Everyone’s a manager
If everyone’s a leader, why can’t everyone be a manager?
What if everyone was responsible for looking for development opportunities for each other? And for guiding and shaping work together? And coaching and mentoring? And skill sharing?
Networks over hierarchies.
Keeping the “soft” in soft skills
Everyone knows how important soft skills are for being successful in anything to do with relationships with others. Empathising, communicating, listening; these are the soft skills everyone needs.
And, over the past few decades, as leadership has moved from telling people what to do to helping people figure out what to do, it’s become increasingly recognised that leaders need soft skills.
But leadership has a very masculine tradition and soft skills sounds a bit too feminine. So soft skills needs a rebrand to be acceptable.
No!, I say. Let’s keep calling them soft skills. Let’s embrace and celebrate the feminine energy that listening and empathising brings.
Tesellating fractals
Fractals are a good way of thinking about patterns in organisations that repeat at different scales. Tessellation is a good way to arrange the different fractals so they fit together.
No more trojan horses
The trojan horse analogy often gets used when talking about organisational change and introducing new things. But the original trojan horse was used to invade an enemy encampment. If that’s how we think about introducing new ideas it’s hardly surprising they fail. Organisational change isn’t meant to be a fight between old and new, it’s meant to be something everyone is part of, knowingly and openly. So, no more trojan horses.
Magpie metrics
One sorrow, two for joy. How many magpies have you seen in your work this week?