Now is the perfect time to be planning ahead for things you want to achieve for the year ahead, and crucially working out how you’ll work to achieve them. The easiest and best time to dedicate to thinking about your career, your business goals, your personal aspirations (and even your home renovation plans) is when you are still relaxed from a break, the inbox is pretty quiet, and the daily routine and rhythms are yet to pick up.

Great leaders are everything, and can be the difference between a performing organisation, and a high performance organisation. They can inspire people to be at their best, even when the outlook is challenging. They can create magical relationships which are based on deep trust and respect, and unlock significant amounts of discretionary effort in the workforce. They can be a force for positive cultural change, and can turn around long-standing issues in double-quick time. In short, they are awesome, and every organisation should do whatever they can to attract/develop/retain them. Trouble is, lots of organisations fall short in developing their leaders. There is another way…..

We get proud seeing them grow beyond the role they are in and step into a new opportunity, but at the same time, we know that we'll miss having them around and that they will leave a gap to fill.It's a familiar story. We invest time and resources in developing our young people, only to see them leave once they're qualified, or begin delivering real value for our organisations. It's understandable - who wouldn't want to take their career to the next level or get out and see the world? But for some reason it can sometimes feel frustrating for those who have invested in building their skills, confidence and knowledge. and to those of us staying behind.

With some effort, you can create an experience designed to orient your new people at the things that will be important for them to succeed in their role, whilst helping them fall in love with their workplace. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking to young Pasifika talent Latayvia about her expectations for her first few weeks in her new role - her response was simple, and telling. “I want to be meaningfully engaged and I don’t want to be made to feel stupid”. With that in mind, I think that there are five key things you can do to help people like Latayvia feel welcome, needed, and valuable.

It’s difficult enough to find the right talent for your organisation when you’re hiring; from thinking carefully about the right kind of skill sets you need, to the right kind of attitude you want to have within your team.To add to this, the world we live in is changing so rapidly, and many of the skills we have aren't necessarily the ones we need for the future. That’s where our young people come in.

Through focusing on IDEA, rather than just D&I, we have a greater opportunity to achieve workplaces that are inclusive, diverse, equitable, and importantly accessible. And without that, we cannot be truly diverse.

Last year, I wrote about a moment I experienced in the early stages of my career - I’d only been in the workforce for a few years, and was given an opportunity to have some 1:1 time with the Head of HR for a global financial services firm.

For years, I've been pre-occupied with a very simple question: what makes a great leader?I've observed many leaders, but great ones have been harder to find, and they seem to be becoming more scarce in the workplace. What's caused this leadership drain?

At the tail end of last year, I spent some time with the brilliant Nigel Paine at LearningNowTV discussing the changes that we made to create the Learning Enablement team whilst at Spark New Zealand. As an organisation, Spark provided our learning team with the space and trust to try something new that we fundamentally believed in, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. We learned so much throughout our transformation to becoming a Learning Enablement team, and many of these lessons and highlights have been captured in this interview with Nigel.

Outplacement support has been around for as long as I can remember. Organisations soften the blow of a redundancy or restructure by offering the departing employee some help in finding the next role; CV writing, LinkedIn profile updating, reviewing key achievements. The list goes on. Now, it’s different. Consider the organisations who are cutting hundreds - or thousands - of jobs. A little bit of CV prep and interview practice isn’t going to cut it for those people leaving… there simply aren’t thousands of jobs available for people to move on to. Something else is needed.