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Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits are a simple set of rules for life – interrelated and synergistic, and yet each one powerful and worthy of adopting and following in its own right. For many people, reading Covey’s work, or listening to him speak, literally changes their lives. We think this is incredibly powerful and recommend it highly.

If you’re operating within a team or contributing to a situation, you have to speak up. You have to ask questions, even at the risk of sounding stupid, and challenge ideas or practices that don’t seem to be delivering on the objectives. If you feel uncomfortable or unclear, it’s your responsibility to sort it out, not anyone else’s. And it’s not OK to keep quiet and then complain about something afterwards.

How do you “re-moralise” a whole industry? It sometimes seems the failure of the global banking system is so huge that it will be practically impossible to fix.

For the vast majority of people, collaboration is a matter of willingness, not ability. And unless there is a fundamental wish to collaborate, it won’t happen. When senior people in organisations tell their team leaders to work together, it will only happen if ‘they’ want it to.

We said in our last blog that the most effective and successful leaders, and the most successful and satisfying organisations, are the ones that take culture seriously. Why? A short answer is to look at the types of organisation where organisation culture (‘the way a group of people behave together’) is and isn’t worked on.

We are largely defined, as individuals, by what we believe in strongly, both the things we are passionate about doing and the things we are passionate about preventing. Some of us are more passionate than others and there are two extremes: One says, “toe the line”, “don’t make waves”, “keep your head down”.

Here are some of the things, often unspoken, that your followers are concerned about when you speak, change direction or priorities, have a “brilliant” new idea, or push them beyond where they think they’re capable of reaching.

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? Normally they’re doomed to failure, because we are creatures of habit. We wish and hope for things to change, yet fail consistently to make changes in our thinking and behaviour which will improve our lives year on year. These questions (from ‘Your Best Year Yet’ by Jinny Ditzler) kick off a process of discovery, reflection and planning which enables you to design your best year yet.

How do you handle change? How comfortable are you with what’s on your plate? Are you going with the flow or resisting? The quality of your leadership depends on how you deal with the cards you draw and how you succeed using what you’ve got. In this article, we present seven perspectives on personal mastery and leadership effectiveness, drawing from ancient spiritual wisdom from around the world.

I don’t know who this poem is by, but it makes a very telling point. If you look at ‘how you act and how you live’, how would an observer judge you as a leader?