November 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  When recruiting staff, how do you select givers rather than takers? Answer: Firstly, if you want an organisation where you have more givers than takers, you need to have givers in charge. This is simply because givers beget givers. Whenever you appoint someone to a leadership role, therefore, it makes simple good sense to...

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How Managers Increase Trust And Regain Power

People choose to grant or withhold trust in other people based on how they perceive their intent or motive. That is, whether they believe that those people are in the relationship to ‘give’ or to ‘get’ from them. Further to this, people trust those they believe care for them, who trust them and are fair...

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Evoking The Value-Add, Rather Than The Activity, In A Job

I have been working with leaders in a private healthcare organisation which has been successfully applying the Legitimate Leadership principles for the past four years. I recently had an opportunity to interact with a group of four of its employees during one of our online programmes, Giving And Taking At Work. The group was made...

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Cows Don’t Give Milk

COMMENT ON THIS STORY BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: There is nothing wrong with wanting a positive outcome. But the outcome is out of our hands because the result in any case is a function of extraneous factors outside of our control (luck always plays a part) – as well as what is done by...

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October 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  Should complacency be deemed as carelessness (the Means and Ability were in place)? Is this an accountability issue, and therefore should we censure for carelessness? Answer: For people to make a contribution to standard or better requires three things: the need to have the Means to do so (allowed); the Ability to do so...

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Getting Management Visibility Right

Management visibility programmes can contribute to increasing or decreasing legitimacy in an organisation. Having spoken to recipients of management visibility programmes over the years, I have heard anecdotes in equal measure about how these programmes have been both positively and negatively received by employees. In 2013 and 2014 I observed such a programme making a...

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September 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  What about if someone has deliberately chosen not to follow a safe system at work or a work instruction, but he did not mean for something bad to happen? As this is a breach of health and safety regulations, he having deliberately chosen to deviate from the work instruction, is disciplinary action the right...

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Marcus Aurelius Did Not Come Out Of The Womb A Leader

COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: It always amazes me that companies would never put someone on an expensive piece of equipment without training them to use it – but are happy to put someone in charge of other people’s lives without preparing them for the task. While some people are more...

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What Accounts For Trust In Management

That employees trust those in charge of an enterprise is vitally important for two reasons. Firstly, the more employees trust management, the more prepared they are to go above and beyond in pursuit of the organisation’s objectives. There is a cause-and-effect relationship, in other words, between trust in management and employee willingness. Secondly, a precondition...

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Right Now! That Is The Right Time To Start Building Trust With Your Team

Last year when we (Legitimate Leadership) called several of our clients to ask whether they would be willing to participate in an investigation we were planning, we didn’t know what to expect. The point of the investigation would be to review the effect of the global pandemic crisis on trust in management. The organisation referenced...

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November 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  When recruiting staff, how do you select givers rather than takers? Answer: Firstly, if you want an organisation where you have more givers than takers, you need to have givers in charge. This is simply because givers beget givers. Whenever you appoint someone to a leadership role, therefore, it makes simple good sense to...

View full article