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@kingroupconsulting

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🤎 HR and leadership development for purpose-led teams and values-driven leaders
🍃A regenerative approach to HR
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Think about someone on your team right now.

You probably know their role, their output, how they like their coffee. Do you know what it costs them to turn up? What they’re carrying that you can’t see?

Every person you lead brings a different mix of identities, experiences and circumstances to work. Some of those make it easier. Some make it harder in ways you may never see.

I think most of us were taught to manage that away. Headcount. FTE. Bums on seats. One approach for everyone, because it’s efficient and ‘fair’.

But if you lead everyone the same way, you build safety for the people who are most like YOU. Everyone else is left to work out the gap on their own.

Seeing the whole person is where it starts. Once you’ve really seen someone, you can’t go back to seeing a number. by @kingroupconsulting

What is your body of work?
Beyond individual roles or projects. Beyond the services you sell.. what is the collective body of work that you stand for?

For me it’s about building fiercely human leaders. That has manifest in a crazy-wide variety of offers over the years, when I look back and analyse there have been powerful themes that run through it all.

If you look back over your career- what could be the themes in your body of work? by @kingroupconsulting

The bar is pretty low in some cases.

#leadershiptraining #workplacewellbeing #leadwithlove by @kingroupconsulting

I’ve been doing too much of the work lately and not enough sharing it around here… leaving this here feed looking a little neglected. So… just a quick update on what I’m doing these days for the curious.

I’m so grateful to have you here.

#Leadership #feministleadership #leadershipcoachforwomen by @kingroupconsulting

We’ve been taught that being a fair leader means treating everyone the same. Same policy, same process, applying things the same regardless of who it is you’re talking to. That’s ‘equal’ right?

And look, it sounds like the right thing to do. Safe, defensible.

But treating everyone the same isn’t the same as treating everyone with dignity.

It’s more like that hideous one-size-fits-all rain poncho. Technically everyone could get one, but it doesn’t mean it actually fits anyone properly!

Applying one approach to everyone, without seeing what each person actually needs, still misses the mark. It actually misses everyone - some more than others.
Real equity does the opposite. It notices the differences and responds. Whether it’s age, caring responsibilities, gender, whatever someone needs to do their best work…they don’t one-size-fits-all for the sake of simplicity or consistency.

That kind of fiercely human response is dignity in action. And that kind of leadership leads to real equity at work. by @kingroupconsulting

In the spaces where I work, ‘privilege’ is a word that often gets hackles raised. We think that if we say we’ve been ‘privileged’ means we are saying we grew up with the proverbial ‘silver spoon’.

But we’ve all dealt with our own hard stuff. Maybe it’s the career you fought for, an unsteady family background, or neuro-diversity you’ve been navigating. And because life has genuinely been hard, it feels impossible that you could also be privileged.

But privilege isn’t about what you’ve gone through. It’s about what you haven’t had to go through. Depending on what those things are, the hurdles you’ve avoided can make a big difference.

It can be very easy for us to get defensive and say ‘you don’t know what it’s like to be me and deal with the things I’ve dealt with’. Which is correct. But it’s a lot harder to think ‘yep, and the reverse is true and maybe their experience was hard too’.

I have had experiences as a single mother, in a large body, from a low-socio-economic and regional background. But I also have been privileged to not have to deal with racism, homophobia, or the challenges of a chronic illness.

You can have worked for everything you have and still have been spared things other people weren’t. Both are true at once.

Like most of this work - the process of unlearning our unconscious patterns and perspectives - it’s not about trying to guilt you. It’s about becoming aware of these factors so you might then responding differently.

#equitycenteredleadership #equitycentred #privilege #inclusion psychosocialsafety by @kingroupconsulting

The legacy of most management practice is that leaders have been encouraged to see the people they lead as resources. It’s a word that is so normal in organisational life that we rarely notice what it does.

Resources are allocated, optimised, and used.

But we lead humans with dignity. Not faceless resources.

When human dignity is genuinely at the core of how you lead, it produces a fundamentally different way of thinking about the workplace.

This is an excerpt from the program I am currently running all about equity-centred leadership. Part of it is understanding how important dignity at work is, and how easily we violate other people’s dignity through micro-aggressions like gender-based comments, racial slurs, those ‘jokes’ people think are okay.

If you’re keen to know more about this program for yourself or your organisation just let me know and we can chat. by @kingroupconsulting

Last week I was fortunate to be invited to run a session for a group of young leaders through Investing In Greatness @iigaus. This is an incredible organisation that offers professional development and networking to multicultural professionals who are on track for board and industry leadership.

The brief was networking. But, typical of me, I didn’t give the usual advice.

Most networking advice boils down to “here’s how to sell yourself better.” Have your pitch ready. Work the room. Follow up fast. It treats networking as a transaction. There’s an underlying current of “what can you get from people” or “how do you make yourself memorable in ninety seconds”. That version of networking has its place. But it doesn’t necessarily help you build something that actually lasts.

Instead we talked about mycelium. The underground network that keeps a forest alive. It’s invisible, reciprocal, slow. A young tree can be kept alive by an older one quietly sending it what it needs. This is what I see as the benefits of a strong network. A community of support that helps lift you up. Everyone plays a part, whether or not they get to actually see a payoff (because it’s often not just about that).

