Self Leadership and
The New Leadership Playbook
Blog by Andrew Bryant

Who is the best motivational speaker and do motivational speakers even work?

These questions get asked each year when organizing the company conference or offsite. Whether leaders and employees are grappling with change, dealing with disruption, or setting some ambitious targets, everyone needs a dose of motivation.

Do Motivational Speakers Even Work?

With inspirational quotes on LinkedIn and Instagram, every manager or social influencer can consider themselves a motivational speaker, which raises some legitimate cynicism about the effectiveness of hiring a motivational speaker.

Here are some common themes that might make people feel good for a few minutes but have no lasting impact:

1. I did it so you can too

   I climbed a mountain, beat cancer, or some other trauma so you can too. As inspiring as these stories are, they ignore survivor bias and can lack practical takeaways for achieving this quarter’s goals.

2. Mindset is all that matters

   Yes, being aware of your current frame of...

Leadership is a complex and multi-faceted topic. To be an effective leader requires awareness of the context in which you are leading, the motivation and skills of the people you are leading, and your own leadership style. Despite the complexity, there are some do's and don'ts that can help you become a more efficient and effective leader. In this guide, we'll cover five of the most important leadership do's and don'ts.

Leadership Do's

1. Communicate Openly and Frequently

One of the most important things a leader can do is keep lines of communication open. This means being accessible to your team and encouraging two-way communication. Leaders should make it safe to ask questions and be available to address concerns (psychological safety). Being responsive to feedback builds trust and engagement.

2. Be Decisive

Leaders must be able to make decisions quickly and confidently. Indecision breeds confusion and causes morale to suffer. Sharing why and how a decision was made creates buy-in...

It’s the time of year for resolutions. A new year, a new start, a chance to begin anew and put the past behind us, or is it the same old B.S. and just another day?

By B.S. I am, of course, referring to a belief system that was succinctly summed up by Henry Ford when he famously said:

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't - you're right.”

If, after the challenging few years that we have all been through, you feel a bit jaded and cynical about such motivational messages and memes, I invite you to read on because this article is for you, and you might be surprised by the conclusion.

There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

There is no such thing as a free lunch" (TINSTAAFL) is an expression that describes the cost of decision-making and consumption. The expression conveys the idea that things appearing free always have some cost paid by somebody, and that nothing in life is truly free.

Henry Ford was not suggesting that just by changing your B.S. from...

"Oh No, Not another Leadership Seminar!"  is the punchline of a story I share when I speak at conferences or events.

The incident happened 20 years ago when I was on my way to conduct a 2-day leadership development program for an international client and I overheard two managers talking before it started.

As humbling as the experience was, it was also a wake-up call to make leadership education relevant and practical. Everyone you talk to will likely agree that effective leadership is essential but few will agree that they lack the skill.

Twenty years after that incident, I have coached hundreds of C-level leaders and facilitated countless leadership sessions. I am the author of two books on self-leadership as well as The New Leadership Playbook: Being Human Whilst Successfully Delivering Accelerated Results. My conclusion from this experience is:

"𝑳𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒑 𝒊𝒔 𝒂 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏"

 

The Leadership Accelerator

Leadership is a...

Collaboration is the behavior of working with others, in-person or virtually, to produce something. It is the nature of business and a key factor for success, yet it is often lacking.

Some years ago, I was asked to run a conflict management training for a software company in Singapore, I explained to the client that giving people conflict management strategies is a great idea, but the conflict would remain unless the underlying causes of the conflict were addressed. I asked:

"Who is in conflict with whom, and about what?’"

With more gentle probing, I discovered that the engineering team was motivated and rewarded to keep the servers online and secure. The innovation team was motivated and rewarded for developing new solutions and selling them to market.

‘I’m curious,’ I probed further. ‘Does the innovation team need to test their beta software on the engineering team’s servers?’

The answer was...

You might think that after the pandemic-induced remote and hybrid work leaders would have embraced social collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or Facebook Workplace.

A recent report by Knowman showed that the effect of the pandemic has been that 64% of organizations indicate an increase in leadership activity on their chosen social platform but only 18% of leaders use the platform to create dialogue around important topics, and only 8% have a structured approach for doing so. 

When I was researching for 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸: 𝗕𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝗹𝘀𝘁 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘀 (Ocean Reeve Publishing 2022), I spoke to many leaders who were looking forward to putting the pandemic behind them, getting everyone back to work, and returning to traditional management techniques. This traditional mindset ignores, at great cost, the gains made through collaboration, team performance, and employee engagement that...

My coaching client, let’s call him Terry, was frustrated. Like many people, he valued harmony, and to achieve it he often didn’t speak up but when things didn’t go the way he thought they should.  But, despite his best efforts, his frustration would often leak out, derailing his plans.

Harmony, I explained, takes work. It requires awareness of your own needs, wants, and beliefs as well as being curious about the needs, wants, and beliefs of others. With this awareness, you can communicate assertively to reach collaboration. In short, you must lean into difference rather than avoid it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

In this post, I share a framework that can help you have more harmony in your work and personal life.

Human Needs, Wants, and Beliefs

A need, like food, water, clothing, and shelter, is a must-have. If a need is not met, we will consciously or unconsciously behave in ways to fulfill our needs. Beyond the physiological needs, Abraham Maslow...

Mentoring has a triple benefit. It benefits the mentor, the mentee, and the organization, so it is not surprising that people and culture, or human resource, departments are keen to set up mentoring programs. Why then do many mentoring programs fail, and what are the pitfalls?

The idea of mentoring can be traced back 3000-years to Homer's Odyssey. In this Ancient Greek epic poem, Odysseus entrusts his young son Telemachus to the care of a mentor, when he goes off to fight in the Trojan War. This history is likely the reason for the stereotype of the older, successful, man mentoring a young ambitious one. It also highlights the current need for those women, who have successfully navigated to the top, to mentor a new generation of women leaders.

Mentoring Definition

In a modern and business context, mentoring can be defined as a developmental partnership between a Mentor, a leader with expertise in one or more areas, and a Mentee, an individual seeking learning and growth in these...

If you Google the term ‘leadership’, you get 2.2 Billion results! And, the definition doesn’t help much:

“Leadership is the action of leading”

 – well that’s deep! And the synonyms include; authority, control, and management - all of which are at odds with many modern descriptions of effective leadership.

“There are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are people who have tried to describe the concept” (Bass, 1990)

I love this quote, partly because I myself am an author and keynote speaker on the topic of leadership, and because it highlights that to understand leadership, you have to consider the context.

Why Leadership?

Wait a moment. Before we decide on a definition of leadership, let us first ask, “Why Leadership?”

We need Leadership because the World is Complex and Changing Fast. You’ve probably heard the term VUCA. VUCA is an acronym coined by the US army and stands...

Career conversations are not performance reviews, and they are not necessarily about a pay rise. They are about utilizing talents, developing skills, and sustaining motivation. 

The strength and sustainability of a company depend on attracting, retaining, and developing good talent, and career conversations are a vital part of this. Considering the importance of these conversations, many managers feel at a loss on how to have them, and employees don't know how to prepare for them. 

Karin was frustrated. She felt taken for granted and knew she was being under-compensated. What added insult to injury was that her manager made no attempt to engage her about what she wanted, despite her driving one of the biggest and most complicated technology projects in the company's history.

Karin confided in me, during our coaching together, that she had started to look outside her firm because she didn’t feel recognized and was not being recompensed for the impact she was making.

...