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 […]

Leadership

Destroyer of Dreams = Worry

STOP!!! DON’T WORRY!!! No matter your situation; No matter how bad you feel; No matter how bad it might seem; don’t worry!!! Instead Do something!!! Anything!!! Anything, that can make things better; Or not!! What matters is that we believe that we have the agency to do something to make things better and exercise that agency to ACT! And NOT TO JUST WORRY!!! Worrying doesn’t help anybody and increases the probability of things getting worse!! So, dont worry.. Take action instead..

Leadership

Do Something

Yesterday, I watched something that I thought was special. I watched Michelle Obama issue a rallying cry to Americans, “TO DO SOMETHING”, which resonated with the audience enough to get them chanting – “DO Something”. You can watch her full speech here. I always wondered why is she not going after the office herself, but I guess we will see about that. Now, I believe that the difference between a leader and someone who is not a leader is that leaders “Do Something” about things. When you see injustice and you do something about it, you are a leader. When […]