In my life I have lived in Singapore and Johore Bahru (Malaysia), so saw first-hand the transformation of that region following independence from Britain. The prosperity of Singapore has many parents. If it came down to one person, however, that person was undoubtedly Lee Kwan Yew (1923 – 2015). In this filmed interview, Lee discussed …
Have you ever been in a conversation in which the parts that are not said were louder than the parts that were? Or have had your emotions manipulated but were not quite sure how it was done? In this second article on Albert Mehrabian’s classic work Silent Messages, I summarise the building blocks of subtle …
I am currently reading a book which is a classic in its field: Silent Messages: Implicit Communcation of Emotions and Attitudes by Albert Mehrabian. First published in 1971, the book throws a great deal of light on the invisible part of communication. A formula on page 77 is the one thing that many people remember: …
In The Bug in Our Thinking, Dr. Hugh Willbourn laments the spread of literacy. You might wonder how the spread of literacy can be seen as a bad thing, so I should explain that it is because it has led to the abstraction of information from its context. This in turn leads to problems being …
When I facilitated a group of new managers in Brisbane, we did a role-play. It was a small course – only five participants – so while two people performed the role play the others observed, poised to give feedback at the end. Role-plays are, at best, awkward. They feel “lame-O” (you won’t find a definition …
Sometimes when I present a course, I cover emotional intelligence (EI). At times, and with particular audiences, I sense discomfort though it isn’t always clear why. What has emotional intelligence got to do with leadership in tough circumstances? Facilitating at a shipyard in South Australia, I learned that the previous foreman’s EI skills drew on …
Read more “Being emotionally intelligent is tough, not soft.”
Here are 14 things I learned from the project (setting up a WordPress website, curating the site, writing articles, writing a Wikipedia article, researching, writing and publishing a book): 1. Persistence. It is easy to start something. It’s much harder to keep it going. Persistence is not a feeling, it’s a doing. I feel it …
Welcome to the blog of Mark Sutherland, a Leadership coach based in Sydney. This is where I write articles, usually one per month. If you like, you can subscribe for updates. Will all of the articles be about Leadership and Leadership Coaching? While this site is my hanging up my “Leadership Coaching” shingle over the …