She calls it "Kanter's Law": "Everything looks like a failure in the middle."  In a Harvard Business Review article in 2009  Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote that "Everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is just the middles that involve hard work." It's an interesting thought and the principle does seem to apply to most changes or new approaches we take, whether in our business or our personal lives. The initial decisions and commitm...

Is what you do who you want to be? As we start into a new year, it's a useful time to be intentional about what we want to achieve in the year ahead: what's important to us, what has value, where our focus should be. Every day we do things - usually in conscious or unconscious pursuit of things we want for ourselves, for others or for a shared purpose. This is true for organisations, teams and individuals. At the end of the day sometimes we ask ourselves what we actually did tha...

We live in an "attention economy"; our precious and limited cognitive resources are constantly being enticed, attracted, lured, tempted, assaulted, and distracted. Not only by global online businesses, but also the constant aural and visual messages that bombard us in our physical environments, as well the people around us. And that's before we distract ourselves! A positive from all of this attention-seeking and distracting behaviour from others is that it reminds us that our...

"We are what we repeatedly do," said Aristotle. "Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." In the past two newsletters I've highlighted the issues of strengths and confidence. Each of these has been a significant theme in workshops and coaching this year. Another significant theme has been the power of habit - for both good and bad. Let's focus on the good in the spirit of both building on strengths and building and sustaining confidence as we pursue "ex...

"Confidence," says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, director and chair of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, "is an expectation of a positive outcome. It is not a personality trait; it is an assessment of a situation that sparks motivation." As I noted in the last issue, confidence (or more accurately, the lack of it) is an issue that arises frequently in leadership development workshops, assessments and coaching. From "imposter syndrome" to harsh feed...