These are networks that build slowly over time. With folks from different stages and backgrounds. Some connections may send you work or job opportunities. Others may have your back while you take another hit and help you get up. Some you learn from and some you lift up.

If one path closes, the network routes around it, the way mycelium does.

Nothing about that is a pitch or a performance.

To me that’s a network - and a community - that’s worth cultivating.

Side note: Lucky I’m not super precious about how I look or I would have to sack my photographer @dukuinspires for these expressions! by @kingroupconsulting

This quote from Trudi Lebron gets to something most diversity strategies get backwards.

We keep treating a lack of diversity as the problem to solve... better sourcing, more inclusive job ads, unconscious bias training. All useful.

But none of it addresses why the gap exists in the first place.

A lack of diversity isn’t the problem. It’s the result.

It’s what happens after years of hiring practices, promotion decisions, and “culture fit” judgments shaped by systemic bias... some of it conscious, most of it not.

When we treat the outcome as the problem, we end up managing optics instead of addressing cause. Fixes become bandaids.

We set hiring or leadership targets, and call it progress. But without asking why our systems kept producing homogeneity in the first place.

If we’re serious about building workplaces where everyone can thrive, we have to be willing to look upstream... at the systems, the decisions, and the norms that created the gap we’re now trying to close. by @kingroupconsulting

We love the idea of empathy. It sounds easy and ‘right’. But I think we may be a little less comfortable with what it actually requires us to do.

Most of us learned “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” as a lesson in being empathetic and seeing another perspective. But as Leanne (@empathyfirsthq ) and I discussed - putting yourself in someone elses shoes is only half of it. You’ve actually got (metaphorically) to take your own shoes off first.

That’s the part that changes your perspective.
That changes how well you understand.
That’s the part that actually changes how you lead.

If you skip that step, and you’re not building understanding. You’re interpreting someone else’s experience through your own lens but calling it empathy.

Leanne empathy educator and founder of Empathy First, had a great conversation recently as part of my @kingroupconsulting new equity-centred leadership program, Leading a Modern Workforce.

Whose shoes have you been trying to walk in without taking your own off first?How would it change your understanding if you did?

Side note: DM me if you’d like to know more about the program. by @kingroupconsulting

I remember a long time back (when I was a baby in my career) sitting in a performance feedback session where my team lead had just given me some touchy feedback. He’d left the meeting but I was sitting there crying. I felt shit. I was thinking all manner of thoughts about him. But under it all… I knew that what he’d said was true. I had a blind spot on how I was communicating in a project and it needed to be addressed.

Later, when I settled down and was much more regulated I was able to constructively take on this advice and do something with it.

In comparison I’ve also been in situations where my team lead just seemed to hate me. I was always being ‘course corrected’. My ideas were always dismissed as being ‘not relevant’ and my outcomes questioned.

As someone who had always been a ‘high-performer’ it was so hard to understand what was going on. In the moment the feedback felt like it did the first time; like overwhelming criticism. But I couldn’t process it and come to a place where it made sense or felt true. It was just relentless doubt for seemingly no reason.

But this is why it’s hard right? Feedback can feel shit. But there’s a difference between performance management and bullying. And sometimes it takes a while to work out which it is.

One of the key steps I recommend now is for folks to start by going looking for the ‘standards documents’. The job descriptions
The SOPs
The KPI targets
Whatever it is in your role that sets out what you are supposed to be doing and to what standard.

Is this document going to include EVERYTHING you do in a day? No. But it’s a starting to point to look at and assess what is reasonable and unreasonable expectations.

So if you are on the brunt of what feels like constant criticism and shifting expectations- start by finding the performance/task agreements for your role. Read it over. Is what the feedback is about related? Is it reasonable? Is it a performance blind spot or something more.

#leadership #workplacebullying #performancefeedback by @kingroupconsulting

Last year my 2 of my immediate family were diagnosed with inattentive ADHD. I am in the early stages of a diagnosis for one of my kiddos. It’s been an eye-opening phase that’s for sure.

I’m only new to this world, of understanding how processing differences show up. But as I learn, the more I am ‘seeing’ how the workplace is just not friendly in the simplest of ways.

- I remember the questioning looks as people read the 12-18 month average tenure on my CV in my early 20s.
- I remember the senior executive who told me to stop ‘scribbling’ in meetings because it distracted others from what she was saying.
- I remember the stress that I would feel when others would think I was doing ‘nothing’ at work, but then in a state of hyper-focus pull out some kick-arse work.

I had always just dismissed these moments as me being ‘the odd one out’... and the burnout that led to me leaving corporate as ‘being less than’. But as I learn about common presentations, masking and the experience of those navigating the workplace... it’s making things click.

I’ve been doing work in organisational culture and inclusion for a while. But adding this additional layer to my lens is reshaping (again) my views on how important it is to keep challenging the ‘norms’ of the workplace.

To truly create inclusive environments, it’s not just about policies and codes of conduct (though these things do set the base point)... it’s about challenging the ideas within us. Being open to difference, and seeing the value that this difference brings. by @kingroupconsulting