The Reality: You Own Capability, But You Do Not Own the Budget
This is one of the most common situations I see in HR and OD teams.
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Team Performance
From reducing meeting overload to building peer accountability, these articles give you frameworks your team can apply this week — not next quarter.
How to Choose Who You Send on a Leadership Program (So You Get ROI, Not Attendance)
Most leadership budgets are tighter than they used to be. That’s not a bad thing. It forces a decision that a lot of organisations avoid: St
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Smart HR Teams Are Buying Leadership Development Like a Business Decision (Not a Calendar Decision)
If you want leadership to move the business this quarter, you cannot buy leadership development like an annual event.
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The 5 Reasons Most Leadership Programs Don’t Create the Change HR Wants (and the Business Needs)
You’ve probably lived this loop.
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New Year's Resolutions Are a Socially Acceptable Way to Lie to Yourself
Why goals fail 23x more often than behaviours (and what to do about it)
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The Amazon Executive Story: A Simple Mindset Shift That Saves Leaders Hours Every Week
Picture this for a moment. An Amazon executive shared that he receives 1,500 to 2,000 emails every single day. Out of those, only 15 to 20 a
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The BRIDGE Model for Influence When Everyone Has Other Priorities
How to get voluntary commitment when your project isn't their top priority
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Stop Wasting Everyone's Time: How to Plan Meetings That Actually Matter
Most people’s meetings are broken. Not just inefficient – completely broken.
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The Leadership Lesson Most Senior Leaders Learn Too Late
An Amazon executive once shared that he receives 1,500 to 2,000 emails every single day. Out of all those messages, only 15 to 20 are genuin
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When HR Says "Be More Strategic" – What Leaders Actually Need to Hear
Every month, thousands of performance reviews include the same vague feedback: "You need to step up" or "Be more strategic."
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Save Your Organisation from the Productivity Killer Hiding in Plain Sight
Your leaders think they're being productive. They're juggling five projects, responding to emails during meetings, and switching between tas
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Leadership Reset: Stop Drowning and Start Swimming
The most powerful leadership skill isn't working harder. It's knowing when and how to hit the reset button.
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Ditch the Old Habits: Why Your Past Success Is Holding You Back
The tools that got you promoted are sabotaging your effectiveness right now. You're carrying habits, practices, and mindsets that once serve
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Leadership Energy: The Invisible Force That Shapes Your Team's Performance
Your leadership impact isn't just about what you say or do. It's about the energy you bring into every room, every meeting, every decision.
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What the Grand Canyon Taught Me About Business Decisions
Standing in the depths of the Grand Canyon as the sun set, I faced a problem that would later define how I think about leadership decisions.
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The Leadership Crisis Your Organisation Can't Afford to Ignore
Why your best managers are drowning and what it's costing you
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The Strategic Leader's Nightmare: How Your Problem-Solving Skills Became Your Prison
Why 73% of new managers fail to transition from tactical to strategic thinking — and the counterintuitive solution that breaks the cycle
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The Performance Inversion: When Top Performers Become the Biggest Constraint
Controversial truth: your top performers are often your biggest constraint. Not because they are underperforming. Because they are overcompe
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Busy Work vs Breakthrough Work
When I coach managers of managers, I see the same pattern. Diaries full. Meetings that update but do not decide. Teams busy, yet the results
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The Five 1% Shifts: What Keeps Paying Off for Managers of Managers
These five amplifying shifts keep surfacing in Amplify cohorts. Different industries, same patterns. They look small. They work because they
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Why Working Harder and Longer Stops Working
When I was a young Army officer, I trained by running as fast and as far as I could until I dropped. I wore the pain like a badge. It worked
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It’s Time to Burn Your Management Playbook. Here’s What to Replace It With.
