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Change Is a Values Test!
I didn’t write anything last month which is the first time that's happened since I began doing this. If this was a game of Cricket I would have made a half century and then got out. But that's a little negative, I was extremely busy on a number of fronts and had to...
Are you reinforcing what you care about?
It’s fair to say that most leaders I meet genuinely care about their impact. That’s most, not all. They typically want their teams to feel trusted and they want the high standards without burning people out. They want everything that Maslow described and to be the...
Are you searching for a Unicorn?
A client said something to me last week that made me both smile and think (probably more like think-smile-think actually). They’d told their HR team that we were coming in to do some work with them, and the response was: “That’s great… those people are like unicorns.”...
What This Year’s Leaders Have Taught Me
As we move towards the end of 2025, a year that has had its fair share of challenge for me personally, I decided to take a look back across the conversations, coaching sessions, team development, and moments that have stuck with me. One of the privileges of the work...
Are you ensuring you leverage your ‘Alignment’ efforts?
Having spent a fair bit of time recently, working with a bunch of leadership teams and then also running sessions all about how to get more alignment. I had a bit of a reflection, in a sense that it's all good and well but what if it doesn’t translate into tangible...
The Missing Layer in Coaching Culture
This month I’m sharing something a bit more in-depth than usual.We’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about coaching cultures, what it really takes to build one, and why so many stall before they properly start. One theme keeps coming up which is the gap...
Is a lack of ‘Alignment’ holding back your People Strategy?
Last week, I had the opportunity to lead a conversation with a group of HR and business leaders on one of the most overlooked, but decisive factors in whether a people strategy succeeds… Alignment. This is always interesting for me, coming at what is positioned as...
Is the Future of Leadership ‘People-Facing’?
Having leaned into more AI recently and beginning to understand how it is going to shape my own practice, I thought it may be worth some time to consider what all of this might mean for those of us in leadership or management positions. It's definitely not a 'look...
How to Secure the Budget for Your L&D Strategy
You don’t need convincing, and we know we are preaching to the choir when we say that L&D is essential to business success. But while most organisations are happy to fund the odd workshop or ‘fix-the-problem’ training session, making the case for a sustained...
Are Your Strategies Aligned or Just Coexisting?
During the recent days of extreme heat, I happened to have a great day out at the Northumbrian Water Innovation festival, taking part in a sprint there. This is what formed the basis of what I'm dropping this month.This isn’t because this is an new avenue of thinking...
Is your lack of ‘Leader Gravitas’, preventing you from gaining ‘High Trust’?
I first met this term when I was working in financial services over 20 years ago, and recently I've been reintroduced as part of a leadership development programme. If your anything like me you will have a view on what might be a part of this term 'gravitas', and so...
How are your significant ‘change cycles’ developing your leadership?
I'm going to keep this month's nice and brief, highlighting something that really connected with me this past few weeks. The weather may have helped, given I seem to be reflecting in the garden more. It was the concept of '7 year cycles' as described in this Harvard...
How effective are your efforts to innovate?
A few conversations recently with the idea of innovation in mind have led me to this month's theme. Many businesses will say they have a culture where innovation thrives and so it's always a good idea to try and put this to the test, so here’s a few ideas on what this...
Are you reflecting enough on your leadership?
Having done a fair amount of this recently, working on myself, it's fair to say my own awareness of how well others are reflecting has been raised. I can see so many opportunities for us to get better at this both individually and in teams and so, why not capture a...
Why the Best Leaders Invest in People Skills (And Why Some Still Don’t)
Whilst recently spending a fair chunk of time with my head in business strategy I was reminded in one of my coaching engagements that breadth is important. What do I mean by that…..well, many people assume that success in leadership comes from strategic thinking,...
Is your team ‘High Performing’?
Reflecting back on 2024 and looking at what we are engaged in going into 2025, this idea of working on bringing about 'High Performing Teams' is something that has continued to be a feature of what we are doing at Get Knowledge these days.And so, my thoughts on a page...
Are you still heading in the right direction?
We're almost at the end of the year. This time of year always brings me around to some element of reflection on how things have gone, how they are going and the general direction it’s all heading in. Nothing new there then and so I thought I would use this months drop...
Are you leveraging ‘Team Learning’?
Having recently started working with a couple of new teams, it always gets me thinking about the dynamics of how they work and fundamentally how they learn, as a team. Peter Senge, a thought leader in the systems thinking space, talks around this idea of "team...
How do you join up strategy with what’s on the ground?
This was a question i heard someone ask on stage at a conference the other week. There was no answer after the question by the way. Why is it an important question? It may help to start here, in case you're not convinced it's important. Joining strategy with the front...
How your ‘fractured’ organisation is hurting your performance
Having heard someone mention 'the gap' between field and office operations recently, I decided to capture some thoughts around this in this month's drop. This is a subject that isn’t new, it's recognised that it’s a problem by leaders, yet it's rarely leveraged to the...
Are you still driving ‘Right First Time’?
As long as I can remember, 'Right First Time', or RFT for short, has shown up as a measure of quality/efficiency/effectiveness in operational departments. Most of the time it's an easy to understand percentage and the concept is pretty straight forward to get your...
Are you leveraging all of your innovation opportunities?
After a couple of conversations I've had over the past few weeks and a bit of reflection on the utility event in May, I'm still struggling to move past this and so i thought i'd give it some more thought and capture a few more reflections. Innovation is a term that...
How are you thinking about your skills shortage?
"I don't have a skills shortage". Maybe not yet but you probably will soon enough.Having recently attended the utility week live event over a couple of days, there was never going to be any other topic than the one that I was invited to sit on the panel for, and not...
How much focus are you putting on ‘Team’?
A while back i started to have a look at Lencioni's 5 dysfunctions and wrote some thoughts down. After a number of conversations this past week relating to some of the ideas in his model, i went and found my scrawlings and decided to drop them in here. They go back to...
How healthy is your Organisation?
Having been involved in a few conversations and undertaking a fair bit of learning around this subject recently I thought I would capture a few thoughts. A challenge I keep hearing over and over from C-suite level leaders relates to the recruitment and retention of...
Will the big stick make Customer Experience better?
Having seen an Ofwat update in February around 'Customer', I thought it worth bringing this to a conversation as I'm sure everyone has seen it and has their own thoughts around it.Here’s the update in case you haven’t seen it… In summary though... "From today (12...
5 common themes in Water Company AMP plans
Over the past week or so I've spent a fair bit of time delving into water companies annual reports and 25-30 business plans. After a while they all seem to merge into one another. It would be no surprise that a lot of what is laid out is very similar, after all we are...
Are your people giving you their all?
This time out, I decided to write some thoughts down around engagement, simply because over Xmas I met up with a good friend who has been operating as a senior leader for decades in various companies. He said something to me that struck a cord around this, he said…...
Are we employing the right customer strategies?
I won’t lie, when I first heard the term CMEx I immediately thought of explosive materials. That was a while ago of course and since then I've learned a lot about the water industry and how it operates. I’m also a Customer (as we all are). I’ve had the pleasure of...
All this great tech, but….
This past week I managed to attend a water specific conference aimed at asset management. What was I doing there given we don’t get involved in designing or delivering physical assets? The answer, I don’t believe that the idea of great asset management is just about...
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