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 […]

Leadership

What does Riding a Bicycle teach us about Leading in Uncertain Times

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between knowing how to ride a bicycle and leading an organisation during uncertain times. However, watching a short video about how much we don’t really understand about how we ride a bicycle made me realise how much there is in common between this and leading an organisation in uncertain times. First things first, I would highly recommend that you watch this video and then we can continue this conversation. If you are anything like me, you’ve known how to ride a bicycle for years yet did not truly understand […]

Innovation, Leadership, Strategy

Dealing with Complex Adaptive Systems with Dave Snowden

We are living in a world where things are changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. In such a scenario, as leaders, it is important for us to learn how to deal with complex adaptive systems (which is how organisations and markets function – including us and the people who we lead). Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework that helps us understand the kind of system we are operating under and shares the way we could function within the system. I wrote about it last week here. In this video, Dave shares his perspective on how to […]