Two of my all time favourite women - Fatima Khan-Shah 💙 Follow me on BlueSky & Katie Kelly on the very same panel!!! How good is that!!! ❤️❤️❤️✊🏼✊🏼✊🏼

Glorious walk and swim at Loch Lomond today. Good for the soul.

How do we develop 'leaders'? I don't think we do. Rather I think we all keep on learning how to understand ourselves & each other so that we can interact & collaborate with curiosity, care, & humility. Then we create the conditions for a kind of relational leadership between us.

Delighted to be travelling to Stirling this morning to be part of a workshop at Creative Stirling on sustainable creative hubs. It feels like a real privilege to be part of this important work.

Often as leaders, we get valued for taking action, rather than for thinking about things. It leads to short-term perspectives rather than the strategic, big-picture, long-term thinking we need for complex problems. Making time for magical thinking, especially collective thinking,

Standing up to a toxic culture can take its toll on the mental & physical health & personal life of anyone who has the courage to take a stand. Keeping quiet is an option but this is the equivalent of silently accepting & endorsing the toxicity. I wish leaders could see my DMs.

#CreativePlacemaking in Scotland highlighted in UK Govt policy statement on #CreativeIndustries - Full statement > shorturl.at/bnDKY ('Wider Impact' section) Big up to The Stove Network #WhatWeDoNow and Culture Collective projects inc Creative Dundee (Archived) 's CULTIVATE

A walk at Mugdock this evening. A cool and peaceful opportunity for reflection.

All of us in leadership roles should be coaching our teams. Coaching (whether by an internal leader or external coach) makes a significant difference at work. Evidence shows that it builds "psychological capital" - increasing the internal resources we each have available to help

Takes a lot of courage to raise concerns about repeated bad behaviours. Imagine if as a result you are moved from your team & colleagues with no discussion & the perpetrator stays in their role. It’s soul destroying but it happens a lot. It’s “path of least resistance” leadership

We do our best work when we feel we're able to work with high levels of autonomy; to make decisions & experiment for improvement. That will only happen if our systems are designed for autonomy. Bureaucracy is not inevitable. We can, and should, design it out:

Adaptive leadership means shifting from being the leader who “knows it all” to the leader who's a “learn it all.” Five critical leadership skills for creating an environment in which learning things the organisation does not know how to do is valued over implementing flawlessly

Sunrise 🌅 in Wester Ross

When you listen to someone without interrupting what they have to say, they get to hear themselves too. It might only take a few minutes, and yet make all the difference. It might be the first time they've heard how they really feel, out loud. Listening like that matters.

@inspiralba Janet Whitley I agree that less is more... and I wonder how we can each find or create so much more of this kind of space between us...

If we want to build learning systems for improvement, we must encourage our teams to be curious. A culture of curiosity leads to psychological safety, experimentation & problem solving. Yet a recent large study found most leaders regard curious people as "insubordinate" & like

Stephanie Beringer Sacha Will (she/her) Lorraine Sillars Janet Whitley Laura Haggarty Lesley Ann Henderson - Similar thinking, but a helpful summary and framing?

The Winter Solstice falls today in the Northern Hemisphere –– a day later than most years. The turn of the light's tide & the start of the sun's slow climb back in the sky. A slight lift of the heart.