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Leadership Development: "This is the key to so many things."

Michael Soderling

Aug 19, 2021
3 min

Leadership Development: "This is the key to so many things."

These were the words of a CEO when I asked him to assess a new leadership development method that I have created. Allow me to briefly provide some background: When working with management team development, I need to gather information on the team to be able to tailor my delivery. To that end, I have acquired licences in several methods for data collection. However, despite my having access to all the relevant tools available on the market, over time it has become evident to m

Michael Soderling

Aug 13, 2021
1 min

Leadership development: New free guide

What determines return on your investment in leadership development? The answer hinges on your navigating a number of forks in the road when considering the enterprise. Taken together, these forks in the road form a complexity in which it is easy to get lost. In order for you to avoid some common missteps, I have written a new guide where I untangle the complexity. When you delve into the tips you will notice a surprising paradox and you might want to consider to what extent

Leadership – the right woman for the job

Michael Soderling

Apr 28, 2021
4 min

Leadership – the right woman for the job

– When listening to him I just shook my head, left the room and started looking for a new job. We have all had managers about whom we have said similar things. But if there is one thing that has become clear to me over the years it is how difficult the role of manager is. So it can be interesting to contemplate what determines success in managerial roles. One study reveals that 70 per cent of success is down to training, and 30 per cent is due to inherited qualities. These pe

Michael Soderling

Mar 18, 2021
3 min

Leadership – words of wisdom

Sometimes I read or hear something that is so perfectly well worded that I wish I had come up with it myself. In a coaching session my client described her professional philosophy to me. It applies to every single person in a workplace, but I think it is even more applicable to leadership. It goes like this: Don’t take things personally and understand why you are at work. I was exhilarated when I heard this statement, which may be the most succinct summary I have ever heard o

Managerial selection – the curious thing about intelligence

Michael Soderling

Mar 11, 2021
3 min

Managerial selection – the curious thing about intelligence

When was the last time you were 100% confident about a decision you had to make? Whenever I ask this rhetorical question in management training, the answer is usually that it never happens, followed by a lot of laughter. This leads us nicely on to a concept that recruiting managers and HR professionals often fail to recognise when I mention it – namely the concept of tolerance for ambiguity. This can be defined as the extent to which we feel comfortable in situations characte

Leadership Development – Forbidden thoughts

Michael Soderling

Mar 4, 2021
3 min

Leadership Development – Forbidden thoughts

– Because he doesn’t deserve it! The moment my client uttered these taboo words the problem was basically solved. The course of events that had led me to this point caused me to reflect on how I view leadership development and coaching. For the most part I consider my role is not to tell the client anything new. Instead my contribution is more often than not to identify restraining forces. And that’s because when the client understands what is holding them back they can start

Get your leadership training program to really take off

Michael Soderling

Feb 25, 2021
3 min

Get your leadership training program to really take off

Have you ever wondered if it’s even worth training leadership? The article ‘Team Development Interventions: Evidence-Based Approaches for Improving Teamwork’ says that inherited traits account for around 30 percent of leadership, while experience, training and other factors account for the remaining 70 percent. Furthermore, the article mentions that accumulated research indicates that leadership development efforts improve the effect of organisations by up to 29 percent. This

Michael Soderling

Feb 18, 2021
3 min

When being a superwoman isn’t so super

Today I want to talk about a manager whose sparking reputation became a burden. To put the story into context I first need to establish a psychological concept – namely cognitive bias. For those of you who have not come across this term before, cognitive bias is a psychological pattern that results in a person's subjective image of the world around them deviating from reality. Any good psychologist should be aware of their own biases and thanks to a triple digit number of hou

Why you shouldn't make a plan for successful management team development

Michael Soderling

Feb 11, 2021
3 min

Why you shouldn't make a plan for successful management team development

– No, I am not going to reveal the agenda. Before a management team development activity, participants often like to have a schedule or daily program of events. Although I obviously don’t respond as harshly as the opening comment above, I do insist that I don't want to provide a detailed daily program. The reason? Well, if the purpose of the exercise is to transform a management team so that it is equipped to achieve its goals, a predetermined schedule is counterproductive. T

Michael Soderling

Jan 28, 2021
3 min

Stop feeling ashamed!

