Julia Middleton's thoughts on leadership

I spoke at the start of a Frontrunner (our course for university students) specifically for disabled students, which we run in association with Santander. They were a hugely focused and dynamic group who were determined to work across disability and other organisations as leaders rather than stick to networks for people with their specific disability. [...]

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Dishaa (our Venture which connected leaders in the UK and India) was so successful, unbelievably successful, that we have been asked to launch similar Ventures between lots of countries around the world (see www.commonpurpose.org/ventures). Dishaa means direction in Hindi, so we will have Phambili (direction in the Nguni languages inc. Xhosa and Zulu), Dao Xiang [...]

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When I started work, I was very lucky. My first boss gave me opportunities to lead small teams from a very early age – to learn some of the lessons at an age when I could simply bounce back from my mistakes – to mess up when the stakes were not high – to succeed [...]

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Last week I was talking about the ability of senior leaders to inspire young leaders. I met a very senior person in the army today. Interesting. Her view was that this is less of a problem in the army. For many predictable reasons. The one I did not know about is – which was almost [...]

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I am more and more interested in how good senior leaders are at inspiring younger people. Or rather how many are not good at it. Is the generation gap getting bigger these days? Probably not. Am I getting older and so more aware of this? Probably yes. Are young people less prepared nowadays to give [...]

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An interesting way to assess your talent. Let’s say there are five levels for project managers. Level 3 is for people who know what to do at every point whatever happens. They are crucial. Level 5 people are only recognisable to level 3′s in that they appear incompetent. They know everything that level 3′s know [...]

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