the cause-based sector is such a rewarding and stimulating activity on so many levels. One deals with highly motivated, talented and dedicated people who are mostly focused on bettering themselves so that they can deliver better outcomes for the people they serve. A byproduct of this is that as a coach you […]
Leaders behaving badly
By Ian Sampson In a recent Forbes article some learned authors distilled seven unproductive behaviours of unsuccessful leaders. They were: Habit # 1: They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s […]
Executive Coaching should be treated as a necessity, not a luxury.
By Chris Gandy Last month the Nonprofit Quarterly ran a thought provoking interview with Bill Ryan, coauthor of “Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards”, who recently led a study on coaching in the cause-based sector. For me there were three major take-outs from this interview – Ryan’s definition of Coaching; What distinguishes […]
What’s with this executive coaching obsession about being lonely at the top?
By Chris Gandy Google the words “executive coaching lonely at the top” and you will receive a blizzard of responses. It seems to me that almost every executive coach feels that it is obligatory to stress that they are there for the poor CEOs and executives who are ostracised by people above, below and side-ways […]
B-Cause 