Consultancy Interests

Current Areas of Interest

I have enjoyed the variety of my career, and am always looking forward to 'what's next?' These are areas that are consuming my current work stream and future thinking about improving the effectiveness of people (at work).

Leadership Development - especially self-awareness, inspiring leadership, and the impact of meaning and purpose on what leaders do and how followers respond. What difference does a leader's psyche and commitment in these areas contribute to leadership success and business performance? How can leaders 'turn people on' to the organisation and its goals, as opposed to (inadvertently) 'turning them off'?

Business Strategy - design, implementation and achievement. How does strategy design (processes and people) influence outcomes? How can functional strategies be improved to align everyone's activities with business effort and achievement? What implementation practices truly help organisations embed strategy and improve performance?

Organisational Culture - discovery and development. How deliberate are organisations prepared to be in assessing, designing and developing the culture and mind-sets that will help achieve (business) success?

Leading through Conflict - dealing with inevitable differences constructively. How can we build interpersonal commitment and use powerful questions to help people collaborate to solve their own 'problems' and challenges?

Research interests

Women as Leaders - My current research highlights interesting differences and challenges for female leaders. There are particular skills and behaviours many women can work on to improve the perceptions of their leadership.
However, how willing are female leaders to act? How might differences be noticed? How does society contribute to views about gender differences in leadership?

Leadership and Charisma - The role of charisma fascinated me in my New Zealand-based research on this topic a few years ago. While 'unpopular' for a while, notions about the importance of charisma are enjoying resurgence. I continue to be interested in this topic and, in particular, how can coaching for charisma can make a difference?

I would be delighted to talk with you if you'd like to hear more about the work I do in these areas, or have your organisation involved in research.