Author: Mukesh Gupta

Leadership

Leaders Worth Following Know When to Go Against Conventional Wisdom

I had seen this TikTok video a few months back and remembered about this again when I saw this LinkedIn post by Dr Paige Williams about the importance of knowing about positive deviance and how leaders worth following know when to apply this concept of positive deviance. In this TikTok video, Arielle Schmitt shares the strategy adopted by the Chinese team in the Youth Olympics. One of the athlete (the gold winner) adopted a unique strategy to win the race. The winner did something that has never been done before in such a race. The runner up (also Chinese athlete) […]

Leadership

Five Ingredients of True Improvement

In my last post, I wrote about the difference between Change and progress. Today, let’s talk about progress from the point of view of improvements. In one of his lectures, Peter Scholtes talks about 5 ingredients of true improvement. While his lecture is at least 30 year old, the principles he laid out still are practical and applicable to any innovation or change or improvements that we make in how we run our business. This is true for any innovation efforts or for any change that we want to make as a leader in how we operate. PS: If you […]

Leadership, transformation

Leaders Worth Following Understand the Difference between Change and Progress

The most common cliche today is “The only constant is Change”. As with everything else, not all change is created equal. In my experience, not all change leads to progress. Leaders worth following know this and are always intentional about any change that they are advocating for. They are always looking at and talking about the progress that the change will lead us toward. If there is a re-org being initiated, it should actually lead to a change in behavior for everyone who is impacted by the change. If the behavior of people affected by the initiative doesn’t change, then […]

Leadership

Leaders Worth Following Never Leave Hiring Just to HR

One of the primary responsibilities of a Leader is to hire the right people for the right roles for their teams. It is such an important activity that it can’t be left to either the HR business partners or anyone else. One of the things we can do if we really want to become a Leader worth following is to always be recruiting or looking for people we can hire to be on our team. Apart from a host of other benefits that this has, it also has the added advantage of creating a pool of candidates for us to […]