My mission is to bring compassion and disruption to the way most bosses manage their people. Being a good boss is a tough gig, and bringing new understanding and conversations to this topic is my passion.
I founded The Change Company in 1999 and for the last 20 years or so, I have specialised in working with senior executive teams, facilitating their conversation to enable the highest quality dialogue and the most effective decision making. That work often involves assisting executives to practice examining individual and collective tensions. I do this as a means to achieve the richest possible learning. As a consequence, my clients have transformed the leadership they offer to their organisations.
While that work continues, I am now bringing that understanding and insight to the stage. My presentations and workshops address topics related to:
In 2014, I gained my Doctorate after publishing several research papers in peer-reviewed journals on my specialist subject of “Power and Undiscussables” and their effect on senior executive teams. My work with Mundipharma Australia was shortlisted in the 2016 Australian HR Awards for Best Learning and Development program and Best Leadership Development program.
I have provided a range of tuition, facilitation, speaking and coaching services to global organisations and brands throughout Australia and overseas. Continue exploring my website to learn more about what I do and who I’ve worked with.
Watch some of my recent conversations on Channel 7’s The Morning Show…
Have a listen to my recent interview on ABC Radio (Thursday, 11th July 2024)
The time is now to move decisively in the direction of creating a Leadership Team that transcends the hub and spoke model of functioning to become a deeply connected team. A deeply connected team where the manager learns to vacate their central position is far more able to identify key challenges for the organisation and resolve them together.
Do you want to depart from survival mode operating where the vast majority of Leadership Team issues are either urgent or boring, and putting out fires becomes the primary preoccupation of your work? Perhaps you have noticed that in reactive Leadership teams, vexed or potentially threatening topics are often avoided. Among those avoided topics are usually the ones that the organisation most requires their Executive Team to attend.
If that is you, then the Leadership Team you now want attends to the most strategic and far-reaching matters by engaging in new conversations that generate wisdom and release energy for action. That action enables collective leadership to be expressed. This team will make better decisions than any individual in the team could have made. They will do this by:
The world is now too complex, data too enormous and change too quick for any individual in a Leadership Team member to be making decisions relating to organisational wide challenges. Leadership Teams are now rising to this challenge to transform themselves into effective collective decision-making units.
Your team can now enter into this exciting and important journey. Please contact me to discuss the possibilities for developing your leadership team.
I have been working with corporations for well over two decades providing insight and guidance helping Executives and Leadership Teams to take decisive steps in realising their personal and collective leadership.
My Doctoral research was focused on the relationship between power use by Executives and the creation of “undiscussable” topics in the team. I am also the author of the recently published Bosses Behaving Badly; how individuals and teams can transform their use of power.
My speaking topics include …
Three habits that prevent growth and block leadership – Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what ingrained, automatic habits are the most halting of our growth and damaging to our leadership? In fact, there are only three, and the chances are you only do one of them! Simply knowing which of these three reactive tendencies is your primary pattern is powerfully freeing. That awareness is simply a game changer when it comes to releasing your personal leadership, and growing.
Anxiety, power use and bad bosses – Evidence suggests that as we get promoted, most people actually get worse at dealing with people, not better. In fact, we reliably misuse power by becoming more intimidating, disempowering, and inappropriate, to name a few. Driving that misuse is the prevalent problem of growing but unexamined anxiety. Learn how to avoid this common path of becoming a bad boss, and instead have people clamouring to work in your team.
How to cultivate a winning Executive Team – Most Executive groups do not function well as a team. Instead, their primary focus is on running the departments that report to them. The cost of this widespread pattern is enormous on organisational performance. Learn how to cultivate an Executive Team that knows its purpose as a team and works brilliantly together to achieve that purpose. There are just 5 bases that must be covered, and this fascinating topic introduces each of those.
And other topics that can be tailored to your needs …
Are you interested in engaging me to speak at your next event? Get in touch to learn more.
What does my Executive Coaching deliver?
Put simply, my Executive coaching helps executives perform better at work by reliably accessing their non-reactive “leader self” to perform. Every leader has two selves. One is reactive, fear motivated, anxious and self-preoccupied self, and the other is deeply purpose orientated, reflective, learning and appreciative. The first is the “reactive self”, and the second is the “leader self”.
The first uses the power invested in their role poorly, the second beautifully.
Research shows that approximately 70% of managers do not access their “leader-self” reliably, but rather find themselves thinking, feeling, interacting and deciding out of their “reactive self” for most of the day.
