Tag: culture

Leadership

Curating a High Peformance Culture

Premise: Let’s talk about culture. What is it? How is it built? Who is responsible for it? How to change it? There is a multi-million-dollar consulting industry that exists to solely answer these questions. Every leader worth following grapples with these questions constantly. They are trying to get the culture just right for their teams, so that they can perform at their absolute best, without burning themselves out. There are some who believe that the culture of any organization is created by their leaders. It mimics the leader and the value system of the leader. Some believe that culture is […]

Leadership

The Path to High Performance in an Uncertain World

Premise: Last week alone, I’ve had at least 5 conversations with leaders in different functions, all complaining about how they see the engagement among their teams going down significantly due to various reasons, including but not limited to current socio-economic and geo-political situations. I see this growing feeling of helplessness and loss of agency at every level in our society, not just in the business world. What is interesting is not the disengagement itself. It was how the leaders described it. Almost all of them attributed it to things outside their control — geopolitical uncertainty, economic anxiety, post-pandemic fatigue. This […]

Leadership

Why Logic Is Overrated: How Leaders Worth Following Can Learn to Hack the Irrational Mind

Premise: In the last post, we saw how leaders can benefit a lot by learning from the field of Anthropology. In this post, I am going to share how leaders who learn from the field of behavioural economics can have a better shot at becoming leaders worth following. I will reiterate the importance of the need to understand the complexity that we need to address as leaders in this ever changing environment and in order to address this complexity, our understanding also needs to evolve and learn how to bring different different mindsets/skillsets and toolsets to solve difficult challenges that […]

Leadership

Four Ways Anthropology Teaches Us to Become Leaders Worth Following

Premise I know that becoming and being a leader worth following is not simple. It is a complex endeavor, which requires us to sense the situation we are in and change our mindset accordingly. It also requires us to bring in skills from different fields if we really want to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in – making the most of the “RIGHT NOW” moment.  So, I want to look at different roles that we end up playing when we are being a leader worth following and also explore what we can learn from the real […]

Leadership

Should your Next Hire be Cultural Fit or Culturally Aligned

This was the topic of my recent conversation with Yuvan Gupta on our podcast – Culturally Speaking! Here are some of the key ideas we covered: What’s the Problem with “Cultural Fit”? Some companies say they want people who are a “culture fit.” What they often mean is:•⁠ ⁠Someone who will settle in quickly•⁠ ⁠Someone like everyone else in the team•⁠ ⁠And so can feel right at home and hence “hit the ground running” But this can lead to hiring people who all think the same way, which creates echo chambers—places where only similar ideas are shared, and new thinking […]