My Blog
This blog is for me, it’s my sketch pad where I think things through and work things out. Having worked ‘stuff’ out I think it’s good to declare it, so I am sending it to you. Hopefully you will also find it useful.
Latest Posts
What we do in Curated Leadership Conversations
Here’s my last blog post before Christmas.
In the New Year I start a series of Curated Leadership Conversations with the directors of an organisation. Early on we distinguish between ‘doing’, ‘managing’ and ‘leading’ and from then on we talk about leadership in the context of their business. Our time together is pure headspace and a rare opportunity to reposition and permanently operate at a higher level.
Happy holidays.
Why is it always so difficult around here?
‘There’s no clear path to addressing a complex problem, but there are actionable steps to be taken now, even if they only solve part of the problem’
‘We can do better, even without definitive answers’
(Inspired by “Net Positive” by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston)
Ineffective communication is a complex problem; here’s a coaching session with Simon and his team in which they plan for better.
HR director: ‘Coaching management style will relieve pressure on younger managers’
This is Rebecca taking a quiet and satisfied moment. She managed somehow to put 50 of her organisation young professionals on a course called Coach for Results. She believed in it though had to persuade hard to get the Board to go for it. She had skin in the game, her reputation. It’s worked, most completed the course and they are now shining lights in the business and they are talking to their friends about how good it’s here. The Board are delighted and Rebecca’s stock has shot up. So, she’s taking a quiet moment to savour it. For the first time in ages she feels she has made a difference.
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Five steps to saving a late project
Things can be better for people in construction, from the person digging holes in the cold and dirt to the chief exec dealing with demanding shareholders and at every level in between. Though when the project is late things invariably get worse for everyone. Here are five useful tips…
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Six questions construction leaders should ask themselves about quality
A frightening question hit me as construction disasters mounted at the end of the last decade: Edinburgh schools, the catastrophe of Grenfell and the collapse of Carillion: they each stemmed, all or in part, from issues of poor quality.
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Why Bigger Goals are Easier
This week, something a bit different check out our vlog exploring why bigger goals are easier.
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Engineer or manager? It’s time to decide
Early in my career I noticed the best cars in the car park belonged to the managers. So I got into management as fast as I could. But I wasn’t trained for management, nor was anyone else so I pushed hard and got promoted. Constantly pushing hard wasn’t good for me, the people I managed, my organisation or industry. If you want to be a successful manager or train up great managers in your company I have got an incredibly useful tool for you.
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Construction Playbook: five things to know
My strategy in business is to be ‘incredibly useful’. 20 years in it still seems to be working. Every now and then the Government publishes something that changes things but few execs have time to wade through it cos they are busy working the bottom line. Case in point – The Construction Playbook. In this week’s post I explain five things to know about the Playbook. Hope you find it useful.
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Command and control: construction’s outdated leadership style
People skills rarely feature in established routes to construction’s professional qualifications and it is from this gap that many industry problems arise. We are plugging that gap and scaling up to change the construction industry, Anne Okafor explains how. But first let’s talk about Command and control: construction’s outdated leadership style…
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Here’s your chance to get some headspace
Headspace is what my customers value most. Even as little as an hour a month of purposeful thinking with excellent people can make a difference to the strategic soundness of a project or organisation. For this reason, I am setting up a Mastermind group…
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