Recently my wife and I babysat our niece for a day. We took her to the kiddies cinema to watch an animated movie called Argonuts: Mission Olympus.

It was your typical against-the-odds-adventure with typical humour and fun characters along the way. I loved how the Greek Gods are depicted as a petulant, egotistical and childish family. But, when the hero's of our story are facing their villains in the big struggle towards the end of the film…

In my last customer facing leadership role (back in London in the naughties) I had an assistant manager (lets call her Beth) that had control of the team roster, stocktake, and cash procedures when I arrived on the scene. She had a long tenure and had a reputation as being accomplished. In my first year I noticed all sorts of issues in the business like in-fighting and disgruntlement in the team. I sat back and observed for a few months as I learnt the lie of the land and didn't do much. Unknowingly it was a good move as it helped me set the tone for changes I would make in the future. However, the reality is I was mostly too frightened to speak up or create more tension on top of what already existed.

No matter the stage you are at in your Job Life Cycle overcoming challenges by implementing change projects (even in the smallest of small contexts) is high value to any organisation.

Depending on the model you subscribe to there are anywhere from 4 to 12 steps of a job life cycle. These sorts of models are taught to most HR professionals detailing the journey we go through in any generic job. From Recruitment to Onboarding to Development to Retention and eventual Separation. To translate this into practical language I feel we mostly go through the following stages:

I was living in Cambridge in the early 2000's and had just finished my cricket contract with no intention to go back - that part of my life was over. As a fully qualified clinical Naturopath I had little job opportunity and with no idea where or what I would be doing from month to month so I never intended to invest in starting up my own practice as I had done in Aldgate back home in the Adelaide Hills.

It is amazing how often people say the same thing about how they got into what they do now.

"It wasn't the normal way people do it, but I..."

It seems we have this ideal of how careers form. Leave school, go to University/TAFE, get our first professional job and rise through the ranks. However, it seems this happens more rarely than we think. Dave Grohl, drummer from Nirvana and leader of The Foo Fighters talks about his rise to fame and fortune as a musician in his biography, The Storyteller.

It doesn't happen often, but a cricketer can be sent off the field of play. In soccer (or football) there is a yellow card (warning) and red card (send off) system. Rugby and many other sports have such systems, but cricket is a non-contact sport and there is not much need for such things. Yet, I was almost sent off a few times in my cricketing career in the UK.

Seth Godin is a world renowned marketing expert. He is a prolific published author, educator, podcast expert, and... well you get the idea - he's a pretty big deal. I follow some of his work and recently came across one of his quotes, "you are not your resume, you are your work" from his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

In 2005, I joined Kingsley Ogedengbe (a.k.a. Kinsley O) as his right-hand man to create Ki Mantra (a concept we dubbed an Urban Spa) on Camden Passage in the heart of Islington, London. With Singaporean investors and a blank canvas we set about creating something new and exciting. In retrospect we had no idea what we were doing. I was in my early-to-mid twenties with very little business or life experience. Kingsley was older and more experienced but was also delving into new territory and basically making it up as he went along.

"They know something I don't." "There are 20 ways I could screw this up." "They are going to see things I can't that I am doing wrong."

These are just a few of the thoughts passing through my mind as I stand over the ball at the 1st tee of the beautiful Kooyonga Golf Club in Adelaide over summer. My mind was focused on the talented wonderful friends I was playing with and living up their usual level. They are mates, but mates that are 'better than me'. My mind feels inferior around them and if I am not careful, my mind will carry on down this path constantly worrying about what they think.

How to motivate others has been the number one talking point asked of me in the last 12-18 months. Leaders particularly want to understand how to activate people to proactively ‘do what needs to be done’ without the niggle (i.e. grunts, grumbles, and glitches). Businesspeople and sales staff also want to motivate their clients and external stakeholders to partners with them to achieve the desired outcome. And everyone wants people around them to buy-into their ideas and strategies.

The Australian author and business Mentor Peter Cook once told an audience I was in (to paraphrase), 'people don't buy from you because they don't trust you'. It is a harsh brutal assessment on why people may not do business with us, why colleagues don't buy into our ideas, and why people don't want to do what we instruct them to do. It may also be an underlying reason for our perceived lack of progress (or regression) over the last year or so.

Latest research tells us the workplace of tomorrow will be full of Artificial Intelligence (AI), more dispersed than ever, and will probably be spent in the meta-verse for most of the working day. A lot of it feels unrelatable to our current experience as many businesses try and pull people back to offices or on-site. But, on the other hand, technology tends to creep up on us - reflect on the phone they had in their pocket in the early 2000's.

'There is no escape!'

That was the realisation I had when the clock ticked over and the Zoom window was loading. I had booked the appointment and even though I had prepared and done all the pre-meeting communications I found myself seconds away from seeing my face up on screen alongside that of my audience.

Come September in Melbourne everyone is close to being fed up with the rain, wind, and cold. It's nothing like London in February where everyone is cranky due to all of this plus a prolonged period of going-to and coming-home-from work in the dark, but the craving for sunny warm weather is shared by all. Nothing illustrates this need for brightness more than my local golf course.

We love a rebel. The bad boy/girl. The one that doesn't play by the rules. They bring excitement and intrigue. They incite a part of us that wants to break free of conformity and ordinariness.

When my wife and I are both working from our home offices we have a cute little ritual around our daily coffee. We have one coffee a day at approximately 10-10:30am and the one of us not in a meeting at that time is the designated barista for the day. Today was my day, and while the coffee was brewing I decided to reach out to a colleague in my industry to simply ask 'how they are getting on' as we hadn't spoken for a few months.

What is it we give to our teams as leaders? Thoughts may turn to functional actions like direction, instruction, guidance, and insight. Or we may turn to the less tangible such as confidence, empowerment, inspiration, or courage.

So it looks like I've been wrong all this time...

One critical skill we teach in performance and leadership programs is the art and science of feedback. It is commonly seen as a 'Tell' mode of communication where one individual relays their observations about another person directly to them (and hopefully in a private and respectful manner). It is a powerful tool to guide people, keep them accountable, and to uphold standards.

In 2009, the UK was hurting due to the global financial crisis. At the time I was working for the premium salon and spa brand in Business to Business (B2B) sales. I was new to the job after being a floor manager in the brand's Centre of Excellence in Covent Garden, London. I had been working in luxury brands for a while to this point and it became the norm to see people spend seemingly extravagant amounts of money for products and services while the media bombarded us with catastrophising headlines.