By Heather Campbell >> Senior leaders have to paint a compelling vision for the future while pragmatically establishing the steps to get there. Customer Service teams must give customers personalised care and attention while still hitting strict call-time targets. Managers are expected to be tough decision-makers and also collaborative explorers. Head versus heart, masculine versus feminine, soft versus hard – getting the balance right between each is critical to business success. Recognising the importance of this – perhaps too late – RBS is now ...

By Heather Campbell >> If you, a 21st-century leader, could travel back in time around 2,500 years, and have a chat with Sophocles, he’d share with you a few lessons that are still relevant today. If your time machine wasn’t reliable enough to take you so far, you could stop in much more recent history, catching up with the Quakers in the US of the 1950s. Or you could just cast your mind back a few years, to the start of the ...

Uber, the increasingly popular taxi app, is making headlines again due to the fact that, as well as allowing passengers to rate their experience at the hands of each driver, it also allows drivers to rate their passengers. So, if you take a ride with an Uber driver, you can be rated on things such as size of tip, attitude and clarity of communication (just don’t say Melville Street when you mean Melville Place or you may be marked down!). ...

By Heather Campbell >> It’s that time of year when bright young students head off to university to start their various degrees, bright young graduates enter the workforce to start their various careers, and oldies like me – and Financial Times columnist and author Lucy Kellaway – wonder where the years have gone since we, too, were all bright and shiny. In this BBC News article, Kellaway shares a conversation she had recently with a graduate entrant in one organisation. The latter suggested that mediocre ...

In this Monday’s edition of The Times, the BBC economics editor Robert Peston writes movingly about the profound effect the death of his wife (at the comparatively young age of 51) has had on him. He goes on to describe the way in which some colleagues – notably male ones – found it difficult to know how to deal with the situation on his return to work. And there, I think, lies the problem. Because of the perceived ‘rules of engagement’ in the ...

By Heather Campbell >> Watching BBC Breakfast yesterday morning, I was amused by a story about the potential for a return to economic insecurity and the slowing of growth across Europe. UK share prices have fallen by some 10% in the last six weeks. It wasn’t the story in itself that amused me – but rather the attempts by the BBC presenter to sensationalise a rather banal story. It was evidently one of those mornings where news was slow and the Breakfast presenters had to fill ...