When was the last time you discussed your shame? Today I’m going to discuss mine. During a fascinating seminar I was attending on the concept of shame, I got firsthand experience of how shame restrained me. Following an introductory lecture we were asked to reflect on what we had heard. After being divided into groups of five, each group got the opportunity to talk while the others listened. I was in the last group and heard lots of interesting points and wanted to comment on

Your management team – boost its performance

Michael Soderling

Jan 21, 2021
3 min

Your management team – boost its performance

How does boosting management team performance by 20 – 25 per cent with just 18 minutes of reflection sound to you? These appealing figures appear in the article Team Development Interventions: Evidence-Based Approaches for Improving Teamwork, an article which I once again want to dive into. The method, Team debrief, is described as follows in the article: “During a Team debrief, team members reflect on a performance episode or experience. They discuss what happened during the

Michael Soderling

Dec 10, 2020
3 min

What is a CEO’s most important task?

After asking me this question, it felt like my supervisor stared me out and my pulse quickened. It was 2008 immediately after graduation, at the beginning of my twelve-month-internship to eventually become a licenced psychologist. In my mind's eye I scanned through all the courses I had taken in group, industrial and occupational psychology, but after a long, silent pause I felt I had no choice but to say I did not know. Before we go further with this story it is only right t

Your management team – make it operative

Michael Soderling

Dec 3, 2020
3 min

Your management team – make it operative

Do you know who is a member of your management team? Are you sure? Let’s continue digging out the gold nuggets from the article ‘What every CEO wants to know: Six conditions to create an effective top team’ that I reviewed here. The article reasons that an effective management team is interdependent, stable and bounded. The first two suggestions probably come as little surprise to anyone who has ever looked into what constitutes a successful team. When it comes, however, to b

Your management team – back to the drawing board

Michael Soderling

Nov 26, 2020
3 min

Your management team – back to the drawing board

Imagine a study that examined critical success factors in management teams. Then imagine that the study looked at 120 top-level management teams from eleven different countries, where every team and individual member were exhaustively measured with quantitative and qualitative methods. For example using interviews, surveys and observations of the dynamics in every team. If you are intrigued about what such a study would reveal I’m pleased to report it has, in fact, been carri

Do not let change management tie you up in knots

Michael Soderling

Nov 19, 2020
3 min

Do not let change management tie you up in knots

– It will cost millions and you will have to deal with the aftermath for years to come. This ominous prophecy of mine came up in a conversation with a manager working in an organisation that is in the middle of a significant process of change. I made this prediction with a certain degree of emphasis in my voice. I have met far too many change leaders, project managers and managers who have become angry or discouraged to the point where they feel there is no other option than

Boost your communication with these four tips

Michael Soderling

Nov 4, 2020
3 min

Boost your communication with these four tips

Have you ever had a conversation and truly felt like you were being listened to and taken seriously? Then there’s a good chance that the person you were speaking to had used one or more of the methods I’m going to explain below. The reason why I’m addressing this topic is that I recently had a coaching client who was afraid of being perceived as someone uninterested in other people's feelings and opinions. The truth, of course, was that she is interested but wondered how she

Mysterious forces at play in management teams

Michael Soderling

Oct 28, 2020
3 min

Mysterious forces at play in management teams

At some point in your working life you have probably attended a team-meeting where you gritted your teeth and wondered what on earth was going on. It’s more than likely you then have experienced defence mechanisms manifesting themselves at group level. We apply these defences in order to avoid something unpleasant. It works in the short run, but the long-term effect is that the team moves away from reality and the task at hand. Explanations. Every time I work with a managemen

Michael Soderling

Oct 22, 2020
3 min

Change process and worst-case scenarios

– I can’t stop thinking… do I still have a job? We can only imagine how much courage she needed to summon up in order to be able to put that question to her manager at the beginning of the change process. And we can only imagine how much speculation there had been behind closed doors amongst her colleagues, asking themselves the same question. The manager bit his lip, realising his previous communication on the matter had not been so clear, after all. I was recently hired to

Michael Soderling

Oct 14, 2020
3 min

Management team fireworks

Understanding why team members sometimes find it hard to access their cleverness. There are two overarching processes that take place when management team members try to create alignment between themselves. The first is a cognitive process, in which knowledge is transferred and worked through. The second is a group dynamic process and involves everything that bubbles away underneath the surface of group life. To understand the first process, we can turn to the Swiss psycholog

Four research-based hacks for management teams

Michael Soderling

Oct 6, 2020
3 min

Four research-based hacks for management teams

Thirty-six per cent of recent graduates have deficient team and interpersonal competencies. Also, according to the article Team Development Interventions: Evidence-Based Approaches for Improving Teamwork, only 21 per cent of managers believe their organisations have the expertise to develop cross-functional teams, which a management team in my experience always is. So in this post I’m going to reflect on what the article has to say about four research-based approaches that ca

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