Insights on Leading for Innovation

I watched this conversation between Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer for Google X, tech entrepreneur, and author of the best-selling books “Solve for Happy“, “Scary Smart” and “Unstressable” on the High Performance podcast and found myself rigorously nodding my head in agreement or going wow, why did I not think about it like that. If are a leader who wants to lead a team of innovators, spending this hour listening (and hopefully adopting some of his ideas at work) to this conversation. Usually, when I like a video, I try to list down the things that I learnt from […]

Culture is Your Primary Job

Death valley is known for its harsh weather and for being the place where the highest ever ambient air temperature was recorded (134F). It is a desert valley for most of the year. However, in 2005, the valley got heavy rainfall which led to, what is called a super bloom. The valley was blanketed with blooming flowers all around. When the environment becomes conducive, even the most harshest place for life to exist comes alive. The same thing is true when it comes to the performance of people. If we are able to create a conducive environment, people bloom and […]

Achieving and Sustaining High Performance

I had the opportunity to watch Gilbert Enoka present at one of the events that I was participating in. He has a long history of success as a mental skills coach with New Zealand’s corporate and sporting elite. He is internationally renowned for his 19 year history with the All Blacks (New Zealand Rugby team), first as their mental skills coach and now as manager. He has been with the All Blacks for over 250 tests and during that time the team has won back-to-back Rugby World Cups, one Laureus Award (for the best team in the world), 17 Bledisloe […]

3 Skills for all Leaders to Cultivate – Naming, Framing and Priming

Premise: One of the key responsibilities that we have as leaders is to make sense of what is happening in and around the teams that we lead and share this with our teams as and when required. The way we do this could be either through writing (emails, blogs, etc) or by speaking (in all-hands, at events, 1-1 calls, etc). In either case, we need to be careful about the language we use, as the way we use the language has a big impact on what others perceive or understand from our communication. So, today, let’s explore the importance of […]

As a Leader, What are your Non Negotiables?

I recently read a post by Dr. Jenny Brockis about the non-negotiables. You can read her post here. While she talks about the non-negotiables as an individual and what we can do to honor them on an ongoing basis, I would like to talk about non-negotiables in a slightly different context – as leaders. Who we are as a leader is defined as much by what we do as it is by what we don’t do. What we don’t do at times is more visible than what we actually do. Stand up for your team Not standing up for our […]