One of the strange things about the corporate world is the love of a project name. We create these with the stated aim of confidentiality, rather than call something what it is - we give it a “project name” so that no-one will ever know what we’re working on. The corporate halls are filled with projects named after gem stones, countries, animals, plants and pretty much any other grouping that you get taught about in kindergarten.

I hesitated before writing this post, there are some topics that I’ve seen over the years tend to draw the wrong kind of audience, the one’s that want winners and losers, the ones that want to blame and point fingers, the ones that - no matter how many caveats or waivers you include - want to read hidden meaning into the words that you write.

How we handle and process mistakes after they've happened can be key to our performance as leaders. Too little or too much reflection can both be bad.

Five years ago in the UK, on 16 March, the Prime Minister of the UK uttered the following words, “…now is the time for everyone to stop non-essential contact with others and to stop all unnecessary travel. We need people to start working from home where they possibly can. And you should avoid pubs, clubs theatres and other such social venues”.

I’ve written before about my dislike for sporting analogies in business. I’d argue that hiring ex sports people to come and speak to your management teams is the prime example of leadership development as a placebo. Very few are prepared or experienced enough to make the translation of their knowledge into the world of work, mainly because very few have lived in that world.

I came into business on the back of studying Psychology many light years ago before it became such a hot topic for undergraduates. Fortunately for me, back then you didn’t need three straight As to get anywhere near the hallowed halls of university. The course that I took, and the modules I chose, focused a lot on child development something that I’ve light heartedly (and sometimes seriously) suggested prepared me well for dealing with fellow execs and the world of work.

The text reflects on the author's career journey since 1996, highlighting how job titles and the workplace have evolved. Despite advancements in technology, the essence of work remains unchanged. The author questions the purpose of job titles and advocates for clarity, emphasizing that straightforward language can improve organizational effectiveness.

I was struck the other day by a post that Tim Baker shared on Linkedin suggesting that one in three HR professionals in the UK were considering leaving the profession, with 41% suggesting unnecessary admin as one of the causes. Now, of course, the company behind the research has a solution and....surprise, surprise...that happens to be exactly what they do as a company.

When I was starting off in business, we didn’t know a lot about what other organisations were doing. Of course there were newspapers, there were magazines and there were conferences, but the speed at which we learnt what was going on was…slow. You might get the odd piece about the biggest brands of the day (at the time in HR management that was Marks and Spencer), but for most organisations in most sectors, in order to understand what someone else was doing, you had to give them a call.

The desire to make workplaces more diverse and inclusive has been going on for at least as long as I've been in a job. As a Personnel Officer, one of my early tasks was completing diversity returns to the Government, I'm not sure they ever achieved anything but the intention was there. I remember the IPM (as it was then) snowflake campaign, remember that?

One of the very few things that GPs and HRDs have in common, is that people tell us their personal woes. Actually, I suspect the other thing we might have in common is that people complain about the service they get from our profession, but that's a whole other post for a whole other day. And whilst it isn't physical ailments that people talk to HR professionals about, at least not in my experience, what they do share gives you an insight into what is going on and going wrong in the world of work.

Culture is a funny thing, people will tell you they can measure it, improve it, encode it, decipher it. I’m really not that sure they can. Culture is so many things, moving in intertwined ways throughout organisations, it is complex and ethereal and yet most of us will be able to say quite quickly whether we like or dislike a particular one without any real assessment or measurement.

If you were asked direction to a location you didn't recognise, what would you do? You might get out your phone and go to a source of information - a mapping app - and see if that might provide the data you need. You might suggestion the person speak to someone with more knowledge of the local area. Or you might simply say, "I'm sorry, I don't know".