Leadership

Addressing the Elephant in the Room

Premise: One of the responsibility of a leader is to be able to tell people what they think about them, their potential, performance and presence. Sometimes it is good news and sometimes not so. It is easy when we it is good news. So, we tend to share this often and easily. However, it is difficult to share the bad news and many leaders tend to post-pone this conversation as it is uncomfortable, both for them and to those they are delivering it. However, the more we delay sharing the bad news, the worse it gets and the more difficult […]

Leadership

Masterclass: Leading Large Scale Transformation

In this masterclass, I share my insights on some of the most important things that we need to keep in mind when we are leading large scale transformation efforts. (You can watch the recording here.) Once the transformation is initiated (inspired or for survival), there are 4 phases: 1. Initiate: This phase is all about explaining the reason behind the transformation, recruiting your change agents, identifying the different stakeholder groups and understanding our own apetite for change or transformation. This phase is all about building the foundation on which we can lead our transformation effort. 2. Mobilise: This phase is […]

Leadership

Failed Leadership

There has been enough said about the post office scandal in UK. Dave Trott talks about his perspective on the same here. You can read more about the scandal on BBC’s site here or watch the documentary here. Seven HUNDRED innocent people were accused of fraud or outright theft. A few of them gave their lives out of shame, some served prison sentences, a lot of them paid from their own pockets {out of shame} and a very few fought against the allegations and proved that the entire issue was due to a bug in the software. All this, while […]

Leadership

Impact of Culture on our Thinking

The teacher, philosopher, J Krishnamurthy’s insight on the impact of culture on our thinking is deep and I believe right on target. We are social beings and our evolutionary biology still plays a significant role in how we show up, think and act in social settings. This in turn has an impact on what we think about, how we think about it and what are the boundaries within which we think about it. It is very rare that someone is able to go beyond these boundaries and think outside the cultural norms, usually the few exceptions to the rule. So, […]

Leadership, transformation

Turning Status Quo into Your Ally

I recently read a blog post by Seth Godin titled, “The four cohorts of the status quo“. It reminded of the fact that as leaders, we need to understand the concept of status quo, how to leverage it and deal with it, as appropriate. This ability to not allow status quo to hinder our pursuits is a high leverage or impact skill for any leader. In the post, Seth talks about the four kinds of people and their relationship with Status quo – those who actively benefit from it, those who care about the stability that it provides, those who […]