Barry Winbolt's Blog

Welcome to my new website, it went live on 5th February. I have added more information and functionality. What do you think? I’d like your opinion. Does the site work? Is anything missing? Please leave a comment.

The much-published ideas on leadership have come under scrutiny in a new study which distinguishes truly exceptional leadership from run-of-the mill management-speak. The research, by the Work Foundation, identifies three principles of outstanding leadership coupled with nine themes that exceptional leaders adhere to.
It adds some surprising insights with practical applications.

Want to know how to create a Happy New Year? Here are seven pointers to help. By the way, you can use this at any time of the year to help with focus or motivation. When is New Year anyway? There are several options.

Swearing has lost some of its taboo; we swear more, and more publicly. Now we have research that positively promotes swearing at work and says this can benefit staff and their employers.

The author Michael Lang suggests a few simple methods that can help children resolve their disputes. They won’t avoid conflict, but their disagreements will be less disagreeable and that will make life a lot more agreeable for parents or carers as well.

The media love to remind us of the ubiquity of conflict, so it was a surprise to find that the Guardian had published an article on workplace mediation; “people realise that ongoing conflict is not good for them”.

Conflict resolution or conflict management?

There was a time when the boundary between work and social life was clearly defined and only in extreme cases did anyone need to be reprimanded or corrected about inappropriate behaviour like swearing, shouting, insults or open sexual innuendo.

The media love to remind us of the ubiquity of conflict. Stories of war, high-profile divorce, religious clashes, strikes and workplace disputes are some, and popular entertainment carries the theme into our daily lives. Conflict sells, and without it the soaps, and other TV and radio drama, would become anaemic, their storylines reduced to pale [...]

My new guide is in its final stages of production and will be ready for download in the next week or so. I’ll announce it in the newsletter so, if you haven’t already done so, sign up here. More on bullying: Moira Jenkins, a clinical psychologist running a University of Adelaide study on workplace bullies, [...]