Category: Leadership

Summary: All organisations, from startups to established giants, exist in a perpetual state of turnaround. Drawing on Michael D. Watkins’ STARS model, I want to explore how to diagnose an organisation’s current state and apply this lens to understand why a constant focus on renewal, adaptation, and correction is vital for long-term success, regardless of…

When I moved onboard to direct the Africa Mercy in 2010, it completed a transition that I was on to be paperless. Being on a ship, there was not a lot of room for paper filing cabinets. Additionally, I also travelled a fair bit in Africa, so I needed my office with me at all…

I have a whole virtual and physical bookshelf on organisational leadership and development books. I currently have three books on the go reading different views of what we have gained and lost from working virtually. Ultimately, one of the main goals of all these books is to create an environment that is healthy. As I…

In 2019 we had a fire that destroyed a good chunk of our personal belongings. As it always is with a fire, irreplaceable things that we would have handed down to future generations were suddenly gone. It was a sad day of grieving because it was such a huge loss of family history. History is…

If your team or some of its members are struggling, could they be a reflection of you as a leader not being ‘on the ball’? There are a number of dimensions of this mirror, but in this blog let’s focus on just one aspect: leading through being generous with encouragement. Most everyone at some point…

No organisation ever expects to drift. Never in a board room or a senior leader management meeting has there been an objective to set the organisation adrift. Yet organisations do drift and sometimes it is too late before they wind up on the rocks. There are lots of reasons why organisations have come and gone.…

Organisational growth relies on character based leadership creating healthy teams, battling for clarity of vision and investing disciplined work into implementation. I have a stack of organisational books in storage on two continents, but if I could only own and read six that summarise this mix well, this is what would be on my bookshelf……

As I have worked in a number of teams and organisations over the years, I have come to recognise that there is sometimes something very special missing. The problem is, you either sense it, see it and nurture it to create an extra special team or organisation, or you default to some other mode to…

My blog last week M*A*S*H – A Vision for Leadership in Covid was one of my most popular posts. If you will bear with me, I would like to take the analogy a bit further to highlight a couple of Colonel Potter’s leadership traits. Looking at the character of Colonel Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H…

As I was reflecting on how to lead in these challenging times impacted by Covid-19, I remembered scenes from the US television show M*A*S*H and I wondered if this storyline demonstrates qualities which might be useful for leaders to inspire vision for team building. To recap or introduce the story line of M*A*S*H for this…