My most valuable leadership lesson wasn't learned in a classroom. It was learned with the bite of an enormous backpack digging into my shoul
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The Google Principle: Why Brilliant Management Teams Beat Brilliant Strategies
When you step up from managing individual contributors to managing managers, everything you thought you knew about leadership gets turned up
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The $50 Billion Leadership Burnout Crisis
Why 90% of leaders are drowning in their own success – and the military-tested solution that saves companies millions
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When Leaders Optimize for Headlines, Not Results
Walk into any leadership team meeting and you'll witness it: leaders who've mastered the art of looking busy while accomplishing little.
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You'll Never Become the Leader You Admire Until You Do This
We've all met them. The leader who has read every leadership book on the shelf.
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Are You Drowning in "Meeting Culture"?
Ever wondered why real decisions happen in the corridor after the meeting?
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Teaching old dogs new tricks
I was excited to attend the Jumpshift NZ Leadership Action Network event last week, focussed on Liberating Structures.
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Leading into the future – better
As I transitioned back to NZ from Mexico this Christmas, after a little over two years away “on the road”, I knew it was going to be tough s
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Glaciers, Dumbledore and the wrong paint choice-3 essential tips
Glaciers, Dumbledore and the wrong paint choice — 3 essential leadership tips for the future.
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How building trust requires good parenting & small talk
The concept of trust might feel like a funny thing to be talking about at this time however as the last few weeks have shown
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We'll be alright once we get back to normal (right?)
As NZ transitions to Level 2, and many people head back to work in their offices (or a coworking or somewhere else)
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Why reflection is the new CrossFit (without the scandals)
This week I have been creating the opportunity for leaders to make some space for reflection.
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Why being inclusive is like growing truffles
Ian Treloar is a long time friend and former colleague of mine who, for all the time I have known him, has been trying to grow truffles.
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Getting clear can boost your business results 31%
Did you know a recent organizational alignment research study by ISA Global found that strategic clarity
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Empathetic Leadership: What it is & how to get started
Empathy enables you to know if the people you’re trying to reach are actually reached. Without empathy, you can’t build a team or nurture a
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Stop telling your team how, and starting asking this
As hybrid work becomes the norm for many companies, your team members are not the same people who headed home during the first lockdown.
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Bow and wake effect
I had several people reach out to me on my latest IG posts on @jimmybleadership this week related to my Bow and Wake post so I thought I wou
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What the top 9% of communicators do differently
I’ve always been fascinated by communication. Therefore it seems logical if talking about better leadership to also talk about better commun
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How communication ABC leads to performance 123
Great communicators repeatedly outperform good and bad communicators by a factor of up to 7x.
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Three leadership insights about high performance
The road to high performance is paved with the golden bricks of experience and learning lessons.
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The 4 tensions affecting your business
Leadership is hard because it’s a game of tensions:
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Leadership Team conversations that change the game
Picture the scenario. I’m running a “Ways of Working” session with the leadership team of a large Asian electronics company
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The 5 connections your team needs from you
Each week as I sit down to write this newsletter, I always consider what will be the most valuable message I can send. Valuable by helping y
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Why teams waste $50Bn per year on development programs
During my military and corporate careers, I attended a leadership development course at least once a year.
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The 4-step 1:1 format transforms things for you and your team
When I talk to leaders at the start of Ways of Working Sponsor Sessions, I often ask how they conduct their 1:1s and how they support their
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The workshop that left me speechless
There we were in a workshop, talking about how to hand over tasks effectively, to free up energy and time to focus on more important things.
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Why tough conversations don’t go to plan
In the Ways of Working program, one of the modules we talk about is Tough Conversations.
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Leadership I learned from 5 years in business to help lead better
Have you ever grown anything? A plant? A child? A business?
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Avoid this common leadership development mistake
As we move to an age of digitized learning, it has become apparent that a lot of companies are going to focus on providers who offer app-bas
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Culture Change (71)Communication (61)For Senior Leaders (52)Employee Retention (52)Remote Leadership (51)Work-Life Balance (50)Delegation Skills (36)Building Trust (36)Coaching Skills (33)Having Hard Conversations (28)Decision Making (17)Change Management (13)Emotional Intelligence (13)For New Managers (12)
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