Blog
When it comes to Leadership and people thriving at work, there is a lot we are passionate about. Check out our blog each month for the latest ponderings, insights and ideas from Karen Gately.
Filter
Topic
- Hire great people
- Onboard new team members
- Create your vision
- Execute strategy
- Create culture
- Manage energy
- Influence mindsets & behaviour
- Manage performance
- Optimise engagement
- Communicate with impact
- Grow talent
- Reward & recognise well
- Drive change
- Influence health & wellbeing
- Drive diversity & inclusion
- Self-mastery
From leadership and company culture to self-improvement and current affairs, our blog offers practical tips and advice to help you learn and grow.
Discover how to become a more effective leader, build a thriving team, and achieve your ambitions. Among other things our blogs can help you to:
- Discover how to build trust, create a healthy workplace culture, and keep your employees engaged.
- Develop a positive mindset, cultivate resilience, build confidence, and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Karen writes about things that inspire her in a hope they will inspire you too. Ultimately she’s strive to help you to become a more effective leader, a successful individual, and a well-rounded citizen of the world.
Staying focused in a busy job with loads of competing priorities
In today's fast-paced work environment, it's not uncommon for people to find themselves submerged in a sea of tasks, with each wave threatening to pull our focus away from essential priorities. The constant influx of emails, unexpected meetings, and looming deadlines can make it challenging to stay on track. It’s a challenge most of the leaders we work with face.
Read Blog
Cultivating Patience: Steps to being a Calmer You
Let’s face it people and life can be frustrating at times. Patience hasn’t always been my strength so I can empathise with the many leaders I work with who struggle to be patient when faced with the challenges inherent in influencing the performance of teams, progress of priorities and achievement of results.
Read Blog
Why visualization is a powerful tool for building confidence and enabling success
As a Martial Artist one of tools we used to build confidence and courage, as well as ready ourselves for competing was visualization. Putting it simply, visualization works because of its ability to tap into our brain's intricate networks, priming it for success and influencing our emotions, decisions, and actions.
Read Blog
Being Assertive
Assertiveness is often misinterpreted as aggression or arrogance. In reality, it's a balanced, respectful way of expressing your views, or standing up for your rights. While aggression may violate others' boundaries, assertiveness respects both your own rights and those of others. It's a middle ground between passivity and aggression.
Read Blog
Making Remote Working Work
Remote work has now found its firm footing in the business world. As a manager, optimizing the productivity, communication, and well-being of remote teams can feel like a big challenge. However, with the right strategies in place, it's possible to create a thriving remote work environment. Here are ten steps you can take to make remote working work well for your team.
Read Blog
Navigating Difficult Conversations: Addressing a Team Member's Poor Attitude
Having a conversation about a team member's poor attitude can be one of the more challenging aspects of people leadership. It’s common for the leaders I work with to avoid or put off conversations about attitudes that are undermining team morale, productivity or performance.
Read Blog
2 things that make the biggest difference when it comes to building a cohesive team
Great teams are always cohesive and united in their pursuit of common goals. The strength and extent of interpersonal connection existing among the members of a group is the biggest indicator of whether a group is likely to succeed together.
Read Blog
Be and work for a 'family-friendly' leader
Maintaining balance between the demands of your job and those of your family life comes down to the decisions you make. Your ability to maintain balance is ultimately a reflection of what you choose to prioritise, who you choose to work for and what you choose to accept.
Read Blog
Enabling Beliefs
Reflect for a moment on the ways in which the beliefs you hold influence the choices you make in life, including at work. Do the things you believe about your capabilities inspire you to step forward and take on new challenges, or do they hold you back? How often do you allow limiting beliefs to cause you to hesitate to give things a go or speak up with confidence?
Read Blog
What to do about unreliable people
Are you frustrated by the impacts unreliable employees have on the spirit and performance of your team? If so, you’re far from alone. Many of the leaders we work with complain of the need to manage people who drop the ball just when they are needed most. Tardiness, absenteeism, missed deadlines and inconsistent standards of work quality are common concerns.
Read Blog
Knowing when to surrender
Reflect on how many fights you are actively engaged in right now. With yourself, family members or colleagues. To be clear, by fight I mean being in a state of struggle in which we are resisting or working to overcome, eliminate or prevent our circumstances.
Read Blog
Strong Foundations
It’s quite extraordinary how one 'aha' moment can have a massive impact on our thinking, emotions and actions. The most recent example for me happened during a three-day immersive development retreat.
Read Blog
Motivation myth
While having lunch with my son recently he proclaimed, “Mum, I think motivation is a myth”. He went on to explain that he doesn’t believe motivation is what enables us to get started, but rather a feeling that builds when we achieve forward momentum or a sense of progress.
Read Blog
What to do when you get the hiring decision wrong
Let’s face it. When we get hiring decisions wrong the consequences can be painful. Lost time, money and productivity together with low morale and damaged relationships are among the most common impacts I see.
Read Blog
No regrets: living life like there are few tomorrows
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, looking after patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded her patient’s dying epiphanies in her blog, which thanks to the attention it received led to the release of her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.
Read Blog
6 steps to harnessing discretionary effort
So many of the leaders I work with are frustrated by failed attempts to lift the energy and contribution of their team. People plodding along doing no more than they absolutely must is all too familiar and a common challenge across the diverse range of industries we work with.
Read Blog
Combating unconscious bias
Searching for information about the impacts of unconscious biases on people at work, I came across an article titled ‘Physical Attractiveness Bias in Employee Termination’ by Melissa Commisso and Lisa Finkelstein from the Department of Psychology at Northern Illinois University.
Read Blog
Why thank you matters more than money
How do you feel when someone says thank you? Whether it be for our efforts, or achievements, most people appreciate being told they are appreciated. Assuming sincerity in its delivery, a simple ‘thank you’ can go a long way to making people feel valued and respected.
Read Blog
Why it’s OK to talk about not being OK
The first time I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety the strongest emotion I felt was embarrassment. When my husband shared ‘the news’ with another family member I was devastated, convinced what would follow was unwanted pity and ultimately loss of respect from people I care about.
Read Blog
Avoiding burnout when you're connected 24/7
When was the last time you spent a day completely disconnected from technology? How often do you check emails outside of work hours? Is your attention constantly grabbed by apps that notify you of everything going on in your world, as it happens?
Read Blog
New podcast episode!
There is a brand new Work Savvy episode ready for your ear holes!
Read Blog
Giving yourself the best chance of success each day
Success doesn’t come easily. No matter much it might seem like some people have it lucky and seem to achieve everything they want to, the simple reality is everyone needs to do the work needed to land in the places that they want to.
Read Blog
Take the pain early
Have you ever avoided change because it feels too hard to go through the pain inherent in making it happen?
Read Blog
Choosing our attitude
Travelling home from Sydney recently I was reminded of how much power we have to choose the version of reality we experience.
Read Blog
NEW PODCAST ALERT!
Work Savvy is back this week for episode 21 with Ros from Neural Networks to discuss the link between EQ and team culture.
Sick of the 'Sickie'?
The issue of the ‘sickie’ was raised by a client recently who has been struggling to get people to consistently turn up for work at a time when roles have been especially hard for them to fill. Staff shortages are putting enormous pressure on the team and the last thing they need is people dishonestly using their personal leave.
Read Blog
Value adding performance management
It doesn’t matter how well designed a performance management system is, unless it is effectively applied it will add little to no value. What matters most is the approach people leaders take every day to getting the best from each person on their team.
Read Blog
Growing emotional intelligence
How emotionally intelligent are you? This is a particularly difficult question for most of us to answer.
Read Blog
Shifting Culture Webinar
Register now for our last free webinar for 2021. Come and join us! TOMORROW - Wednesday 15th of December, at 12pm AEDT.
Read Blog
CEO fires 900 staff on a Zoom call...
In case you’ve missed it in the news, the latest staggeringly poor example of business leadership is brought to us courtesy of Better.com CEO Vishal Garg.
Read Blog
Assessing character through the hiring process
Getting hiring decisions wrong is an undeniably costly exercise. The drain on time, energy, morale and drag on progress can be immense.
Read Blog
Diagnosing performance issues
Register now for our fourth webinar. Come and join us! Wednesday 24th of November, at 12pm AEST.
Read Blog
Lessons learned from Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning'
Recently I finished reading Viktor Frankl’s famous book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ and was reminded of just how much power we each have to choose how we perceive and experience reality.
Read Blog
Executing a strategy through your people
Did you miss our second live webinar?
Read Blog
Webinar 2 - Executing a strategy through your people
Register now for our second webinar. Come and join us! Wednesday 29th of September, at 11:30am AEST.
Read Blog
Just deal with it already!
Contemplate for a moment on how often you avoid dealing with the problems you need to. Now ask yourself how well that typically turns out - for you, your team or even your business. In my experience avoidance simply prolongs agony and often makes things worse. All too often the people I work with hesitate to address issues and ultimately pay a price. Energy, time, money and momentum are all lost when roadblocks to success are tolerated, ignored or simply put in the ‘too hard to deal with right now’ basket.
Read Blog
Leveraging Executive Assistants well
This week the Corporate Dojo team and I are very excited to be launching our freshly minted 'The Influential EA of the future program. Among the most common things I work to support CEOs and business owners to achieve, is creating the capacity and mindsets they need to focus on doing their own job. All too often the leaders I work with at all levels of an organisation’s hierarchy are operating at one or two levels beneath where their focus needs to be.
Read Blog
Are you biting off more than you can chew?
While working with a client recently he said to me “we’re like a python that has swallowed a cow”. Apart from making me hearty laugh, his comment also made me reflect on all the people and businesses I work with that fit that description.
Read Blog
Dealing with reality
If nothing else what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed is a need for many of us to learn to deal with reality in ways that are good for our health . While it’s understandable that a lot of people have felt fearful, disappointed or frustrated, the simple truth is there is very little we can do to change the circumstances we all find ourselves in.
Read Blog