Articles on coaching, leadership and change.
Excerpts from Gareth Chick’s books Corporate Emotional Intelligence and And the Leader Is…, and articles from the CEQ team: curiosity, SuperListening, feedback, the comfort zone, the four pillars and more.
Most of these articles are drawn from Gareth’s two books.
Corporate Emotional IntelligenceBeing Human in a Corporate WorldAbout the book →
And the Leader Is…Transforming Cultures With CEQAbout the book →All articles
Calm the Fish!
Under pressure our people default to safety, and we are their environment. The first Coaching Trigger, and the neuroscience of why it matters.
Read →A Leader as an Honest Coach and Facilitator
The leader’s role is critical – forcing behaviours where necessary through great coaching, being ruthlessly consistent on boundaries, with a huge use of non…
Read →Promoting Positive Learning
The reason we are so successful as a species is that over the last 200,000 years we’ve developed an incredible system for learning. There is the conditioned…
Read →Peer Group Coaching
Coaching teams is different to coaching individuals, but actually the trick is to treat the team as a single organism. Many managers fall into what I call…
Read →Clumsy Coaching
Leadership theory tells us that there are many leadership styles and methods, however I like to talk about just two opposite styles – Directing and Coaching.…
Read →We’re Always Learning
We talk about learning as something that we choose to do consciously, as if on all other occasions we’re simply maintaining a benign state of readiness for…
Read →Question Crafting
Open questions are powerful. They work so well because they multi task for us – they work on several levels, but basically they do two jobs at once. They…
Read →The Vision is the Boss
There’s no real point in working for an enterprise that’s got no Vision or Ambition. People want to work for a company that they can be proud of and has…
Read →Behaviour Change
Oh all this coaching lark is becoming too difficult. Why can’t we just tell people and have done with it? Why can’t people just follow instructions or even…
Read →Believing in People – Pygmalion and Golem
One of my absolute advantages and assets as a leader, is that I have an unshakeable faith in people – in their ability and their desire to learn, to grow, to…
Read →Why Don’t Fish Bump Into Each Other?
I have often been entranced by the beauty of a shoal of fish moving as if dancing like a single organism. I also recall a truly incredible display of a flock…
Read →Human Emotions are a Very Good Thing
Human beings are naturally messy, emotional, clumsy, imperfect. Corporatism desperately tries to condition these unhelpful and inconvenient dynamics out of…
Read →Curiosity
A magical thing happens when we choose to listen intently to the content of the communication – to the words, phrases, descriptions, metaphors, similes…
Read →Coaching Vs. Directing
Leadership theory tells us that there are many leadership styles and methods, however I like to talk about just two opposite styles – Directing and Coaching. I…
Read →Create Right Brain Thinking
When coaching, in our mission to craft the very highest quality questions, we just need to keep in mind the structures that can guide us – one of them being…
Read →Authenticity Demands Leadership
Lots of us are capable of opening core-to-core channels with other individual human beings, but leaders need structures to move a whole community. Leaders…
Read →The Perfect Cocktail for Self Inflicted Stress
While I remain firmly of the conviction that abusive behaviours are still rife in the corporate world, I am also acutely aware of just how many leaders are…
Read →Untapped Potential
What percentage of your personal potential are you currently delivering in your work?
Read →What is Authenticity?
There’s a knowing when a role has your name on it – almost designed perfectly for you at a precise moment. Of course this is the ideal; the perfect…
Read →The 4 Pillars of CEQ
The 4 Pillars of CEQ 1. OUCH! Our Unconscious Controlling Habits 2. Promoting Positive Learning 3. Transparency and Vulnerability 4. A Grip on Reality
Read →Vulnerability
Much is written on the subject of vulnerability nowadays, and that’s fantastic. It can only be a good thing that vulnerability is more widely feted as a…
Read →Ambition
There’s no real point in working for an enterprise that’s got no Vision or Ambition. People want to work for a company that they can be proud of and has plans…
Read →Workplace Burnout
How many hours a week do you work? Let’s look at a not untypical working week for a corporate citizen. Rising every day from Monday through Friday at 630am.…
Read →Cultural change
Everything I’ve witnessed and learned has taught me that in The Corporation, culture is everything. How does it go? Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast!…
Read →The Comfort Zone
If someone comes to you as their Boss, Manager, Leader, Coach and asks for help or guidance, it is because that’s what they need. They do not need to be told…
Read →The Empowerment Cycle
Empowering a workforce is not a passive act of mere rhetoric. It is not sufficient to tell people they are empowered and then leave them in a vacuum to get…
Read →Corporate Traumatic Stress Disorder (CTSD)
In 2018, the BBC News night program covered allegations of bullying against John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, based on a report that one of…
Read →Hold the person, not the problem
We often believe that to coach someone we have to set up some sort of formal coaching session.. Personally I believe in 1:1s but I don’t subscribe to overly…
Read →Our ‘Shield of Pretence
Unfortunately, but quite understandably, as we grow up we are taught to modify and mould ourselves to the world around us. On one simple level this is…
Read →Our Golden Core
We are born with a unique genetic make up that gives us our physical characteristics and psychological preferences – our Golden Core; our Soul. We are truly…
Read →The Five Myths of Coaching
The biggest problem any of us have in achieving excellence in coaching is that we tend to believe the myths that surround the term itself. Coaching is a…
Read →Human Potential
What percentage of your personal potential are you currently delivering in your work? Made you think, didn’t it? It’s a question that raises so many…
Read →Truly Great Feedback Hurts
The biggest problem we have with giving feedback is that we believe it involves passing judgment on people. In other words that we have to tell them they are…
Read →Corporate Emotional Intelligence
Human behaviour is peculiarly conditioned by working in a Corporate environment, with well-meaning people behaving in unnatural and often inhuman ways…
Read →Logical Levels
A problem cannot be solved at the level at which it presents itself - Robert Dilts In other words, as a coach, all we need to do is listen hard, work out…
Read →Resilience – Life Skill or Corporate Body Armour?
What do you feel when you hear the word resilience used in a work context? Personally I sway between enthusiastically endorsing the promotion of such an…
Read →CEQ - Blog Series - Coaching, Leadership, Change
There’s a great deal of rubbish written about Authentic Leadership these days and, Corporatism’s pursuit of Authentic Leadership has often been a cunning…
Read →Personal Core Values Process
The following exercises are designed to provoke reflection. There are no right or wrong answers, as the responses reflect your unique inner drives and…
Read →The Medical and Neurological Effects of Stress
The major medical manifestations of stress are headaches, stomach upsets and back pain. These conditions can of course be caused by some form of physical…
Read →What is “Collaborative Equity”?
I created the term Collaborative Equity as the brand for my style of organization. Collaborative to stand for the encouragement of a truly collective…
Read →What is Coaching?...
Coaching is not a normal, everyday, superficial, matey conversation…it is a structured dialogue, controlled by the coach, with a direction and an intent.…
Read →Honesty - The Most Precious Commodity
Teams rely on one over-riding commodity to be truly effective – complete honesty. And if a team is going to progress to a new level, the natural points of…
Read →Vision, Ambition and Goals
There’s no real point in working for an enterprise that’s got no Vision or Ambition. People want to work for a company that they can be proud of and has plans…
Read →SuperListening: The Path to Trust and Connection
"Everyone longs to tell their story and have it understood and accepted – Carl Jung"
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