A healthy culture is the starting point for any successful organisation just as good soil is essential for a successful garden. If you have ever worked in an organisation with an unhealthy culture you will understand the impact culture can have on performance. As a leader, digging into your culture can be a very revealing exercise that you should do on a regular basis if you want to keep your organisation healthy.

So what makes up culture, how do cultures vary and what can you do to…

Cultivating a culture of engagement can be achieved in a variety of ways and recently I can across an innovative method involving pot plants being used to great success by a local organisation. Here is their story. 

Sandra Taylor, the Development and Communication Officer from Teachers Union Health has started an…

The old model of “building” a great team is outdated.

The concept of growing a team instead of building a team has been around a long time. It seems to have started with Frederick P Brooks in his book “The mythical man-month” written over 30 years ago. He believed that:

“The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness. The conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be accurately specified in advance and too complex to be built faultlessly, then we must…

This post is taken from my blog "Notes from the workplace garden" where I analyse how creating a great organisation is like creating a great garden.

It is very easy as a leader, or a gardener, to get caught up in the details and forget what it is you are trying to achieve in the big picture. We can easily obsess about minor issues, like the weeding or pruning when, from a distance, everything looks fine. We just need to take a step back to see the big picture rather than focussing on…