In a world increasingly looking backwards (Make Leadership Great Again!)1, Randal and David thought perhaps they too should look way back for inspiration. So they invited leading international leadership and coaching psychologist, Gaj Ravichandra to discuss leadership through the lens of Eastern philosophies, particularly the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. As expected, the Gita proved to be a great starting point for a wide-ranging discussion of leadership development. This included the...

How to become more powerful and successful using the power of others.That was going to be our shamelessly clickbait title for this episode but the Olympics are currently on and we thought we'd instead piggyback on everyone's excitement over that. This episode does indeed explore the concept of power, where does it come from and how can one gain and deploy it. To help us, we have invited Dr Andrew Frain, a social psychologist, who like Randal, is a true believer in the social identity app...

Resilience racket or corporate calm? What works when building resilience, psychological health and well-being in the workplace.In this episode David and Randal share their microphones with Diya Dey, an organisational psychologist and leader in the area of evidence based approaches to enhancing psychological health and wellbeing in the workplace. Their discussion explores the concept of resilience in the workplace, its historical context, and its impact on mental health. It delves into t...

Following from our previous episode on Bad Leaders, we look for lessons in leadership from the case study of Citizen Musk. David takes a psychologist’s perspective and examines if Elon’s self reported Autism Spectrum Disorder and his apparent narcissism offers both explanations for his combination of extraordinary achievements and appalling / idiosyncratic behaviours. Randal questions if he can be considered a leader at all - why not just an entrepreneur?   We go on to debate neurodiversity...

We are very pleased to welcome Prof Mark Williams to the Nonsense Dialogues. Mark is the author of the best selling book “The Connected Species” and is a cognitive neuroscientist with an extensive international career. Randal invited him to present the neuro cognitive perspective of psychometric assessments with the obvious expectation that Mark would join him in denigrating the whole domain. Well, Mark sort of does do this but also provides a great range of insights into the challenges of...

Randal has a lingering suspicion about anything that reminds him of cults, mysticism or good old fashioned snake oil. What has been attracting his sceptical attention of late are the various claims made by the proponents of Mindfulness for improving psychological health, well being and performance in the workplace.  This episode is mostly Randal checking in on the evidence around these issues and best practice on mental health in the workplace with an authoritative practitioner in workplace...

Where Randal and David unfurl their inner Boomer and look fondly back on how leaders used to develop before those horrid consultants came along and ruined everything.   Was leadership development much better in the past – slow, natural, organic and bespoke  – compared to our modern, industrialised model of rapidly producing leaders in bulk by force moulding them into a generic corporate leadership template?  But is this just a nostalgia driven view of preindustrial leadership development...

In episode 4 part A we talked shite about leadership development practices and in this next episode, part 4B, we explore what we think effective leadership development programs should do to be actually effective in developing leadership for results.  To save space, here is a summary of the episode as a series of lists.  First list: Leadership programs should: Be tailored to the organisation’s strategy and people. Focused on non trivial strategic changes that leads to a distinctive team...

In this episode we take a look at the effectiveness of leadership development programs and question if they are truly worth the time and money organisations spend on them.  David reviews his possibly wasted career in leadership development and defends against Randal’s accusations that the dominant individualistic approach emphasising self reflection and self actualisation, is just indulging the narcissism of our clients and has no evidence to support its efficacy. David presents a somewhat...

In which we explore the very lucrative business of Leadership Development. We initially look to distinguish leader development from leadership development but soon wander through a series of increasingly discursive topics including:  diversity of identity and skills, do these help or hinder?, the commercial imperative vs evidence based practice in leadership development, how a lack of a clear definition of leadership leads to mixed methodologies for leadership development that lack focus and...

In this episode ask whether our current crop leaders are hopeless? Lots of talking in circles as usual but surprisingly, we end with a quite decent (in our humble opinion) definition of leadership. Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others. We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and...

Our first published podcast, where we sabotage our careers by pointing out how CEO pay may be making it harder for them to lead.  We also debate leadership,  individualism vs collectivism, rats and lawyers, Plato's anti democratic beliefs, and a brief mention of Hitler (but I think we got away with it).  Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate...