Andi Roberts – Executive Coach | Leadership Trainer | Facilitator

Quick answer To improve collaboration at work, identify how people are currently working together, decide what the work requires and address what is preventing them from working that way.

Quick answer Give feedback in the moment when it is useful, proportionate and unlikely to embarrass the person.

Quick answer To prepare for a difficult feedback conversation, get clear about what happened, why it matters and what needs to change, without assuming you already understand the whole situation.

Quick answer You do not need formal authority or a management title to lead.

Quick answer You can give negative feedback without damaging the relationship by making its purpose clear, staying with what you observed, and following up to show you still value the person.

Quick answer In the second edition of Collaborating with the Enemy, Adam Kahane suggests we can work with people we don’t agree with, like or trust by dialling down enemyfying (treating them as enemies), choosing whether to collaborate, force, adapt or ex…

Quick answer Mental depletion doesn’t switch your judgement off, but it can quietly shift what you are inclined to choose.

Quick answer When someone believes they are performing well and you see evidence otherwise, you are often facing a perception gap rather than defensiveness.

Quick answer Leaving the building does not switch your mind off.

Quick answer When an employee disagrees with feedback, treat the disagreement as information before you treat it as resistance.

Quick answer To map power in a matrix organisation, look beyond formal authority and ask who can actually affect the particular outcome you are trying to achieve.

Quick answer Motivation doesn’t collapse because you’ve stopped caring.

Quick answer To give feedback about behaviour rather than personality, separate what actually happened from the story you told yourself about why it happened.

Quick answer A new habit survives a busy week when it depends on a stable cue and a small, repeatable action, rather than on how much motivation or willpower you have left.

Quick answer Time is fixed, but your capacity to use it well is not, so manage your energy, not just your diary.

Quick answer There is no single best feedback model for a difficult conversation, so choose the one that fits what is making it difficult rather than the one you know best.

Most of the leaders I work with in matrix organisations can draw their formal reporting line from memory.

Quick answer You can give difficult feedback to someone more senior than you, but the standing, evidence and timing behind it need to be more deliberate than they would with a peer.

Quick answer You can give useful feedback to someone you don’t manage, but you need a legitimate reason to raise it.

Quick answer Resistance to change is real, but calling someone resistant doesn’t explain why they are responding the way they are.

Quick answer You cannot guarantee that feedback will not make someone defensive.

How to convene through Peter Block’s Six Conversations: A guide to building community through the questions we ask Peter Block’s Six Conversations, invitation, possibility, ownership, dissent, commitment, and gifts, are a set of conversational shifts that…

Quick answer To improve your critical thinking, get better at testing your own assumptions, not just other people’s arguments.

Quick answer To catch the thinking patterns quietly skewing your decisions, start by separating what happened from what you think it means.

Quick answer Better decisions under uncertainty start with better sensemaking.

Quick answer Imposter syndrome isn’t a lack of evidence, it’s a pattern of explaining away the evidence you already have.

Quick answer Estuarine mapping is an approach to working with complex change, developed by Dave Snowden, to identify what can realistically change in a system, what cannot change yet, and where intervention is most useful.

Quick answer The Wayshaping framework treats behaviour change as a coordination problem, not simply a test of willpower.

It is tempting to treat a stalled digital transformation as a technology problem: the wrong platform, the wrong vendor, not enough automation.

One of the difficulties with leadership is that it is very easy to become consumed by whatever is demanding your attention today.

Quick answer Simply telling yourself abilities can grow isn’t a reliable fix on its own, the evidence for that is weaker in adults than popularly claimed.

Quick answer To learn faster from the situations you’re already in, treat experience as data rather than as the lesson itself.

There is a strange pressure that comes with declaring you are going to do something for 365 days.