One of the biggest surprises for employees (and sometimes even managers) in a scaling organisation is how promotions actually work—or rather, how they should work. Too often, people fall into one of two flawed assumptions: “They’re an amazing...
Organisation Culture
Growing Pains of a Scale-up Business: what to do when your SME feels out of control
Ever feel like your job is just putting out fires? "They all want pay rises, but we’re not making enough money." "Nobody documents anything—we’re flying blind." "I only hear about problems when they’ve become emergencies." "All I seem to do is make myself unpopular."...
Be More Bee
There is a point, when human beings come together, that a group of individuals becomes an organisation. Like a hive of bees, a group of people is an organism. And organisms have rules of their own which, operating at their best, override a narrow focus on individual...
Employee Ownership – It’s about the Legacy, not the Lolly
What exactly is this employee ownership thing, then? Simply speaking, EO is a form of exit strategy for a founder who wants to extract value from their business before finally leaving to retire or to do other projects. The usual way to achieve this is a commercial...
Go on – tear up your job description
When did you last see your job description? Well..? Thought so… Here’s something for you to try. Forget your ‘to-do’ list just for the moment, and don’t look at your job description, even if you’ve found it by now. Now, write down the things that it is your job to...
Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana…
Did you work it out? Because that’s exactly the sort of puzzle that distinguishes a human from AI. In the Turing Test, an AI computer and a human are asked questions to determine which is human. If the computer is indistinguishable from the human, it passes the Turing...
Bully for you. Are you aggressive or simply ‘robust’ in the workplace? Here are 3 key points about the so-called ‘bullying threshold’
The recent resignation of Dominic Raab has focused attention on what constitutes workplace bullying. Examples of bullying behaviour usually include undermining someone, spreading lies, and unfair treatment. But it’s a grey area. Part of the problem is there’s no...
Face the facts – board room or zoom room? Here’s what the science tells us…
Many of us discovered during the Covid lockdown something we probably knew all along anyway - face-to-face communication is in many ways ‘better’ than remote communication. While remote communication offers convenience and cost-effectiveness, it cannot match the...
Resilience vs Resolutions: Choosing to bounce back instead of breaking down
At Leaders Lab we’re not big fans of New Year’s Resolutions. This is because usually and unwittingly you set yourself up to fail. This year instead, we’d like to shift the focus away from failing at your New Year’s Resolutions to working on your New Year’s...
Drinks after work? Abseiling expeditions? Group hugs?
Why team building doesn’t work.
Here is why none of these will make your team more accountable or more collaborative, and what you need to do instead. The last two years of the pandemic have upended the traditional model of ‘work’ for nearly all our clients. As the dust settles, and business...
Find out how to create and manage a brilliant culture that underpins a truly successful growing business.
Find out how to create and manage a brilliant culture that underpins a truly successful growing business.