Leadership

The Rule Of Six

I came across the “Rule of Six” from a blog post by Adam Voigt (you can read his post here). In the post, he says, and I quote Apparently radio stations use this rule when a new song is released.  They have a quest to have you hear that song six times as quickly as possible, which is why it seems to us as though that song is being played every second track. After six exposures to the song, we move from analysing the song and into familiarity with the song.  Even if the song is horrendous, we tolerate the […]

Ideas

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 […]

Leadership

Effectiveness Before Efficiency

Earlier today I read a blog post by Mike Shipulski titled “If you can be one thing, be effective“. It was a really short and to the point. The crux of the matter is the following: Being effective trumps being efficient or productive!! The insight behind all of these assertions is that being productive or efficient at the wrong things only leads to waste. So, Efficiency or productivity or speed comes after we become effective at what we aspire to do. This creates a significant question that needs an answer. Do we know or have the clarity of what we […]

Leadership

Three Primary Roles of a Leader

There is a lot of expectations from leaders, specially when we are in an environment that is ambiguous. Matt Church in his “Speakership” programs talks about the role of leaders and he says that there has ever been only three things that leaders have ever done. Replace fear with confidence: This assumes that we, as leaders know what our teams are afraid of. Some of the fears are easy to guess (fear of getting sick) and some not so. So, it is important that we learn how to understand what are the different fears that our teams face. Once we […]

Leadership

Under the Surface

Yesterday, I watched the movie – Encanto streaming on Disney+ and really loved the movie and the underlying concept that it is based on. This song encapsulates the feeling that the movie handles. I would recommend you watch this 3 min song (and the entire movie if you have the time). I think as leaders, it is our responsibility to learn the way we and the people we lead feel under the surface (in addition to knowing how we feel under the surface ourselves). This is as simple as asking and as difficult as having built a culture that allows […]