Tag: Communication

Leadership

The Surprisingly Simple Reason Teams Fail

In this TEDx talk Tessa West shares the story of the disaster that played out during NASA’s Mars Mission in 1999 and one of the main reason (among others) for the failure – A simple yet fatal communication gap. The teams working across continents were using different metrics to measure pressure, each assuming that the other would use the same as well. The question we need to ask ourselves is the following – What are the most basic assumptions we are making when interacting with our colleagues, specially, if they are from a different culture from our own? Breakdown in […]

Leadership

Residual Communication

I read this post about Residual Communication written by the British advertiser Dave Trott and it left a deep impression on me. You can read his post here. The idea is pretty simple – what do people remember from what we said, long after we said it. As a leader, I believe that we should obsess about residual communication. What do people remember the most after we had done sharing our vision, strategy or any idea. Our effectiveness as a leader depends on this. We will move on to other meetings and to other tasks expecting our people to act […]

Leadership

Elevate Your Leadership Effectiveness

Premise One of the core responsibilities we have as leaders is to think about our business and continuously reflect on how we can improve the overall effectiveness of our leadership, our teams and therefore the business. Here are four questions that we need to reflect upon on a regular basis, and when done well, they can help elevate the effectiveness of our leadership: Questions to ask Yourself Regularly 1} What am I not paying attention to? Why? What can I do about it? 2} What is being left unsaid by my team members? Why? What can I do about it? […]

Leadership

Leveraging Unofficial means of Communication

We live in a world where each and every one of us faces a deluge of information and there is a war out there to get and hold our attention. Given this is the case, as leaders, how can we ensure that important communication that our teams need to know is not lost in this deluge? There are a few things that we can do to improve the effectiveness of our communication (more on this here). There are a few things that we can do by mixing up our communication medium (written, spoken and visual). We can repeat our messages […]

Leadership

Leaders are Not Great, Leadership Could Be

I stumbled onto an interview with Simon Sinek where he shared his thoughts on what does it take to become a great leader. You can watch the video here. One of his core insight is that leadership requires courage, courage to do the right thing under pressure, courage to stand up to what we think is the right thing to do, courage to make the tough decisions with limited information, courage to set a direction and march forward (believing that it is the right direction), courage to give credit when things go well and take the heat when things don’t […]