Until someone calls out bad behaviours, they will continue.

If you are a parent, you will be familiar with your children using the phrase ‘I’m allowed’. In the workplace, ‘I’m allowed’ can translate into employees rationalising arriving late and leaving early or helping themselves to stationery or any other thing that isn’t tied down and that they feel is a ‘right’ to help themselves to. At senior levels of … Read More

How to deal with poor employee performance

When should you take action?  There are some simple rules of thumb….  1. When it directly affects the person’s productivity 2. When it affects the productivity of other people in the team/department 3. When, no matter how many times you have set up additional training, or peer mentoring, or even counselling (for home problems) performance simply hasn’t improved 4.  When … Read More

25 terrifying questions to ask if your business seems to be going backwards

Over my many years working as an HR consultant to medium and large businesses; I realised that the successful ones were rarely the ones that had a great product or service; those are temporary. The really successful ones were those that weren’t afraid to ask the difficult questions and to do something about the challenging answers. So I thought I’d … Read More

The 20 most environmentally courageous countries

I’m just putting the finishing touches to my latest book ‘Leaders Behaving Badly: What happens when ordinary people show up; stand up and speak up’ and given that we’ve just had pretty much a final warning from the UN with regard to climate change; thought I’d share a short extract from the book with regard to countries that are taking … Read More

12 tips to remain stress-free during your joyous family Christmas

I love Christmas – the whole family getting together to share good food, nice wine and presents. What could possibly go wrong? So before we all head off to celebrate – I thought a few of these hilarious family gathering tips might be relevant. For the people doing all the shopping and preparing the food: Henry Kissinger famously said ‘There … Read More

Every leader has a ‘weird’ gene

‘Weird’ leaders see things differently. When working with my teams I created a game called ‘The Motley Crew’. The aim of the game was for participants to select 8 people from a list of weird; strange and crazy people to re-start the human race on another planet. They also had to choose the leader. The 5 characters which caused the … Read More

Difficult Manager, Co-worker or Bully – How Do You Tell?

This was a pre course survey run in readiness for a “bullying” workshop a small group of us planned to run. We wanted to know if all the bullying we were reading about in schools and the workplace were for real or just media hype. Question  Yes  No Does your organisation have a dedicated HR department?  52..45%  47..6% Have you … Read More

What I want is bigger than any fear that I have…

I’ve often wondered if we humans live our lives with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake? Typically we make our New Year resolutions and/or decide on some new and and exciting business goal and we set off with a rip and a roar – till about March. Then time, life, tiredness and excuses take over. … Read More

Understanding The Real Cost Of Losing A Key Staff Member

When someone hands in their notice, although it may be sad and you know you’ll miss them, mostly we think ‘I’ll just advertise the job or hand it over to our usual recruitment agent and we’ll find a replacement.’ This is what most people think is the ‘cost’ of losing a staff member, i.e. the cost of placing ads and/or … Read More