We have been reading, writing and talking for a little over a year now about different elements of 21st Century Leadership (C21L). Over the last few weeks, my experience has been of a number of elements suddenly dropping into place. It’s as if the story has suddenly become clear. So, here goes: 21st Century Leadership …

Catherine Howe, Chief Executive of Public-I, continues her reflections on leadership in the 21st Century Leadership context. Over the last few years, I have used my blogs partly to hold myself to account. In the same way as I might broadcast the fact that I am going for a run in the morning (I’m not by …

Why do we expect people to be complete fully-formed leaders, when really we are always a work in progress? What makes a person? Is a person a singular thing? Think of your day – the one you are having right now. What roles are you playing? What states have you been through? (For ‘states’, read: moods, feelings, ups …

How much is leadership about facilitation? How far are the skills of the leader in an age of complexity (21st Century Leadership or C21L) equivalent to those of a facilitator? Isn’t ‘facilitation skills’ just ‘leadership skills’ in disguise? Recently I ran a Facilitation Masterclass for a client based in the Far East. This was a …

Change is a fact of life and if it happens too fast then its overwhelming. The trick, perhaps, is to work out which changes you need to react to. Change is a fact of life and if it happens too fast then it is overwhelming. The trick, perhaps, is to work out which changes you …

In times of survival, it seems to be those who look inward, and find the resources abundantly within, who get through with their humanity intact. Abundance: It still seems to be working. And the opposite too. Last week I was at an educational conference, in my role as a school governor. It was all Heads and …

Wouldn’t organisational life be just a little bit easier if we could worry less about keeping safe? If we knew we could access our innate capacity to produce safety for ourselves and connect with people from that place? Recently I dreamed I was possessed by some kind of ‘devil’ that lived in my throat. Very …

When it comes to 21st Century Leadership skills, it seems there are some convergent views about the challenge we face.  A glance across the blogosphere suggests a number of axioms: Leaders can emerge from anywhere in the business – leadership happens when people take responsibility for the wider purpose and meaning of what they and …

What does it take to be a leader in these times? To navigate the opportunities, complexities and wider challenges of the 21st Century context? In Spring 2012, Mayvin, in association with Training Journal, is launching an Action Research-based Leadership Programme that aims to turn this complexity to the advantage of leaders at all levels in …

I tend to exist about half an hour behind wherever I want to be at a given time, or so one of my best friends once pointed out to me. Annoyingly, he is absolutely right.

Another day, another HBR article with a 5-step model to business success. God knows the author is probably trailing their current book, or even more of a professional foul these days: ‘the book I am currently writing’. (Aren’t we all?) more All this earnest, heartfelt verbiage! Yet aren’t they all kind of saying the same thing? So, Leadership is a developmental process – you don’t say?! Well, let’s see if we can boil it down to 500 words or less. Five steps even.

Splash! The first few strokes are slippery smooth as I glide under the water. Sometimes I try to swim the first length without surfacing, but this can make the next stage feel worse: the dreaded second and third lengths. These are the stiff ones. The change of state from land to water literally drags on my limbs, and I feel out of place, a fish out of water in the water. more But there is nothing else to do than keep swimming, and by the time the third or fourth lengths are complete, I am starting to feel at home. By the tenth length, I am fully immersed. I concentrate on cycling my awareness, alternately focussing on breathing, kicking, my hand breaking the water’s surface, the tumble turn. I am so submerged that a kind of primal brain takes hold and I am not swimming anymore – I am the swim.

I have to confess to being something of a petrol head. I love internal combustion engines in all their forms, along with the vehicles they power. So how can it be that in the last three months, I have gone from owning two cars to being on the point of owning no cars? What kind of epiphany can have produced such a change of heart?

‘There’s so little content we don’t know how we got it through’, screams the headline of the Daily Telegraph (9/12/11). This story is about how an exam board insider is blowing the whistle on the poor quality of learning at GCSE level. The lack of content, we are to believe, is regarded as a bad thing, a scary thought that our children may not be being tested hard enough, or that they might not know important ‘facts’.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is a clever man. You expect him to be. It seems that those who drop out of Harvard to pursue an entrepreneurial career may be more clever than those who stay on. more The exception to the rule is Sir Martin Sorrell of course, but even he implied recently on Desert Island Discs that those who graduate from such these establishments may be too clever by half. He was challenged apparently by his tutors during his time there to consider three pillars of his life: career, family and society. From what he suggests, one divorce later, it is the middle one that gets the shortest shrift.

I like football. I know it isn’t cool, but then again neither is Rugby anymore, so that’s OK. I play five-a side football regularly (a sad sight) and most weekends during the Season, I watch a lot football from the sofa. more Occasionally I go to a game, perhaps two or three a Season. It is usually a disappointment. I shiver and yawn a lot. My mind drifts and I contemplate the burnt hole in my pocket and wonder how the 50,000 other people there can afford it. Rarely, I see some good football. But it doesn’t really matter: it is only a game, after all.