Access and Browse the Library
The Resource Library contains free online tools to help align your people strategies with your business strategies
The discussions, guidelines and planning tools within my library of resources are compiled in response to the Common Questions and Concerns of leaders and managers I coach and mentor. I began refreshing the library in February 2014; expect it to grow significantly and continually.
Common Questions and Concerns
Many workplace culture and “people-development” initiatives begin with excitement and promise but end up in cul de sacs, with leaders unable to point to lasting achievements. Meanwhile, the pedestrian, non-sexy challenges that drain energy and productivity from everyday organisational life remain unaddressed, unchanged or in a more serious state. People still need to:
- Learn how to talk and negotiate with one another without creating ambiguity, confusion, antipathy or resentment
- Hear what others are saying and listen for what they’re not • Use agreed practices that can be trusted to bring about progress
- Support and bring out the best in others
- Deal constructively with differences
- Conduct meetings and collaborate in ways that increase capacity and minimise waste
- Achieve a balance between transactional and transformational matters
- Cope with built-in limitations of the structures and systems within which they do business.
When people return to these fundamental challenges and as I listen and clarify their “presenting problems”, their common questions often follow these lines:
- How can I avoid becoming as overburdened with and worried about work as other leaders I know?
- My role sometimes demands more than I am able, reasonably, to give. My private life is already compromised by my working hours. I can’t work harder. How can I reduce my stress and anxiety?
- How can I do anything well, when I’m overwhelmed by my workload and the constant incoming traffic that increases it?
- How can I prioritise when everything appears to be both urgent and important?
- Under these circumstances, how am I expected to develop others in their roles?
- What can I do to provide greater strategic leadership and reduce my involvement in tactical or transactional management?
- How can I make better use of the potential represented by my team?
- When, how and what should I delegate?
- How should I coach and develop others?
- I’m being told I must “step up” to become a better leader. What does that involve?
- What’s the shortest route to improving relationships with colleagues and staff?
- How should I respond to complex interactions and others’ negativity or difficult behaviours?
- How can meetings be made really useful?
- What can I do to reduce damaging friction and conflict?
Most of my resources about Interpersonal Communication, Problem Solving and Conflict
Resolution practices are drawn from my comprehensive guide and workbook, Collaborative Dialogue – self-management practices at the heart of dialogue.
