Leading With Two Minds
I used to be a decisive leader … but now I’m in two minds. If you’ve ever heard the idiom “to be in two minds about something” then you need to forget its negative connotations around being indecisive. This article will show why leaders need to think with at least two minds if organisations are [...]
Becoming a Leader
Becoming a leader involves learning to lead yourself as well as learning how to lead others. To become a leader, to stand out from the crowd, and to take on responsibility for others is a threatening experience for most people. Their first experience is often a feeling of being very exposed. To be successful in [...]
Conscious Organisational Change
“Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell 1949). When an organisation is failing to cope with market forces, could this be due to a restriction of consciousness – the collective consciousness of its people? An [...]
3 Enablers of Agile Leadership
Is our approach to education, training and development delivering the agile leaders that organisations need now and in the future? Organisations are facing unprecedented levels of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA). First appearing in military circles the acronym VUCA is now more often used to describe the business environment. Organisations need leaders who can [...]
Complex Authenticity
Successful leadership today requires the leader to be both authentic and agile at the same time; a paradox that many leaders struggle to resolve. In his book ‘Authentic Leadership’ (2003) Bill George (former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic) has defined authentic leadership as “being yourself; being the person you were created to be” rather than [...]
Capacity to Lead in a Complex World
Are leaders ‘in over their heads’ in this increasingly complex world? It is common knowledge that most organisations currently have to deal high levels of complexity and uncertainty due to the unprecedented economic, technical, political, environmental and social change and volatility people are experiencing around the world. To survive and succeed organisations need greater agility [...]
Leading Society in a Complex World
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in,” (Greek proverb). Societies around the world are experiencing significant change driven by the combined forces of globalisation and technology. Disagreements and uncertainty over global warming threaten to paralyse any attempts to mitigate its effects. Some believe social [...]
Teaching Leaders how to Learn
The most intelligent, educated and experienced leaders often become the worst learners. Why? The success of organisations in today’s complex and dynamic environment depends on their leaders’ ability to apply new solutions to new problems. It relies on a leader’s ability to learn new ways of working, yet most people don’t know how to learn. [...]
3 Characteristics of Wise Leaders
Are leaders becoming more intelligent and stupid at the same time? It has been found that peoples IQ’s are rising by an average 9 points per generation across many countries in the world. This has been termed the Flynn Effect, after James R Flynn who did much to promote this phenomenon. So, as a global [...]
Leader Agility for a VUCA World
Are today’s leaders being beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists? VUCA is an acronym that came into common usage in the military in the late 1990s and is now used to describe the environment many organisations are facing today: – Volatility – The speed, frequency and nature of change Uncertainty – The [...]
Using the CPP to go Beyond Competency Frameworks
Have competency frameworks passed their sell by date? The past success of competency frameworks has derived from the simple and efficient way they translate business strategy into processes for selection, development and performance management. However, today most organisations operate in a far more complex, dynamic and uncertain environment than can be adequately addressed by a set [...]
How Leaders Can Avoid The Expertise Trap
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd Nothing breeds failure like success! This is a misquote from the phrase by French playwright and novelist Alexandre Dumas ‘Nothing succeeds like success’ (Ange Pitou, 1854), but it is, nonetheless, more relevant for the world we live in today. The ‘expertise trap’ is [...]
3 Stages of Awareness for Leader Development
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd Are leaders fully conscious at work? They may look conscious, but are they are in fact behaving unconsciously or habitually? Are they just acting out a combination of their personality and the skills that have brought them success in the past? With many organisations [...]
Becoming an Authentic Leader
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd Advocates of ‘Authentic Leadership’ argue that there is currently an ethical meltdown in leadership and cite major corporate failures such as Worldcom, Enron, and Arthur Andersen. The recent financial crisis and the current low level of trust in business leaders have inevitably bolstered [...]
Developing Leaders in the Workplace
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd Leaders are ‘forged in the fire of experience’ not on traditional training courses. Learning to lead takes place in the business through facing challenging experiences, the sort of challenge where the leader realises that their existing way of viewing the world is no [...]
5 Factors for Identifying Future Business Leaders
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd Historically, companies have either used Performance Reviews or assessments against Competency Frameworks to identify those who have the potential to be successful business leaders. However, research has identified that, whilst these methods are appropriate for measuring past performance and current capability, they are [...]
Mapping the Terrain for Leader Development
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd A leader’s journey of development is often treacherous and not for the faint hearted. It is a journey that can take over 20 years and one that most leaders will never fully complete. Yet today’s businesses are in desperate need of leaders who [...]
A Leader’s Journey
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd A leader’s development can very effectively be described as a journey. It is a journey on which the inherent wisdom of the leader is awakened as progress is made towards self-actualisation for the service of others. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand [...]
The Need for ‘Leader’ Development
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd With increasing levels of change, ambiguity, and uncertainty, today’s business leaders need to ensure they have the complexity of mind to match the complexity of their business environment. What is ‘Leader’ Development? This article discusses the need for ‘leader’ development as opposed to [...]
Creating the Future
By Terry Sexton, business psychologist and founder of Creative Edge Consulting Ltd Competitive advantage for a business is gained through meeting customers’ needs better than the competition. Should business leaders try to predict, or can they create, these future market conditions? The Futility of Prediction In the past most business leaders endeavoured to accurately predict [...]
