Articles & Field Notes
Articles & Field Notes
Practical observations on leadership, teams, change, selection and the strange reality of organisational life.
A collection of articles, field notes and short observations from Andrew Porteous, exploring what really happens inside organisations and what leaders, teams and HR professionals can do about it.
Why senior hires fail even when they look right on paper
Senior appointments rarely fail because no one checked the CV. They fail because capability, working style, context and relationship fit were not explored honestly enough before the appointment.
Why leadership development fails
Leadership programmes rarely fail because the workshop was poor. They fail because the learning is disconnected from the real pressures, behaviours and incentives people return to.
Why good people stop giving their best
People rarely stop caring all at once. Discretionary effort usually disappears quietly, in small withdrawals, long before anyone resigns.
Why meetings become organisational theatre
When meetings stop being places where decisions are made and start being places where positions are performed, the real work moves elsewhere.
Why annual appraisals often arrive too late
By the time the form is filled in, the moment for the conversation has usually passed. Appraisal becomes a ritual of documentation rather than a mechanism for development.
Why people resist being changed
People do not necessarily dislike change. They dislike being changed by people who have not involved, listened to or helped them understand the route forward.
Why email is often avoidance dressed as productivity
A full inbox can look like commitment. Often it is a way of avoiding the harder conversations that would move the work forward more than any thread ever will.
Why teams stop saying what they really think
Teams do not usually stop talking because they have nothing to say. They stop because they have learned what is safe to say.
Why values only matter when they become inconvenient
Values are easy in good weather. Their real test is what happens when they cost something: a client, a hire, a quarter, or the pressure to make an exception rises.
Five signs your leadership programme is treating symptoms
When a leadership programme keeps returning to the same themes, year after year, the problem is usually not the participants. It is the diagnosis the programme was built on.
The hidden reason team development fails to stick
Most team offsites produce genuine energy and honest conversation. The question is what happens on the Monday after.
What leaders should diagnose before launching change
The most expensive change programmes are usually the ones that skipped the quiet, unglamorous work of understanding what was really going on before the plan was written.