In my Blog on leadership I’ve covered a few areas that are fundamental to learning how to lead effectively. These creating a compelling vision, being an inclusive leader, doing the right thing, building a network of relationships, building a successful personal brand, knowing yourself and building self-awareness. Clink on these links or the tags at the bottom of…
Author: Paul Monekosso Cleal
For more than 20 years I've been in professional services with PwC mostly in London where I was born and raised. My professional experience gained at PwC and prior to that in the public sector includes strategy advice for governments, economic development and infrastructure finance, as well as human resources and diversity, for which I have been recognised for a number of awards relating to ethnic diversity issues in the workplace. Throughout my career since my MBA at London Business School in the 1990s, I've been interested in leadership and how one makes a difference in organisations and countries. I've held a range of board level and other leadership positions inside and outside the firm. I'm a keen traveller and because of my African roots am especially interested in matters of development and social progress.
The long road to self-awareness
Who are you, really? This simple, but intimidating question is one that I believe is key to personal development and especially to those with leadership aspirations. It’s really difficult to improve without first having a realistic appraisal of where one starts from. The advice to “know thyself” has been around since at least the time…
Business Karma
What comes a round goes around… One of the concepts that I talked to Gina Hayden about during my interview with her for her book on Conscious Leadership was what I call “business karma”. I’ve noticed over the years that by generally being helpful to people in the business world (and sometimes going out of…
Why diversity (and inclusion) matters to leaders
The workforce of today is more diverse than ever before – the workforce of the future will be still more so. Not only do women play a greater part in all levels and sectors of the workforce than when I left university 30 years ago, but the ethnic, national and religious diversity of the economically…
Seeing the bigger picture
One of the key themes that I explored in my interview with Gina Hayden for her book on Conscious Leadership was around the definition of success, which guides a leader’s vision and objectives. As an example, I talked to Gina about my role in founding and leading PwC UK’s Africa Business Group. For me that was…
Conscious Leadership
Last year I was interviewed by Gina Hayden for her new book that has just been published. It’s called “Becoming a Conscious Leader” – she sees me as one such leader. The book contains a number of quotes from our interview which I have grouped into four themes. (1) Seeing the bigger picture: How should…
Building a successful personal brand
Lots of people that I have mentored over the years have asked me about building their personal brand so that they can develop their career. I get asked this a lot because I made partner at 35 – five years after joining PwC as a manager – and then got into the UK board of…
Pep talk: Can business leaders learn from sport?
Lots of books have been written by sporting leaders giving leadership lessons to business. I’ve read a few but they don’t seem to me to work, perhaps because while sports people peak for occasional high-profile events, most workers face a daily grind (more akin to the training that sport stars do away from the glare…
Who ARE you?
This is a good question for people interested in being a good leader because the first mistake some people make is to try to be someone else. It is well over ten years since Professor Gareth Jones (then with London Business School and doing a lot of work with us at PwC) introduced me to…
2016. Not the best year for leadership?
So many people seem glad to see the back of 2016. I can’t recall such universal condemnation of a year. It seemed to me that a common factor behind a lot of what went wrong was a lack of good leadership so I’ve decided to devote some of my time in the new year to…
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