Recently by Guy Bloom

I am doing a lot of development at the moment with senior leadership groups and am finding something rather insidious that only seems accessible through the kind of immersive development that braver companies are willing to go after.

The fact that the business leader of today is being pulled and stretched like never before is not a new thing, this has been running directly in tandem with the lives that we are all living, I know my life has got quicker and increasingly full of economic, social and personal pressures in the last 5 years (which may well have something to do with reaching 40 years young).

As always the New Year brings about the opportunity to re-energise, refresh and re-frame our way of thinking and being. It's something about renewal and closure that though the opportunity is open to us all year round, the start of a new year acts as a catalyst.

So what are your challenges for the 2009? As a leader within your business, what are your thoughts, planing to do more of the same, ramp it up? Whatever your thoughts, the work of Kouzes & Posner will go along way to helping guide your thoughts.

The brightest and the best leaders often fail, strangely (for them) not because of a technical inability but because of behavours that detract from their capacity to deliver.

Timothy Gallwey author of the 'innergame of work' came up with a simple equation P=p-i (Performance=Potential-Interference) and it this interference that often dilutes a leaders capacity to succeed.

First of all it's worth noting I am fundamentally not interested in politics, as I believe that the soul went out of the whole arena when Kennedy and Gandhi were shot. There's just something that has always struck me as un savoury about the type of person that wants power and dominion over others.

A friend of mine is a policeman and he has always said about validating gun licenses, "there should be an automatic criteria for denying someone a gun license....we don't give a gun to anyone that actually wants one. Instead we should give them only to people that have no interest in them".

I like this type of thinking and have always thought the same thing should apply to politics, the criteria for selection should be only choosing those that don't want the power, but do want the job! I digress....well actually not really. I have just never seen selflessness in the eyes of only but a handfull of politicians.

Why should use an experienced consultant to help with change?

Mario Andretti said,

which is often how it feels to be working in a business and yet the one thing the people crave is stability and the one thing they get is change; so as the sign on Ted Turners desk says, "either contribute or get out of the way".

So it feels right to many Business Drivers to create change, to shake things up or at the very least to enable change that facilitates results. Can't really argue with that.

20 years ago 'stability' was the by-word of the shareholder and the markets, as without stability you are playing games with someone else's pension fund, back then markets were closed or undeveloped, which meant you either refined you organization or grew it......simple, safe and satisfying.

But hey times they are a changing. Not at the rate the doom mongers would have us believe but subtlety, slowly. Consider petrol used to be under a pound and then it switched from gallons to litres, it's now nearly £5 and you are used to it. They changed the pound note to a pound coin and you spend it that much easier, because you are not breaking into a note and you are used to it. They leak the fact that a tax will be £100, then when it comes out its £50, but that's so much less than you'd got used to it being, it feels like a sale even though originally you'd have been annoyed at £20 and you are used to it.

I'm going to tell you a story about a new manager; he's 34 years old, a dedicated and highly intelligent individual, used to succeeding in life through a high work ethic and a strong line of sight on the end goal.

Promoted to a senior role in a high brand recognition business, he deserved it and started to prove that the promotion was valid and pave the way for even greater opportunities. This showed itself in the way he didn't delegate and I'd go so far as to say in the way that he wouldn't delegate.

As each task came in this chap took it on himself and his workload increased, never mind what this was doing to his team, the belief started to be that they just weren't trusted and people became disaffected and they then started to complain to his line manager (a senior partner in the business). The Senior Partner reacted in a very measured way, first of all he gathered the team together and telling them he'd listened very seriously to what they had to say he asked them a simple question, "Do you trust me?"