Creating a lovely life is not easy, clean, organized or without struggle. This blog shares my writing and videos about my journey to create my lovely life - a blend of my personal leadership lessons, my love of Hermes scarves, creating a lovely home, good food, relationships, dealing with chronic illness and career.
Leadership for me is about creating space for others to sparkle and shine, when your people succeed, you succeed. It’s about how you make people feel as well as the performance and results you produce, together.
I think of this quote when I think of the Lifestyle I want to embody.
Go forward in life with a twinkle in your eye and a smile on your face, but with great and strong purpose in your heart. - Gordon B Hinckley
Leadership is not meant to be experienced as a noun, or simply something descriptive. It's a verb; it should be something that you can feel, it’s something you experience. Specifically, I'm talking about leadership when it's your job, part of your role. I strongly believe that anybody can be a leader, but when you take a role as a Manager, or somebody responsible for the oversight of people, it becomes more than something you can do; it's something you need to do.
This has been a difficult couple of years for most people and for many workplaces. Whether the pandemic has boosted your business or challenged it, no doubt your teams are tired. As a leader you may not always have the answers. One thing you can always do is listen. Listening can create simple acknowledgment. It’s a super tool to challenge assumptions and dig into understanding realities of your customers and teams. Creating connections and spending time listening is a powerful leadership tool.
As a leader dealing with decisions that involve ambiguity is all part of the job. How you deal with it will have an impact on your team and of course that will have an impact on outcome and results. So learning how to deal with this, must have skill is a critical element of leadership today.
Recently I was having a conversation with a friend and somebody who I regard as a really strong people leader. We were discussing initiative, how do you develop it in people and can you select for it when you are hiring? I think this is something that does reflect your beliefs about people in general, do you for example believe that all people have initiative or do you believe that there are those that don’t. Tune into this video to hear my point of view.
Has somebody ever said to you, 'you seem to be micro-managing that project or team' or have you had a team member or leader say to you, 'you don't have to control everything'. If you've had this experience, you may want to examine your relationship with micro-management and control. Let's face it; there is a reason you don't hear the term micro-leadership. It's not a thing that exists in leadership. Stay tuned for a follow up video where I talk about strategies to move beyond this.
I have one key principle that I think can shift this behaviour the most. I also share 4 steps that if you can incorporate them I believe that this will help you shift this behaviour. While this is certainly not an easy behaviour to shift entirely it is one that you can make significant improvements on with some clear intention. I also think it is important for leaders to examine why they believe this behaviour works for them. What is the payoff you feel this is giving you?
Having a passion, a hobby that you love or something that sparks joy is so important. Why? Well, no matter what, adulting can be hard work, boring, repetitive and sometimes mundane. Without something that creates some sort of joy, we cannot show up, I believe, as our best self. We are supposed to have things that allow us to have joy in our life. What do you do that creates joy in your life?
Check out my written blog on the topic below as well!
In this age of Remote Work, Work from Home and Hybrid, many of us are navigating new territory as employees and leaders. One of the things that I've had leaders ask me, particularly as many organizations are starting to make decisions about coming back to the office, is around their team's productivity. They tell me they want them back because they weren't as productive. That's my question back to them, are you doing your role as a leader to manage this well?
Do you wonder why it’s so important to have a system to help you as a leader prioritize? You need it not only to help you in your work but without an understanding of prioritization you won’t be able to effectively support your team. Good prioritization is less about how you do it and more about selecting a system that works for you and that you can create results from.
The reality is that if you have a good prioritization system as a leader you will be able to identify what work is important vs urgent, and realize not all work is equal. That’s why lists aren’t prioritization. You will learn that time spent prioritizing is never time wasted. I talk about how trust and delegation are critical aspects of any good prioritization process as a leader. One of the hardest things for us to recognize is that when things keep bumping from week to week with no effort added, perhaps it’s time to just remove it. Good prioritization means you aren’t afraid to just delete or move things off entirely. How can the trap of emotional connection to work keep us locked into unreasonable expectations of what we should be doing and final the most important skill as a leader in understanding prioritization is intentional communication. This will enable and empower your teams to do their own prioritization and do it well. That not only serves them, the team but ultimately the organization.
The reality of why prioritization is a challenge is that at the core it’s mundane and repetitive. The cycle of it is wash, rinse, repeat. You never get to a point where you no longer have to prioritize. So when you are feeling like you don’t know that you should be focused on and what is going to help you move things ahead; ask yourself when the last time you sat down to do some prioritization. It may not be sexy but if you create great systems, discipline and process around prioritization you will improve your leadership skills for you and for your team. You will also deliver more which at the end of the day is what leadership is about, supporting and developing people to execute and deliver results that matter.
I think the concept of multi-tasking is one of the great lies of work life. Somehow you are suppose to produce good quality work while juggling multiple things? Even when you say it like that it doesn’t make sense to me. I also think that technology has contributed to this a great deal; Teams messaging, E-mails, Texts they can all interrupt productive time. There is countless research studies out there that show that multi-tasking is not efficient or effective. The thing is it has become a habit for many. Once you have your priorities of what needs to be done how you approach that is as important. So if you are one of those multi-taskers out there I encourage you to take the tips from this video to try a new path. You won’t know until you try and feedback without effort given to try something is not fair feedback. What do you have to lose?
We are well into a year and a half of the Global Pandemic and if you think about that length of time the things we may have been speaking with our teams about in terms of challenges has likely changed. The landscape of people’s lives outside work may be significantly different than when this all started. Join me for this video on how, from my perspective, we as leaders can show empathy to our teams and what we need to be mindful of. Ultimately when we practice vulnerability as leaders and are able to model and show what empathy can look like for our teams we are likely to drive better employee experience, performance, and ultimately results. My view on leadership is that it is our role to help our teams sparkle and shine, by supporting and developing them in order to deliver results that are meaningful to the organization.
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