Leading Remotely? Spend Less Time Managing, More Time Enabling

I have met many managers who cling tightly to the belief that people need to be managed. One manager I worked with held so tightly to this belief that even when the rest of the organisation had implemented remote working policies he told his team that the new policy literally didn’t apply to them. We...

View full article

April 2021 – Question of the Month

Question of the Month: Why do managers in organisations generally not hold their people accountable? Answer: When I have asked this question of managers, they have typically given me a list of reasons which fall into the categories of Willing (the leader lacks the courage or is conflict-averse or wants to be liked too much, or he...

View full article

When Leading Remotely, Don’t Miss The Opportunity To Commit To Your Values

The role that organisational values play in defining the way people behave in modern organisations is frequently overstated. It’s not that values shouldn’t play a leading role (we certainly believe they should), it’s simply that in most organisations they don’t. There’s no doubt that aligning organisation behaviours and practices with a set of aspirational values...

View full article

I Like You – Who Cares?

COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: Care, from a Legitimate Leadership viewpoint, is a matter of intent or motive. For those in authority at work, care is about whose interests are being served. Leaders who care are in the relationship to “give” to their people not to “get” something out of them....

View full article

An Empowerment Model For Cleaning The Lab

In a major chemical plant, an ongoing problem was that its testing laboratory, which operated 24×7, was old and dirty, and the small team of analysts who staffed it were resistant to cleaning it properly. They variously said it was “just old” and would “just get dirty again”, and that “cleaning it would be like...

View full article

Reducing Control To Cultivate Accountability

“To be granted legitimate power in the workplace there needs to be a preparedness by the leader to let go of her need to control the outcome,” I pronounce. The faces of 16 senior executives stare back at me in silent disbelief. But this is a pivotal moment for me to slay some inherent leadership...

View full article

March 2021 – Question of the Month

Question of the Month:  An employee finds out that he is earning 5% less than his peers, and assumes that the organisation and the management are unfair. This demotivates him and he considers finding another job. What should be done? Answer: This question arose in a recent Legitimate Leadership webinar – see our report on this below....

View full article

Are Anonymous Callout Channels A Good Way To Deal With Abuse?

Bullying and abuse have been prominent in news reports about, among others, Priti Patel (the UK’s Home Secretary), Julie Payette (Canada’s Governor General), and Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex). One question these cases prompt is: are anonymous callout channels a good way to deal with abuse? I recently weighed in on an article in...

View full article

CEO Secrets – ‘My Billion Pound Company Has No HR Department’

By Dougal Shaw, business reporter, BBC News. COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is a role for support functions in companies big enough to afford them. But they need to perform an enabling rather than a controlling or policing role. The...

View full article

‘Us And Them’ Became Just ‘Us’

A Legitimate Leadership intervention in a major industrial company in South Africa identified a problem of victimhood throughout the organisation. In the intervention, two groups of managers were being facilitated by two Legitimate Leadership consultants with one group reporting to the other. The module Building Strong People was applied, part of which is the Gripe...

View full article

Leading Remotely? Spend Less Time Managing, More Time Enabling

I have met many managers who cling tightly to the belief that people need to be managed. One manager I worked with held so tightly to this belief that even when the rest of the organisation had implemented remote working policies he told his team that the new policy literally didn’t apply to them. We...

View full article