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My article on neuroscience, gender and performance, published in ‘Coaching at Work’ Nov/Dec 2016, distils learning from a recent workshop I facilitated. Academic neuroscientist and coach Dr Geoff Bird presented up-to-the-minute findings from neuroscience which challenged some established ideas on the connection between gender and performance – and participants considered the impact for their work as coaches, consultants, mediators and sales professionals.

Male and female brains aren’t, after all, as different as we’re used to thinking – and this in turn challenges the validity of gender bias. In reality, it’s nurture rather than nature that accounts for many of the gender differences we observe in the workplace. Many of our attitudes to the connection between gender and performance come from learned associations and embedded (but unjustified) beliefs rather than reality.

One of the exceptions to these challenges is that females do indeed appear to have higher emotional intelligence than males.

If you’d like to see the article, it’s available here if you’re a subscriber to Coaching at Work – or e-mail me at lw@lindsaywittenberg.co.uk for a pdf

Photo by Leon Riskin via Compfight

Neuroscience of gender and performance

In a recent article in 'Coaching at Work' I distil learning from a workshop on the Neuroscience of Gender and Performance. Nurture rather than nature accounts for many of the gender differences we observe in the workplace: male and female brains aren't as different as we're used to thinking.

'What lies beyond': my latest article in Coaching at Work

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Self-leadership

Unless we know how to lead ourselves, we can’t expect to be effective leaders of others - and self-coaching engenders a capacity for self-leadership as a pre-condition for leading others. High-quality leadership isn’t a check-list: it’s a question of how the leader brings the essence of themselves to their role, and for this, leaders need to courageously examine their own practices and thinking, and to build their self-awareness, self-understanding, and awareness of how the systems of relationships and influences around them work, and how they impact on each other.

Making an impact - through self- and system-awareness

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Post-truth leadership

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My latest article explores what leadership needs to be in the light of the shock Brexit referendum result - and what will now change about my coaching during this period of uncertainty

Wilful blindness, belonging and exclusion

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Coaching qualifications and accreditations: a new angle

Knowledge and experience alone may have little or nothing to do with what makes for an excellent coach – and yet until now many of the principles underlying coach assessment have been about competencies. Tatiana Bachkirova and Carmelina Lawton-Smith (2015), of Oxford Brookes University, argue that the complexity and unpredictability of coaching may need a new model, and they propose a capabilities approach rather than a competencies approach.

#hellomynameis: Courage, passion and pioneering

Consultant geriatrician Kate Granger, who set up, and became the force behind, the campaign #hellomynameis, has died of terminal cancer aged 34. Passionate about person-centred, compassionate care, she was a leader by virtue of her passion, commitment, courage and determination to reach as many people as she could in service of a message which she believed would create a better quality of medical professional by releasing more of their inherent humanity.

'Compass or straitjacket': my new article in Coaching at Work

My latest article to be published in Coaching at Work magazine looks at how a coaching client's lack of clarity in the contracting process may be problematic at the beginning of a coaching programme. However measurables often surface during the coaching relationship.

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