Leadership

What Kind of a Leader Are You?

Early today, when I opened up my LinkedIn feed, I saw a poll set up by Dr. Nirmalya Kumar. He is Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University and Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute. In the poll he talks about the three kinds of meetings that he has seen CEO’s run. You can access this poll and cast your vote here. Essentially, the options he shares are not just relevant for CEO’s and their meetings, but to all leaders and the kinds of culture we create and promote within our teams. So, here are the […]

Leadership

Creating a 5 Star Employee On-boarding Experience is a Leader’s Responsibility

The responsibility of onboarding the employees we hire squarely falls on us as the leaders of the business unit. The number of times this process is delegated to some HR business partner or sometimes even to some HR executive is not a joke. The on-boarding process is our opportunity to start moulding the new hire in such a way that they can become fully productive and functional members of our team as quickly as possible. In a talk that I gave sometime back, to a HR community, I talk about how could one go about delivering, what I call a […]

Leadership

This is the Highest Leverage Activity for Leaders

Don’t think of an elephant!! Did you think of an elephant? Did you think of how an elephant looks like? Did you see an image of an elephant? Did you think of a large animal? Did you think of black or a trunk or a sound or anything else that we can relate to an elephant? If you are like the most of us, when asked not to think of an elephant, we automatically think of something that is relates to an elephant. This is instinctual. This is what is called framing. In this example we activated the frame of […]

Leadership

Culture is like Climate

If you are already a leader and lead a team or an organisation, I am pretty sure that you have at some point in time considered the questions around culture. The current discourse about culture is that this is an important element that could potentially determine a lot of things including your efficacy as a leader and the performance of your team or organisation. There is a lot of talk about the importance of building an inclusive culture or a creative culture or an innovative culture or a diverse culture, etc. In the recent past, I have been adding to […]

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

6 Ways to Solve Difficult Problems

Lately, I have been talking a lot about how to be creative on demand. I have shared my learning and insights with my colleagues, students, startups, leaders and creative professionals. This is one of the most fundamental abilities that we need to master if we want to do really well in our professional and sometimes personal lives. You can watch the recording of one of these sessions here. I have also shared my perspectives on “Where creative ideas come from” in earlier blog posts as well. So, the question then is why another blog post about the same topic? That’s […]