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I’m often asked about the difference between leadership and management. While it is helpful to be clear about the differences, you need to be able to both lead and manage if you want to produce top results and people. Field Marshal Lord Slim, responsible for the British campaign in Burma in WWII and a great […]

Seth Godin once distilled a great list about getting serious about your meeting problem. It highlights the problem that people in many companies face: being in meetings all day. If you’ve wondered when the work gets done, for some people, the answer is that they have forgotten what work involves. The day is filled with meetings,

Too often, feedback is a codeword for criticism. Many managers want to know how to criticise their staff. Many years ago, one of my manager’s, let’s call him Gernot, noticed my tendency for self-critical reflection. He deliberately focused on giving me positive feedback so that I would not lose sight of my strengths. He knew

Interruptions have always been the bane of a researcher’s life and at the same time researchers need interactions to thrive. Most operate an open door policy and are annoyed about the level and style of interruption that ensures their own time is not so effectively used. In many cases, it seems that staff or students

Letting people stay in their comfort zone has a bad press; more people recommend setting stretch goals for your people so that they develop. These two ideas are actually complementary, as the simple chart Shows The inner or comfort zone represents the set of skills and tasks that a person has mastered; they’re comfortable doing

In August 2013, Melanie Glickman and I were invited to run a mini-workshop at a post-doc retreat in the Swiss Alps. The beautiful landscape was conducive to good and creative work. One of the workshop topics was what career options are open to post-docs who do not want to pursue the traditional academic career option of

I often hear from clients about the side effects caused by the tension between their desire to collaborate and their people’s need for individual success.  These can take the form of people hiding data from their colleagues or not putting them in shared directory structures. Some researchers resort to labelling their bottles of materials in a

Late one evening, when we were all sitting around and philosophising about life, a friend of mine said to me, “you know, you’ve clearly cold-bloodedly masterminded your career.” Through the rear-view mirror, it all looked planned. Hand on heart, none of it was planned. Instead, I developed and adopted a strategy that increased my options