But here is the clincher. Most of those 70% don’t know they are living reactively, and at the same time are frustrated they are not seeing the results they want. They spend the vast majority of their time dealing with unwanted events, and in moments of honesty acknowledge they are playing “not to lose” rather than to win.
The promise of my Executive Coaching is to help you decisively move away from that persistent frustration, and experience work as a place where deep satisfaction accompanies the work of realising heart felt desired outcomes.
In addition, your better use of the power invested in your elevated role will bring greater agency, freedom and dignity to the people you lead.
This book is about you, the manager, and you, the managed. Perhaps you haven’t thought much about power. If you manage others, you may not feel powerful but, in fact, you have been given access to a lot of power. If you plan on being a manager in the future, big power is coming your way.
This book is in two parts. Part 1 focuses on the individual, and how you as can personally use power better as a manager. Part 2 focuses on the team, and how you as a manager can facilitate team processes and culture that supports a good use of power by all team members. Those teams are more engaged, more innovative and more productive…
Bosses Behaving Badly is a timely book to help leaders navigate a period of unprecedented change, whilst leading their people in a style that gets the best out of them and helps realise their potential. His exploration of power and how it can be applied skilfully is an important contribution to the leadership development space and can support leaders to examine their impact on others and how to adjust their style to achieve better performance and cultural outcomes. Paul’s deep ‘real world’ experience working with individual leaders and leadership teams over many years, is combined with contemporary research to provide a practical roadmap for leaders to strengthen their individual effectiveness and that of their teams.
Paul’s description of the Power Paradox rang deeply true for me. Combining that with his insights on Team Purpose and that according to research, most teams are not clear about why they exist or meet, Bosses Behaving Badly gave me a new impulse to reassess the teams I lead.
To help understand the concept of the Power Paradox and how it works in practice, a case study is helpful.
How does power cause a person’s patterns of thinking and feeling to shift and bring new patterns of behaviour which ultimately erode their leadership?
In this article we unpack the tell-tale behavioural signs of the Power Paradox at work and how those behaviours may play out in management.
We’ve talked about the Power Paradox and how it works, and we’ve considered the tell-tale behavioural signs of the Power Paradox and how they may play out for a leader.
Let’s take this conversation one final step. Let’s talk about the Power Paradox specifically in the context of corporate management. Can it be outsmarted?
The three main stages of team development are described. These stages explain the importance of making purpose the centre of the team, as opposed to the manager. Managers who insist on remaining overly central impede the growth of their team.
Feeling powerful is described as important experience for leaders. Why? Because leaders who feel powerless tend to misuse the power available to them in their roles. More specifically, they can tend to engage in one or more of the three main reactive patterns. They are controlling, compliance or protecting.
Five common power problems are identified and acknowledged as being major obstacles to good use of power by managers. They are sourced from Power a User’s Guide by Julie Diamond PhD.
Micromanaging is a common power misuse. The issue of being autocratic and holding others to impossibly high standards is viewed as a means of managers lessening their own anxiety. Power in the management role is being used to make the managers less stressful, even if for a moment.
Paul’s coaching has been timely and has allowed me to stop and reflect on how things are going with myself and my team. I’ve learnt about how to structure meetings, and how to have “difficult conversations”. It’s been great to freely chat about what is happening with the team – without any conflict or worries about confidentiality. I would definitely recommend this coaching.
Professionalism, frankness, openness. Comfort and safety in the environment. Calmness. Impacting, uncomfortable, and effective. Any change in any system results in discomfort. Paul’s session provided the tools and awareness to sit in the discomfort and know that it’s okay. To stop the “rescuer” mentality so often present in leaders of “fixing all the problems”.
It was fantastic… a very collaborative and fruitful approach to strategic planning. I have appreciated being part of this process, and particularly seeing the culmination of many different colleagues’ perspectives being brought into a more concise and effective set of objectives. Paul’s overall approach to collaboration and planning would be beneficial to many colleagues at all different stages of their career.
I wish to acknowledge the Dharug and Gundungarra people, and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Owners of the lands where I live and work.
I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Occupying roles with power does strange and problematic things to us, and unfortunately for most of us, we simply don’t notice...
...working for such bosses however is a tough gig, and sometimes a dignity-robbing, soul-destroying experience.
Bosses Behaving Badly. How individuals and teams can transform their use of power.
