Writing on change management focused on the human, organisational, and political realities of change in complex settings. These pieces explore why change efforts stall, how resistance emerges, and how leaders create movement when authority is limited and outcomes cannot be fully planned in advance.
Should leaders be friends with employees? Explore the benefits, risks, and strategies to balance trust, fairness, and performance at work.
Explore the three dimensions of trust; character, communication, and capability, with simple practices to strengthen collaboration and confidence at work.
Teams often get stuck in the same patterns of talk. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats offer a way to think differently, creating space for facts, feelings, risks and possibilities to emerge in turn.
Discover how Nancy Kline’s Ten Components of a Thinking Environment help leaders practise stewardship, build trust, and create shared responsibility.
Discover how proactive coping helps leaders build resilience, anticipate challenges, and cope better in today’s volatile workplace.
Learn how to use OKRs to give your team focus. Discover their origins, benefits, pitfalls, and practical steps to connect daily work with purpose.
When a team has faced layoffs, turnover, and shifting leaders, stability becomes the true test of leadership. This guide shows how to rebuild trust and resilience after constant change by focusing on four resilience behaviours, shared identity, and strengths-based teaming. It also offers a clear sixty-day path for creating steadiness your team can believe in.
This guide explores how to influence others without manipulating them, introducing five respectful approaches that build trust, commitment and genuine buy-in.
Unclear decision rights are one of the biggest reasons meetings stall. In this article, I explore five ways decisions can be made and offer practical invitations for leaders who want to bring more clarity, trust, and accountability into every meeting.
A team member dislikes their role but refuses to resign. As a leader, how do you respond? This article explores five research-based frameworks that explain why people stay unhappy in jobs and what you can do to re-engage them with meaning, trust, and choice.
Being promoted early can feel daunting when you are asked to lead older, more experienced colleagues. This article explores four proven psychological theories, impression management, social identity, leader–member exchange, and self-determination, that help young leaders show up with steadiness, build belonging, earn trust, and empower ownership.
When senior leaders choose a path you would not, how do you respond without losing integrity or influence? This post explores evidence-based practices for regulating your reactions, acknowledging loss, practising self-compassion, reframing the situation, and grounding in values so you can lead with steadiness through disagreement.
How can you lead with authority when you don’t have all the answers? Drawing on behavioural science and self-stewardship, this article explores impostor phenomenon, self-compassion, growth mindset, tolerance of ambiguity, and narrative identity to help leaders stay steady and trusted in uncertainty.
Conflict between strong personalities can drain a team or strengthen it. Leaders who steward these moments with care can turn heated clashes into progress. This guide shows six evidence-based approaches and practical tools to host conflict in ways that protect dignity, regulate tension, and anchor people in shared purpose.
When teams keep missing deadlines, reminders and escalations rarely fix the real problem. This guide explains why deadlines slip and how leaders can redesign commitments, accountability and support so work gets delivered reliably and with less stress.
Burnout is at record levels in 2025, with two-thirds of employees at risk. Drawing on Maslach’s burnout framework, this guide shows leaders how to motivate burned-out teams by addressing six critical mismatches in hybrid workplaces.
When trust is broken in leadership, clarity and control rarely repair it. This article explores the psychology of trust: ability, integrity, benevolence, fairness, and psychological safety and offers practical ways leaders can rebuild confidence through convening, fairness, and community.
Town halls and webinars are efficient at spreading information but rarely build ownership. This article explores why big formats fall flat, using insights from behavioural science and group psychology. It also shows how to redesign gatherings, physical or virtual, so people co-create meaning, commit to action, and leave with a sense of shared ownership rather than passive compliance.
Stepping into a role leading leaders is one of the toughest transitions in management. This 60-day plan offers research-backed guidance on how to listen, build trust, create alignment, and empower your leadership team, setting a foundation for performance and culture that lasts well beyond the early weeks.
Just promoted to team leader? Your first 60 days set the tone for trust and performance. This guide offers a practical roadmap in four 15-day phases, balancing early wins with building a culture of belonging and accountability.
What do you do when one of your top performers is also the most toxic presence on your team? This article explores five leadership lenses that reveal the hidden costs, relational fractures, and cultural risks of tolerating toxicity, and offers practical moves to protect trust, balance results, and safeguard the future of your team
When a team member is often absent or quietly disengaged, leaders face a tough choice. Should they tighten policies or start with connection? This post explores how to balance compassion with accountability, using coaching stories, practical steps, and HR guidance to help leaders respond with confidence and fairness.
What should you do when a team member goes to peers first instead of you? It can feel like being bypassed, but it is also a signal worth listening to. This article explores what it really means, why people turn sideways before up, and how leaders can respond with trust rather than defensiveness.
What if a colleague’s refusal to help is not the problem, but the signal? Discover three leadership lenses: culture, structure, and systems, that turn frustration into collaboration.
Organisational climate is the “everyday weather” of work that shapes whether change efforts succeed or fail. Unlike culture, climate can shift quickly and leaders play a decisive role in creating clarity, trust, fairness, and psychological safety. This article explores six facets and five levers leaders can use to build a true climate for change.
