Happy New Year!!! Over the holidays I spent a few days building a French Drain. We bought our house about nine years ago and the back garden has never been right. Because of the position of our neighbours property and the slope of the ground, when it rained, we always ended up with a completely waterlogged back garden. Well after nine years I decided to do something about it. (more…)

Towards the end of the year I always find my mind wandering back to the year gone by. I look back on those things that have gone well, the things I’ve accomplished – how have I moved my life and career forward? – who have I connected with, and what could I learn from or do better?

I find this exercise invaluable because (more…)

“When in a business setting always stay away from discussing religion and politics.” That’s the advice I got many years ago from an old leadership mentor of mine and it’s advice I pass onto my clients as well. It makes a lot of sense because these two subjects can often come packaged with emotion and the potential for divisiveness. However, how the National party faced into the election this year is ripe with so many lessons that we, as leaders, need to learn from it. (more…)

“The most important thing about leadership is your character and the values that guide your life.” ~ Brenda Barnes

The above quote really sums up what leadership is to me because a title alone does not make you a leader. A person can have a title and people can report into them (more…)

I started off my working life as a fitness instructor and breaking into IT was quite a challenge. As you can imagine I took every opportunity that presented itself. I started off working in a credit card software company (a start up/stay up) that had a great buzz about it. It wasn’t long before I was moved to a software development team and then that great buzz turned into an annoying din! My new boss had a unique management style… (more…)

It has been interesting chatting with people over the last few weeks about how they really didn’t like the idea of working from home when we went into lockdown and now they don’t want to go back into the office – they prefer to work from home! The human psyche is very interesting, isn’t it? Initially when things change we push back against it, it causes stress, worry and concern. This is perfectly natural because, believe it or not, we’re designed (more…)

We’re well and truly over the lock down period now and I know a lot of organisations are in discussions with their teams about how they’d like to move forward in terms of creating a balance between working from home and working from the office. It’s not as straight forward as you might think because before the lock down the majority of people were working from the office and working from home, for most people, was only an exception. (more…)

Now that we’re over the worst of the pandemic (well, in New Zealand anyway) it’s important to start to look to the future. Whether you’re in business for yourself, part of a team, or leading a team, creating a compelling future is vital for getting up and running after a significant change. Whenever I need to create a new direction I always return to a tried and tested formula; I call it the R.I.D.E. formula and, even though (more…)

I hope you and those close to you are safe and well. These are challenging times and they are certainly invoking a lot of different emotions for people. As a leader, all we can do is provide support to our teams and encourage them to make themselves the priority. If your experience is anything like my own, you probably jumped into the response to the pandemic with a sense of gusto and challenge; however, as the weeks (more…)

I’m sitting on Tauranga beach writing this and with St Patrick’s Day looming I can’t help but think about the impact that one man has had, not only on the lives of every Irish person, but also on generations of Irish people all over the world. The story of St Patrick is an interesting one and one I recommend having a quick look at. When St Patrick was converting Irish people to follow God he was called upon by the king of Ireland (more…)