Are values recognisable? Fortunately, yes. One helpful resource for making values visible is Ed Schein’s book “The Corporate Culture Survival Guide”. Using it as a starting point, here are a few simple ways you can unearth an organisation’s or a team’s (or your own) values. The first is to analyse common sayings and phrases within …
Avoid the discrepancies in lived values in your team that lead to decreased cohesion and productivity. A recurring theme in our workshops is the increasing importance participants give to values in their teams and organisations. In Freedom to Learn, Carl Rogers defines them thus: “(Values are) the tendency of any living beings to show preference, …
As the year draws to a close, I hope you’re looking forward to a break and also some time around children, who seem to imbue this season with its own magic.In Germany, the 12 days of Christmas coincide with the Rauhnächte, a time traditionally for driving out spirits and engaging in prophecy. While I’m not suggesting you …
Meetings take up a lot of the working day. Sometimes it feels like all of it. Going through all the ways to make meetings better could fill a book in itself. In this blog I’d like to focus on one idea to shorten meetings. How often have you found yourself in a meeting where the discussion …
Giving feedback is a lot more challenging in practice than it seems. It requires attitude, timing and technique. Let’s look at attitude first: What’s the purpose in giving someone feedback? To let off steam? Then, I button my lips. To put someone down? Button lips. To appear knowing? Lips. If I am interested in improving …
Would you prefer to be breakfast, or to eat breakfast? As Peter Drucker put it, “Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast”. This was one of the insights that helped me to develop our definition of Enduring Leadership Excellence: The first part of the definition reflects strategy, the second part of culture. And an appropriate culture supports …
Do you want to be the best leader you never had? Along with relaunching our website, we are relaunching our blog. It is a well-curated collection of classic articles from the past, together with articles on our latest thinking on leadership excellence and articles prompted by your questions and feedback. Take a few minutes to …
You got to where you are because you’re excellent at what you do. Now you face the challenge that you have more to do than you can deal with, so you need to delegate tasks to other people. People who may not match your skill and enthusiasm levels. In his book The Tao of Coaching, Max …
The one thing CJ’s grandmothers could agree on — apart from how to make the perfect apple tart — was, if you lose something and you pray to St. Anthony, he will help you find it. As a small child, CJ nodded in agreement to this, since there was often a slice of perfect apple …
Finally! Here at Leadership Sculptor we are pleased to announce that our new website is live! Our original website was developed at a time when Leadership Sculptor was CJ, Daphne, Melanie, and Billy (who has recently reached emeritus status). Over the last 10 years, we have grown considerably and have taken the time to reflect …
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