Jim Verstraete argues that the reality of leadership is that urgency often trumps importance. Yet for him, this is precisely the key to effective leadership. Leaders who create structural value consciously focus their time and attention on matters that have a long-term impact: developing their team, setting clear priorities, building strong systems, clear processes and a culture imbued with ownership. With his article “Van brandjes blussen naar structurele groei: hoe je als (people) leader tijd kan maken voor wat écht telt”, Jim wants to give us concrete and easily applicable tips that help us to work less reactively and more strategically in our daily functioning as leaders.

Communication in all its forms has been a critical element in Linda Junius’s professional endeavors so far. In writing “Communication – a blessing or a curse”, she does not have the ambition to lecture us on communication, but rather to share some basic rules she personally tries to imply. By elaborating on a number of “do’s” she tries to integrate in her day-to-day occupations on the one hand and a number of “watch outs” she personally tries to be mindful of on the other, Linda offers us enlightening insights into ‘Communication’ in a corporate environment.

In ‘Onboarding: van informatie-overdracht naar duurzaam leren en gedragsverandering’ Katrijn Steenbeke states that in many organisations, onboarding fails to sufficiently help new employees settle in for the long term. An important explanation for this is that traditional onboarding often gets bogged down in administration and information transfer, while onboarding is essentially a social learning process. In her article, Katrijn outlines five principles that can be used to design onboarding as a learning strategy: respecting cognitive capacity; allowing space for active processing; consciously incorporating repetition; embedding onboarding in a social context; and placing an explicit focus on behaviour and habit formation.

When Marc De Boom started his professional career in the late eighties’, spotting people who were professionally active at the age of sixty was a true challenge. Today, we are all expected to work longer and contribute ‘till end of career’ in a healthy way with skills and competencies that are business-relevant/value-for-money ‘at every moment in time.’ But how to prepare for this challenge?In the truly inspiring “Longer lives…longer careers…how to stay in the game?”, Marc shares with us the lighthouse principles that guided him towards a long and happy career.