When jokes at work cross the line, leaders are often unsure whether to ignore it, enforce policy, or step in directly. This guide offers practical ways to address inappropriate humour, protect trust and build a respectful, inclusive team culture.
Complaints are part of every workplace, but when one person constantly complains, it can drain energy, damage trust and undermine performance. This guide explores why people complain and how leaders can respond in ways that build ownership, accountability and engagement rather than defensiveness.
Defensiveness can derail feedback conversations. This article explores why people react defensively, what behavioural science reveals, and how leaders can respond. From practical models to self-awareness practices, discover strategies to turn defensiveness into growth, build psychological safety, and create a culture where feedback strengthens rather than divides.
When one person dominates meetings, valuable ideas are lost, engagement drops and frustration rises. This guide offers practical facilitation strategies to balance participation, engage quieter voices and create meetings that work for everyone.
Hybrid work has changed how teams connect. Learn how to build trust, create equity, and design simple rituals that foster belonging in remote and hybrid teams.
Discover how workplace wellbeing drives sustainable organisational performance. Explore behavioural, systemic, and relational strategies to prevent burnout, boost engagement, and build resilient, human-centred workplaces.
A practical guide to reducing distraction at work by redesigning how teams focus. Through four pillars: connection, environment, system, psychology. it shows leaders how to protect attention, cut interruptions, and build shared commitment, with actionable tips, micro‑stories, and reflection questions for sustained team focus and performance.
When team members regularly avoid team events, it is often a signal that gatherings are not meeting real needs. This guide explores how leaders can redesign team events to rebuild belonging, ownership and genuine commitment.
Many leaders struggle with cameras staying off in virtual meetings. This guide explores practical ways to build presence, trust and engagement in remote and hybrid teams rather than relying on camera rules.
Recurring performance issues in teams can frustrate leaders and lower standards. Learn how to handle recurring problems constructively through the Five Lenses of Performance, giving feedback that builds accountability, strengthens trust, and even works when you lead without formal authority.
Leading across cultures means adapting to very different expectations about communication, feedback, leadership, and time. Drawing on Erin Meyer’s Culture Map, this article explains the eight dimensions of cultural difference and offers practical tips and reflective questions for managers of global teams. By developing cultural intelligence, leaders can turn diversity into a strength and build more effective, collaborative teams.
Many leaders struggle to say no without upsetting others. This article explores why saying no feels so hard, how culture shapes our responses, and practical strategies to set boundaries while preserving trust and respect.
Discover how to run a Future Search that gathers every key voice, explores the past, creates a shared vision, and commits to action in just three days.
Inspired by Peter Block’s Connecting for Common Good series, this blog explores the shift from leader to connector: building trust, belonging, and shared accountability through everyday habits, cultural practices, and real-world examples from around the globe.
Every tough situation we face has hope, if we are capable of standing back and seeing the possibility. A short piece on finding and creating hope.
An Appreciative Inquiry Summit brings the whole system together to imagine its best future and design strengths-based change. This guide explains how to run an AI Summit and turn large gatherings into spaces of shared vision and committed action.
Discover how to run an Open Space: a dynamic large-group facilitation method that hands the agenda to participants and sparks self-organising action. This practical guide explains the process, principles, hosting tips, and real-world examples so you can create events where energy, ownership, and collaboration thrive.
World Café is a powerful large-group facilitation method that helps organisations and communities surface collective insight and shared ownership through meaningful conversation. This step-by-step guide shows how to host a World Café, craft powerful questions and design conversations that lead to lasting change.
Flawless Consulting by Peter Block is a foundational work on building trust-based partnerships with clients. This practical summary highlights the key ideas, mindsets and behaviours that help consultants, facilitators and leaders create sustainable results through authentic partnership.
Yesterday I attended the second session by Peter Block on "Connecting for the common good". A great follow on session with new people to meet and exchange ideas with. There are three more in the series. See HERE to attend. Here is my sketchnote summary of the session:
The book in 3 sentences Peter Block challenges the dominant “business perspective”, built on scarcity, consumption, and institutional control, and offers a new story: the common good perspective, where citizens reclaim agency through trust, local action, and relational care. He argues that real change happens when neighbours gather, share power, and co-create community well-being, rather than waiting for systems to fix [...]
The full title is "The Answer to How is YES: Acting on what matters." The book in 3 sentences Peter Block argues that our obsession with asking “how?” masks a deeper avoidance of personal responsibility and purpose. Instead of chasing solutions, we should begin by saying “yes” to what truly matters and commit to it without waiting for permission or certainty. [...]
Stewardship by Peter Block is a foundational work on shifting leadership from control to service. This practical summary highlights the ideas that support trust-based partnership, shared accountability and long-term responsibility in organisations.
A practical summary of Peter Block’s Community: The Structure of Belonging, highlighting the key ideas that help leaders, facilitators and community builders create genuine belonging, trust and shared ownership.
The book in 3 sentences The Empowered Manager is a practical guide for managers who want to lead with integrity, not control. It shows how managers can choose partnership over hierarchy, service over self-interest, and accountability over compliance. By making these personal shifts, managers can foster trust, ownership, and meaningful change, regardless of the system they work in. Who should read [...]
