Insights – Page 2 – Little Grey Cells Club

Dear Ken Cheng: My Daughter Doesn’t Pick Successful Role Models

Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to Dear Ken Cheng, I’m worried my child is picking bad books as inspiration […]

Eight Things I Keep Coming Back To…

I’ve been delivering leadership mentoring for 25 years, and recently, having also spent a significant amount of time in conversation with exceptional leaders as research for my book, I found myself returning to the same eight observations I have been considering for most of my career. They are not new, but they are still true, largely unaddressed and still quietly costing senior leaders and teams more than they realise. What struck me most is how consistently the same gaps appear regardless of sector, seniority or the size of the organisation. The faces change, the patterns don’t. So, in this article, and in the spirit of giving back, I am sharing them with you. The 8 Principles of High Performance These eight principles sit underneath everything when it comes to success or struggle as a senior leader. The role clarity that gets skipped, the self-trust that gets overlooked, the recovery that gets sacrificed and the leadership identity that never quite gets deliberately built. 1. The leadership development industry is obsessed with WHY, and it is leaving HOW unattended. I gave a TEDx talk about this, because I was genuinely frustrated watching brilliant leaders get sold purpose as the answer when the real gap was always in the execution. Knowing your why matters, but I have sat across from hundreds of leaders who know their why perfectly well, and yet are still struggling, because nobody has ever helped them get underneath HOW they actually lead. 2. Assumption is the single biggest saboteur of high performance at senior level, and nobody talks about it. When you reach the C-suite, everyone around you assumes the foundations are in place; Role clarity, Emotional regulation, sustainable Energy, a deliberately defined Leadership style. But, I am yet to meet a senior leader who has genuinely mastered all four without deliberate focus and work. Nobody checks and the higher you climb, the less support you get to strengthen them. This is exactly where performance quietly starts to erode without anyone quite being able to name why. 3. Most senior leaders cannot confidently answer the question “what’s your job?” Not the title, not the vague brief from three years ago, but what they are really there to deliver, and what rhythm genuinely serves their performance. When I ask this question (and I ask it a lot), voices drop and body language shifts, because what comes back is something that is being constructed in the […]