Your year end review should not contain surprises Agreeing what success looks like is only the start. Keeping that understanding shared takes work throughout the year. Dear Reader, As we head towards the end of the year, many of us will be preparing for performance reviews. Either our own, or those of the people we lead. I have been thinking about two questions. Have we kept a shared understanding of what success looks like? And are we recognising the full contribution we expect from senior...

You promoted your best performer. Now it isn't working. Before deciding what to do, work out what has actually gone wrong Dear Reader, They were one of your strongest performers. So you promoted them. Six months later, they are struggling. Or perhaps worse, they are still delivering, but the way they are leading is creating problems for everyone around them. I have seen this quite a few times. And I think one of the mistakes we make is assuming that because someone was ready for promotion,...

Is your strategy driving your choices, or are your choices rewriting your strategy? In a difficult funding environment, staying anchored to the problem matters more than ever Dear Reader, There is a phrase I keep coming back to: Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. It sounds simple. In practice, I think it is becoming increasingly difficult. This is an incredibly tough funding environment. Organisations are cutting costs, looking for new sources of revenue and asking where the...