Author: Mukesh Gupta

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Introducing Systems Thinking for Leaders

Premise This post is relevant for you irrespective of where you are currently situated in leadership ladder (Individual contributor, team lead, leading teams, leading managers, leading lines of business or leading organisations). While systemic awareness this is a foundational skill, it gets more and more crucial as you climb the leadership ladder. So, we would be better off learning about this while we are early in our careers and build on it as we grow by adding nuances and being intentional and learning from our experiences interacting with systems. What is a system? Before we can start to understand or […]

Leadership

Benefiting from Leadership Advice

Premise There is a lot of leadership advice available on the internet – free and otherwise. I offer a lot of them myself, here on this blog. There are innumerable number of books being written on this topic, so much so that at times, it can become too daunting for someone looking for help. However, as leaders, we need to know which advice or ideas are relevant for us and which one’s are not. There are two key criteria or filters that we need to apply in order to decide whether a piece of advice might be useful for us […]

Leadership

Simplifying Complexity

We live in and work in a nest of complex adaptive systems and one of the characteristic of this kind of system is that with time and experience, things tend to become more complex and interdependent. As a leader, it is our responsibility to understand this increasing complexity and make sense of it. Then break it down to its simplest form and share this with our teams, so that they don’t have to struggle with this complexity in their work. The question then is how can we do this for our teams. There are three skills that come to the […]

Leadership

Leading Under Pressure

Premise: I read an article with the same title, written by Theodore Kinni for strategy+business (a pwc publication) and it reminded me of an blog post I had written almost a decade back about the role of leaders in absorbing pressure, to allow their teams to perform at their best. (the original post here). In the post, he shares the components of the Pressure Equation, originally attributed to Dane Jensen, CEO of performance consulting firm Third Factor and author of the new book The Power of Pressure. Variables in the Pressure Equation Jensen finds that pressure grows more intense across three elements: […]

Leadership

Lessons in Leadership from the Award Winning TV Series – The Rookie

Earlier today, I finished watching 5 seasons of the TV Series – “The Rookie” on Netflix and learnt a lot about leadership from the series. For those of you, who have not heard about the series, here is how it is described on Wikipedia: The Rookie is an American police procedural television series created by Alexi Hawley for ABC. It follows John Nolan, a man in his forties, who becomes the oldest rookie at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). It is based on real-life LAPD officer William Norcross, who moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and joined the department in his mid-40s. Lesson 1: You can do whatever […]