PRAESTA PROMPTS
Confronting Conflict: Handling an Emotional Standoff
Does your team sometimes find itself in an emotional standoff and distracted from their core purpose?
Avoiding the Risk of Groupthink: What Makes a Watchful Team
When can a team risk becoming too attached to their way of looking at the world?
What Makes an Adaptable Team: Playing to All Your Strengths
Do you and your team fully appreciate the strengths that you have between you? Are you making full use of them for the shared purpose?
What Makes a Great Team: Focusing Your Collective Time
Is the start of a new year a good moment to review how you and your team are spending your precious time together? We notice that teams can settle into a pattern of working which they know to be suboptimal, but they somehow never find time to make practical improvements.
What Makes a Confident Team: Embracing Uncertainty
Uncertainty can overwhelm a team. We can freeze or feel caught in the headlights. We see a way ahead and then ‘the goal posts keep moving’. We want to make decisions, but the data keeps changing and the messages from above keep switching.
What Makes a Resilient Team: Staying Focused When All Eyes Are On You
Most teams have periods when they are under more intense scrutiny than is comfortable. How do you best respond when all eyes are on you?
What Makes a Great Team: Time For a Health Check?
Are the teams you are part of in good health? Are they ready to anticipate whatever may be coming down the track? In our Praesta Prompts this Autumn we will be exploring what can derail teams, such as uncertainty and being in the spotlight.
Authority: How Do You Show Up?
How do others respond to your presence? How we 'show up' can affect the dynamics and emotions in a meeting, whether it is in person or virtual.
Relationship Authority: How Can You Use It?
Relationship authority can often be more influential than the formal exercise of power. A formal leader may get compliance with their instructions, but if their followers don’t feel fully committed they may look for an early opportunity to change leaders.
Convening Authority: When Can You Use It?
When have you brought people together with an outcome that was better than you had hoped? We can underestimate people's willingness to respond to our bringing different interests together to identify a shared way forward.
Authority: How Do We Use It?
How can you use your authority to best effect? Our latest Praesta Prompt explores how leaders earn respect for the authority they hold, and reflects on the many forms that authority can take.
Stuff Happens: What Matters is How You Respond
What helps you handle situations when things go wrong, or events seem to conspire against you? You may feel a mix of disappointment, frustration, and resentment. Your confidence in your own judgement can take a dip.
Effective Feedback Needs Clarity and Care
Why is it so hard to give and receive feedback in a way that leads to positive results? Feedback is an integral part of our lives, whether at work, in education or in personal relationships. We do it all the time, but it can be difficult to get it right.
Stick or Twist: When Do You Hold the Line and When Do You Adapt?
Leaders we work with are frequently faced with decisions about when to stick with their original plan and when to adjust their approach. Often they face vociferous challenge and begin to doubt themselves. A fresh assessment of the evidence, and reference to their values, may strengthen their resolve to hold the line. Alternatively, it may lead to a change of course which needs to be carefully explained.
Where Can You Find Fresh Energy?
Many of our current coaching conversations are about how to find fresh energies for the challenges to come in 2023. After a switch in focus over the holidays how do you want to show up on your return to work? Can you find a quiet moment to reflect on what sustains you, and what resources you have within you?
Handling Escalating Uncertainty
How can we best lead through uncertain times, and see the opportunities as well as the threats? Human beings crave certainty in their lives but it is rarely possible, and it is at the times of greatest change that breakthrough innovations happen.
Praesta Prompt: Using a Coaching Style
Using a Coaching Style: Flexing Your Leadership Approach
Could you use a coaching style more often? Coaching can improve people’s contribution, boost team performance, and ultimately take some of the pressure off you.
Praesta Prompt: Recognise Your Derailers
Recognise Your Derailers: Flexing Your Leadership Approach
What can derail you and stop you from being your best self? How well do you understand others’ derailers as well as your own?
Praesta Prompt: Managing Difficult Conversations
Managing Difficult Conversations: Flexing Your Leadership Style
If you face a difficult conversation with a colleague, is your instinct to get straight to the point, or do you craft your message to avoid a strong reaction from them?
Praesta Prompt: Overcoming Setbacks
Overcoming Setbacks: Flexing Your Leadership Style
How do you handle a risk to your confidence or reputation following a decision or action that has not worked out as you had hoped? Might your default style be to stick by your initial judgement, whatever the warning bells?
Praesta Prompt: Balancing Task and People
Flexing Your Leadership Approach: Balancing Task and People
How do you strike the balance between getting the job done and showing empathy to your people? This is a challenge for leaders at any time but becomes acute when one global crisis follows another. When team members are feeling fearful about the future, how can you respond in a way that still delivers the results expected of you?
Praesta Prompt: Bringing Curiosity
Flexing Your Leadership Approach: Bringing Curiosity
When can curiosity be a valuable part of your leadership repertoire? Whatever your leadership style, bringing a sense of curiosity can enable apparently fixed positions to be explored more openly, and allow new possibilities to emerge. More >
Praesta Prompt: Knowing Your Default
Flexing Your Leadership Approach: Knowing Your Default
Our Praesta Prompts this next quarter reflect on styles of leadership. Successful leaders know when to flex their style to suit different situations, and to respond to the different personalities they are dealing with. More >
Praesta Prompt: Year End Reflections
Praesta Prompt: Self-talk Affects Others Too
Praesta Prompt: What Are We Avoiding?
Praesta Prompt: Valuing Your Strengths
Praesta Prompt: Handling Setbacks
Download or Read Online
Praesta Prompt: Taming Your Inner Critic
Praesta Prompt: What Metaphors Catch Your Imagination?
Praesta Prompt: Weave the Golden Thread of Trust
Praesta Prompt: Float Like a Butterfly and Sting Like a Bee
Praesta Prompt: Calm Amidst the Storm
Praesta Prompt: Capture the Genius of Your People
Praesta Prompt: Staying Resilient in Tough Times
Praesta Prompt: Connect With Each Link in the Chain
Praesta Prompt: See the Wood for the Trees
Praesta Prompt: Managing your time and energy when working from home
Download PDF or Read Online >
Watch the video
How might we adapt our leadership to current pressures?
Further reading
