In my career as a leader, and latterly as a consultant, I have sat in on a huge number of Leadership Team meetings. Some are better and others worse but, overall, the standard of them is surprisingly poor. Over ambitious agendas, rambling updates, visibly disengaged participants and, most importantly, superficial discussion that don’t seem to be getting to the heart of the issue are the norm. Given the calibre of the people in the room, how can this be? Why do we put up with such poor meetings – and how can we change them? The evils of the ‘Update’ Leadership Teams are comprised of human beings and are just as susceptible to falling into bad habits. These habits are a big part of the reason why groups of talented and experienced people keep doing things that clearly aren’t working. They just aren’t getting the most out of the enormous resources of knowledge and experience in the room when the Leadership Team gets together. The most pernicious of these habits
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Is leadership fun for you?
One of the responses I received to last month’s edition was an email from a former colleague. He asked me about what role I thought ‘fun’ had to play in leadership and leadership teams. It got me thinking… The word ‘fun’ is difficult for many leaders as it can be seen as implying frivolity which doesn’t sit well with the gravity of responsibility in leadership roles. Let’s, then, talk about how rewarding the experience of leadership is – and the role it plays both in delivering results and also in enabling each leader to give of their best. Leaders’ experience today Few leaders I meet are enjoying their jobs. Most are working too hard, frustrated at the pace of progress and worn down by the daily grind of eking out even small incremental gains in a hostile business environment – from what feels like an unresponsive organisation. Worse still, the impression I get from many leaders is that this is what they expect. They feel that this is what
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Why do I keep having the same old conversations with people?
Some frustrating conversations just seem to keep cropping up – and not always with the same people! They are frustrating because we know that failure to move them on is reducing our effectiveness and keeping us from the outcomes we need. This month’s thinker has some ideas to help you break these patterns to get better results. The games people play (yep, that means us!) Eric Berne took Freud’s ideas and made them accessible by focusing, not on the individual but on the patterns of interaction (transactions) between them. His seminal 1964 book ‘The games people play’ introduced not only the Discipline of Transactional Analysis (TA) but was also, arguably, the birth of ‘pop psychology’. Before we look at the ‘games’ (the recurring relationship patterns) that we all play, we need to understand the underlying ideas in Berne’s work on TA. Some (now) familiar ideas… Berne explains that we play ‘games’ from one of three basic roles (‘states’):- Parent. In which we play the part of an authority figure. This is
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