Leadership and Happiness

One significant impact that Covid-19 had is that it has caused a sudden explosion of the importance of wellness all around us. The contrast between working from home and working from our offices has been stark. This has also initiated a lot of great conversations about mental health and the importance of the role of emotions within the business context. While this focus in the cultural zeitgeist is new, the research and our knowledge about the role that emotions play in our work place is not new at all. There is a lot of good research that have found that […]

A Framework for High Performance Leadership

Premise: I read a post by Michael McCune on Gartner’s blog about thought leadership and it resonated really well with me. In the post, he talks about the importance of original thought provoking content. Content that deepen’s someone’s understanding of their own challenges and how to solve them by sharing an insight that is either original or is non-obvious has significant impact. I agree with his analysis and also the kind of impact that he shares this can have on someone’s behaviour (Buying or otherwise). The challenge with this is that creating content that can have this kind of an […]

Crisis in Leadership and a Call for Action

In July of 2012, I had published a blog post about leadership in crisis. While reading the newspaper today, I realised that we are living in a world with a leadership crisis. Whether it is lack of strong political leadership or strong leadership in the corporate world. Is this because the current set of leaders never wanted to step down or nurture the next set of leaders? Or is this because we are living in a time of rapid change and the current crop of leaders don’t understand the dynamics of the change and are at a loss on how […]

Having Difficult Conversations

As leaders, it is inevitable that at some point in time we will need to have some form of a difficult conversation with someone. It could be as simple as providing someone with critical feedback that they might not like or as difficult as letting someone go. It is never easy and needs a lot of patience, care and empathy on our part, whenever we are called upon to have such difficult conversation. Recently, the CEO of Better.com had one such difficult conversation with his staff, when he had to let go of 15% of his staff. The way he […]

The Role of a Leader – Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable

This is a picture that I had clicked some time back. This was a street art and at that time, it rang true for what it said, from the perspective of an artist (and yes, I do consider myself as an artist who works with words). When I was going through my instagram feed and stumbled on to this picture again, I realised that this is exactly what a leader is to do – to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. Leaders comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable – Mukesh gupta Comforting the disturbed: One of the […]