As a coach I have worked with many clients who have been caught in blame games. For instance there was the clinician given responsibility for reforming services that had been appallingly neglected for more than a decade. When she failed to produce the ‘proof’ that these services had magically improved after only a year in … Read the rest >>
Category: Blog
Job seekers be aware: nothing so quaint as the recent past
In my local Oxfam shop I picked up a copy of David Lodge’s entertaining novel Therapy. It was published in 1995 so probably written in 1994, not so long ago, surely? But actually it feels as bizarrely other-worldly and strangely unfamiliar as any novel from much earlier eras. In the novel people write letters, they … Read the rest >>
Making Friends is Hard to Do
The recent study by Relate reveals that one in ten people in the UK do not have a close friend and 19% have not felt loved or cared for in the previous two weeks. This was not news to me. Over the years, many of my coaching clients have described exactly the same thing. The … Read the rest >>
Managers and Professionals: can the Twain Meet?
When, as I do, you coach doctors, accountants, architects, lawyers and the like, you can’t help noticing the striking differences between the way their brains work and the typical thinking style of people who opt for a managerial career. No wonder there are so many problems – for instance in health services where each side … Read the rest >>
7 Myths and Half-truths about Writing Non-fiction
Probably many people would recognize that writing a good novel is challenging. There are ‘creative writing’ courses everywhere, from universities to your local community college. Yet somehow writing non-fiction does not get the same close attention. Perhaps this is because there are so many unhelpful myths and half truths about it. In a career spanning … Read the rest >>
Not Such Flat Hierarchies After All
One of the buzz phrases of the early years of this century was flat hierarchy. Hierarchies were to be abolished! They stank! Layers were to be removed! And all organizational problems would be solved at a stroke.
How strange then to find that hierarchy is alive and well. The layers have crept back in.
A … Read the rest >>
8 Mistakes Never to Make with your CV/Resume
What is a CV/resumé for? Its purpose is not to get you the job as a lot of job-seekers believe. Its true purpose is to attract the attention of an employer and to get you in front of them so that you can impress them in person. Over the years I’ve been working as a … Read the rest >>
8 Ways to Recover from Interview Failure
You were shortlisted for the job but you didn’t get it. There’s no way around this: you will feel, even if only for a very short time, that you have been humiliated. Regardless of knowing that it was your fit with the job that was being assessed not you, the core person, it usually feels … Read the rest >>
10 Tips for Finding a New Job
Whether you’ve been made redundant or fired or just decided to resign there is a lot you can do to make it easier and quicker to find a new job
1. Take stock of your life and career. Leaving a job gives you the chance to reconsider direction, to re-weigh work-life balance, to ask yourself … Read the rest >>
Has ‘curating’ got above itself?
I first noticed the strange new use of the word curator when the King’s Place performing arts centre at Kings Cross in London opened a few years ago. They began a tradition of devoting Monday evenings to the spoken word, calling it Words on Monday. But I was baffled to see that the initial round … Read the rest >>
What can Supervision in Coaching Really Do?
We coaches work in isolation: who knows what we get up to when no one is looking except the client? Coaching is unregulated and looks likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future since no one ‘ in authority’, whatever that means, cares enough about coaching to provide the money to make statutory control … Read the rest >>
Were psychometrics to blame?
It’s true that the Co-op Bank’s decision to appoint Paul Flowers as its Chairman was baffling in its wrongness: a Methodist minister with no financial experience to speak of, who hired rent boys and was caught in a sting operation where he was filmed apparently buying crystal meth and cocaine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Flowers_(banker) Dubbed The Crystal Methodist, … Read the rest >>