![]() ![]() I was frequently talking to my team about managing their work/life balance, about “switching off”, “taking care of themselves”, and “managing energy”, yet they were still receiving emails from me at 6am or 10pm, and were seeing me dabbing my lips at the start of a Zoom call because I had just finished eating. This made me start to think about the shadow I was casting. I was exhibiting the kind of bad behaviours that I saw people writing about on LinkedIn, but of which I was taking no notice. I am not entirely sure that we would treat any of our friends to a spread from Fortnum & Masons, but the gesture was dramatic enough for the message to hit home.īeing home alone I was not only eating lazily, I was also working long and erratic hours. The aim was to wake me up to the fact that I should be treating myself the way that I would treat my friends. My partner, like me, does not place a tremendous value on material things nor on grandiose gestures, but one day, out of the blue he sent me a food-hamper from Fortnum & Masons. Instead of a keyboard I now have more of a smörgåsbord. And our IT department will probably have a fit when they see the amount of food I have dropped on my laptop. My meals also progressed (or declined, depending on your point of view) towards things that were prepared rapidly and could be eaten from one bowl. During our daily Zoom calls I would often be seen munching as we chatted. Having the house to myself meant that I could pretty much carve out my own timetable, including mealtimes, and because we were still very busy in Cranfield, I gravitated to the habit of eating my meals at my computer. ![]() This might seem rather esoteric, but plenty of treatises on leadership have been written about “the shadow we cast as leaders”, and the unwitting influences we can have, simply by our behaviours being observed by our followers.Īt the start of the Covid crisis, due to unfortunate circumstances my partner and I ended up in lockdown in different countries, and it was clear we were not going to be together for quite some time. 影Yǐng means “shadow”, and 响Xiǎng means “to make a sound”, so to influence someone is all about the sound that your shadow makes. The Mandarin word for “Influence” is made up of two individual characters, 影响,pronounced “Yǐngxiǎng”. ![]()
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