FLEXPERTS - BY GILLIAN BROOKES

Flexible work can enable us to successfully deliver productivity and wellbeing. Flexperts fronts into the challenges, like disconnection, organisational culture and leadership and how to develop flexible working as an individual, team and organisation.

Owen Eastwood is a high performance coach, who has worked with teams like the Royal Ballet in London, England Football, South African Cricket and Nato, centring his work on ‘belonging’ - a basic human need.

The world is changing rapidly, will you be a bystander leader - ignoring change as it happens around you, or will you be an upstander leader contributing to positive change?

2023 has started with a climate change wake up call in New Zealand – many communities have been hit by, and are reeling from, weather related disasters.A question for all of us as business leaders, and in our organisations wherever in the world we are, how prepared are we to work through and support our people and communities recover from these sorts of disasters?

Business books don’t have the monopoly on providing insights and inspiration to make work better. Aroha is a beautiful small book that contains 52 whakataukī - or Māori proverbs providing life lessons, guidance and notes of caution.Aroha tell stories that help anchor different ways of looking at work, teams and working.

A numbers person is someone who understands the metrics, can read what they are given, looks for trends in the data and can communicate the data to others.  They have conversations about action, are future focused and solutions orientated.  They think slowly and critically about the data they have. Numbers people are enjoy seeing evidence of their impact, and knowing they are making a difference.So let’s help build our data literacy and ability to be that sort of person. 

This playbook explains how respect, fairness, integrity, attention, empathy, humility and courage are the characteristics of the compassionate leader.And it’s not all about putting everyone first – compassionate leadership starts with self compassion.

Psychologist, Dr Sarb Johal, helps us navigate uncertainty, understanding how our brain drives our reactions, the role of structure and habit in creating calm and how self regulation makes us more creative, positive and optimistic.

Future You helps us challenge our assumptions and embrace the future - harnessing the creative benefits of change, learning all the way from Gen Z, by observing as leaders and making sure we have flexibility and spontaneity in what we do.Author, entrepreneur and educator Frances Valintine leads by example in this.

In a post-pandemic world flexible work has blurred the boundary between our professional and personal lives. How do we take back control, deal with the demands of work and have greater freedoms?