Leadership

Five Ingredients of True Improvement

In my last post, I wrote about the difference between Change and progress. Today, let’s talk about progress from the point of view of improvements. In one of his lectures, Peter Scholtes talks about 5 ingredients of true improvement. While his lecture is at least 30 year old, the principles he laid out still are practical and applicable to any innovation or change or improvements that we make in how we run our business. This is true for any innovation efforts or for any change that we want to make as a leader in how we operate. PS: If you […]

Leadership, transformation

Leaders Worth Following Understand the Difference between Change and Progress

The most common cliche today is “The only constant is Change”. As with everything else, not all change is created equal. In my experience, not all change leads to progress. Leaders worth following know this and are always intentional about any change that they are advocating for. They are always looking at and talking about the progress that the change will lead us toward. If there is a re-org being initiated, it should actually lead to a change in behavior for everyone who is impacted by the change. If the behavior of people affected by the initiative doesn’t change, then […]

Leadership

Leaders Worth Following Never Leave Hiring Just to HR

One of the primary responsibilities of a Leader is to hire the right people for the right roles for their teams. It is such an important activity that it can’t be left to either the HR business partners or anyone else. One of the things we can do if we really want to become a Leader worth following is to always be recruiting or looking for people we can hire to be on our team. Apart from a host of other benefits that this has, it also has the added advantage of creating a pool of candidates for us to […]

Leadership

The Key to Building High Performing Teams

People will do things that they are measured on, incentivised and that leads to be celebrated by their leaders. Many leaders often make the mistake of misaligning what is measured, incented and celebrated. The key to be intentional about designing behaviors that could unleash the potential for high performance is to ensure that all the three (behavior that is measured, incentivised and celebrated) are completely aligned. This is so simple and maybe that is why so many leaders miss doing this.

Leadership

How to Communicate like a Leader Worth Following

In this short video, I talk about how every piece of communication could be used to do one of three things: 1. Inform (share information or updates, etc) 2. Influence (Work towards changing the recipients thinking, beliefs or Behavior) 3. Inspire (Transfer of energy, enthusiasm or Hope). You would be better off, if you knew the purpose of each piece of your communication as the way you structure your speech / email / presentation would be very different if its purpose were to inform vs influence or to inspire. Also, our communication (written or oral) has a better chance of […]