Feedback is one of those things that is talked about a lot in organisations but is rarely done well. Sometimes, if you can believe it, it’s not done at all! No feedback at all is so much worse than “negative” feedback because without any feedback you don’t know if you’re hitting the mark or not. I put “negative” in double quotes because I believe feedback is just feedback…there’s no such thing as negative feedback, there’s only the meaning you put on it. All feedback is useful and there are certain things you (more…)

When I first arrived in New Zealand my boss was a relatively heavy smoker. It wasn’t unusual to find him outside dragging on a cigarette before coming back into the office to get back into his work. I often found myself joining him as we engaged in some conversation about an existing challenge we were facing into and although I never smoked, just the change of environment helped move the discussion along. After that brief five minutes outside we often came up with a solution or at least steps (more…)

What if I was to tell you that you are not really who you think you are? It sounds like a line straight out of The Matrix, but for the majority of us, it’s true. It’s like a big secret that we carry around about ourselves and we think we’re the only one who knows it. The truth is, we all carry the same secret and we hope that no one else will ever discover it; it’s like a little game that everyone is playing, the person with the best poker face wins…or is the ultimate loser. You see, as human beings, we all share the same (more…)

Coaching is one of the fastest growing industries in the world! According to Forbes, eighty percent of directors would welcome coaching and, while not every CEO has a coach, one hundred percent of their bosses wish they had. While coaching in the US, the UK, and Australia is already a very well established practice, it is taking a little longer to become the “performance development tool” of choice here in New Zealand. Having said that, coaching is (more…)

We’re in an age where the quick fix is all the rage. We’re all looking for the reward without having to put in the effort, to earn the status without working on character, to be seen as an expert without beating on the trade. I’m as guilty as the next person. I’ve recently become consumed by how to make the perfect poached egg (I love poached eggs!), and after several failed attempts and a few hit and misses, I jumped onto Youtube to see how (more…)

I was having a coffee with a colleague last week and, as it tends to do, the topic of conversation turned to leadership. In this case, it was servant leadership. My colleague expressed his view that servant leadership was great in theory but could never work in practice. “I mean,” he argued, “how can you be a servant to others but still make the decisions, and tell them what to do and the direction to take? There’s too much of a dichotomy to make it work.” I had to agree with him…to a point. (more…)

Erwin Schrodinger was an Austrian Physicist and he devised the paradox known as Schrodinger’s Cat in 1935. Schrodinger said that if you put a cat in a box with a poison that might kill it, at the end of an hour the cat has a 50% chance of being alive, and a 50% chance of being dead. According to quantum mechanics, since we can’t see in the box to know if the cat is alive or dead, the cat is both alive and dead. Of course, we know that this is not possible; nothing can be alive and dead at the same time. However, I disagree. (more…)

I was a very junior software developer and I absolutely sucked. Not only was I learning the trade I’d recently made the transition from the gym environment to the office environment and knew very little about office etiquette. To say that I was struggling was an understatement but I was too full of determination to succeed that no matter how embarrassing the mistakes I made (including deleting thousands of credit card dispute records from one of Ireland’s (more…)

As a kid growing up one of my favourite cartoon characters was always Donald Duck.  You just know that no matter how happy he is at the beginning of the cartoon that things are going to go terribly wrong and he always ends up getting the short end of the stick…largely of his own making.  One of my favourites of Donald was when he hit a moral dilemma and sure enough a little devil appears on his right shoulder encouraging him to go after what he wants regardless of the consequences. (more…)

I must’ve been 16 years old and I’d been cycling for about a year or so.  I’d head off with my friends on 60 and 80Km bike rides up into the Wicklow Mountains.  Wicklow is called the Garden of Ireland so you can imagine how beautiful it is up there.  I remember one particular ride because on this occasion I was unfortunate enough to get two punctures!  I had a spare tube but when I got the second puncture my friend, Conor, gave me his spare… (more…)