Self Leadership and
The New Leadership Playbook
Blog by Andrew Bryant

John joined the coaching call eager to share his success. He recounted how he had applied his learning from our previous sessions and utilized critical thinking to analyze how to influence key stakeholders to buy into a solution.

I celebrated John's success and helped him unpack each step he took in developing the influence capital to achieve his objective. This prompted John to ask the question,

"How do I repeat this?"

Making Critical Thinking a Habit

The Greek Philosopher Aristotle taught that we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, he espoused, is not an act but a habit. In this post, we will explore the importance of critical thinking for success and how to strive for excellence by making it a habit.

Critical thinking is a cognitive process that involves careful analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of information to make reasoned judgments and decisions. Critical thinking is a Power Skill that is essential for the future of work. By leveraging critical thinking, we can...

Leadership is essential to the success and sustainability of any organization, especially during times of rapid change. It is therefore worrying that a recent leadership forecast showed a 17% drop in the number of leaders who reported their company had high-quality leaders. At only 40%, this is the steepest decline in leadership quality in a decade. The last time it was this low was between 2007–2008, the height of the global financial crisis.
This begs the question:

"What's going wrong?"

A Crisis of Confidence

Surveys suggest less than half of people have faith in their immediate supervisor and less than a third trust their senior leaders, and CXOs.

Where has the trust gone?

The recent Global Health crisis with a shift in work practices coupled with digital transformation, the rise in AI, and a pending environmental catastrophe have exposed the weakness of the old leadership model that we could trust that our leaders knew what to do.

The old hierarchical model of...

According to PWC’s 2023 CEO Survey, 52% of CEOs see a lack of skills being a major challenge to their company’s profitability and Gartner’s 2023 reports that human resource assumptions in workforce planning (WFP) no longer hold in today’s environment.

Leader and manager effectiveness is essential to the future of work, and yet HR Leaders know that a new approach is required.

Soft Skills and Hard Skills

Traditionally job requirements had been divided into soft skills and hard skills.

Hard skills are technical or scientific knowledge that has been obtained through practical learning methods, such as memory or training. Hard skills are essential to certain roles, if you are a heart surgeon or a pilot, there are some very specific skills required to do your job without killing people.

Hard skills become obsolete over time. When was the last time you wrote in cursive, found information using a library card catalog, or navigated with a map and compass?

With AI and...

"I've got your back" might just be the most powerful leadership and team-building phrase.

The effect of this phrase to encourage, empower, and build trust was recently highlighted by a member of a team that I lead. This individual, filled with enthusiasm, had bypassed a guideline and made a decision, that would normally be mine.

Roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities are important but in a startup or agile team that is 'falling forward,' it is also important to encourage ownership and progress over perfection.

Leadership is a Conversation

I believe that leadership is a conversation, a one-to-one conversation, or a one-to-many conversation. In the New Leadership Playbook, I outline twelve conversations that leaders need to have with their team or organization.

The conversations are guided by seven principles, one of which I have already mentioned, progress over perfection. Waiting for things to be perfect can stifle creativity and productivity. The leadership principle that...

I recently returned from Finland, where I gave a keynote speech at a management conference. Since this was my first time speaking in Finland, I did extra research to ensure that my message was well-received by the audience of senior leaders.

Finland is the Happiest Country in the World

As of March 2023, Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world six times in a row. The World Happiness Report is based on ratings of self-reporting of their quality of life in various dimensions. I was curious to see whether Finns felt happy and so interviewed as many as I could about their ranking.

From taxi drivers to event planners and executives, I was curious how a country with a short summer and long winter could score so, highly.  

The taxi driver was incredulous about the results and showed me a foggy weather forecast to make his point, but then he was originally from Estonia so perhaps I should exclude his data!

The answer lies in what Finns don’t do rather than the...

Since the Ancient Greeks, oratory, public speaking, and debates, have shown the power of the spoken word to influence and make an impact.

Not everyone wants to be a Professional Speaker, but everyone can become more professional when speaking to an audience.

Public Speaking and Leadership

Effective communication is a vital skill that every successful leader must possess. Leaders can inspire, influence, and direct their teams to achieve organizational goals through communication.

Whether it is the company kickoff, a team meeting, or presenting to the board, leadership requires confident and effective public speaking skills. 

Leadership requires courage and so regardless of your level of comfort with public speaking, this is a pill you will have to learn to swallow if want to be successful. Having been a professional speaker for nearly 25 years and coached hundreds of people to speak with confidence and gravitas, this blog is designed to sugar-coat that pill. 

It Starts with...

Technology companies love to be ‘market leading’ and be featured in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant but despite cutting-edge technological advancements, unless the leadership of these companies addresses the people issues, growth will be short-lived.

Employee Burnout

In a recent research report “The State of Burnout in Tech”, 30,000 IT professionals were surveyed across 33 countries:

• 56% of men and 69% of women can’t relax once their workday is over
• 43% feel disengaged from their work, and 27% don’t see the value in it
• 51% feel they are achieving less than they should

Tech burnout is caused by unrelenting stress and manifests as exhaustion, cynicism, and negative self-evaluation. The burnout problem stems from the early days of Silicon Valley, where working until you drop was a badge of honor.

The 'burn and churn' attitude of leadership has an actual human cost, with two out of five tech professionals, and 50% of IT security employees, suffering...

Motivational speakers can be a powerful tool to help you engage your teams and create a positive, productive workplace. A well-known motivational speaker can help to inspire and motivate team members, helping to increase their motivation and performance. They can also provide valuable insight and guidance, helping to build team unity and create a sense of purpose.

Providing a New Perspective

Providing a new perspective is an effective way to engage your team and motivate them to achieve their goals. A motivational speaker with experience and deep insights brings a fresh outlook to the table and provides ideas for different tactics and strategies to facilitate your team to reach their goals.

They can challenge outdated thought processes and provide a new perspective on how to approach and solve problems. By introducing an outside expert, the team can gain valuable knowledge and ideas that can help them come up with innovative solutions. Additionally, the...

Imagine being on a big waterslide at a theme park. Your descent to the bottom is inevitable, due to gravity, the flow of water, and the design of the slide. What is within your control is how you view the experience. Is it fun, or frightening? Are you learning and experimenting, or rigid and inflexible?

Now imagine your brain as a cascade of neurons firing rapidly. The pattern of connections is influenced by your genetics, your conditioning, and your physiology.

Just like the waterslide, in each moment of life, your brain is giving you an experience. This experience is yours to choose how to enjoy but ultimately governed by physics.

Self Awareness Matters

As you pay attention to your experience, your awareness increases, and with awareness comes ideas.

Ideas matter. Ideas are not just the result of experience, they become part of the cascade of neurological connections that generate your experience.  Ideas are what make us uniquely human, and without them, there is no...

Impostor Syndrome, doubting your skills and being fearful of being exposed, is much more prevalent than you might think.

I remember some years ago, speaking with a senior executive who would hide in his office and constantly check his phone to see if some imagined mistake had been discovered. 

This was an extreme case but I think we all question how good we are, and it feels great when we are validated for doing a good job. 

"BE CAREFUL that being validated doesn't turn into a NEED"

The Need for Validation

When we are born, we can do nothing useful but are loved by our parents for just being. Just being human in itself has value, and how much we appreciate that value is the measure of our Self-esteem. But, here's the rub, when we go out into the world, to school, to college, to work, we are not appreciated for just being, we are measured for our doing. 

We have been conditioned to perform. From the encouragement to take our first faltering steps, and successful...