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Our Interpersonal Inheritance

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Conversations are the barometers of organisational health but personal objectivity about the quality of our contributions to them can be like asking a fish to describe water. Mostly they're a constant, unnoticed system in which we conduct interpersonal relationships. And it's never just us involved: we inherited many of our practices uncritically from our families-of-origin as our parents inherited similarly from theirs. Because they may be based on redundant or unhealthy patterns, the topic's … [Read more...]

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Why delegate? Why not?

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On the face of it, delegating work is a simple and straightforward matter:  identify tasks you want someone else to carry out and ask them to get on with it.  So why do many leaders and managers find it difficult and delegate insufficiently or not at all?  What are their practical and attitudinal obstacles? We delegate by assigning authority or duties to someone who acts for us. As a leadership practice it involves allocating, entrusting and supporting others to carry out work towards … [Read more...]

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Hostility: it’s probably not about you

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To what extent is boredom and dissatisfaction behind picking fights? If the author and journalist Gaby Hinsliff  is correct or if what she suggests is right sometimes, we ought be able to make very useful shifts in our responses to much of others' "difficult" behaviours:  annoyance, antagonism, hostility, nastiness, unkindness, spite, meanness, malice, malevolence,  plain old bad-temper and other forms of poking sticks at people. I believe she is right and that the insight, coupled with … [Read more...]

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Encourage!

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We know from personal experience that our capacity for performance is significantly enhanced when our efforts and we ourselves are appreciated.  When we believe otherwise, we become easily stressed and soon give up or stop caring.  We also understand that people who go out of their way to acknowledge our effort and output, even if only with simple words of sincere thanks, go far beyond the limits of performance appraisal systems or conventional customer-client relationships:  they nourish a … [Read more...]