Tag: leaders worth following

Leadership

Strategic Foresight – The Skill that Every Leader Needs to Learn

Premise: For most of the 20th century, leadership has been about managing the known about optimizing for efficiency and reducing variance in every sphere of work.  But today, we live in a world where variance is the norm. The pace and scale of change around us mean that optimizing for efficiencies is a lost cause, maybe even a doomed cause and a recipe for disaster.  Leaders who succeed in the future will be those who make the shift from extrapolating the past to preparing for the future. One can’t really predict the future; one can only prepare for it.  And […]

Leadership

What Swarm Intelligence Teaches About Leading Complex Adaptive Systems

Premise: The traditional organizational paradigm, defined by rigid hierarchies and linear command-and-control loops is at a breaking point and no longer an effective form of leadership. What we need now is the ability to respond quickly and effectively, which means that the role of leaders needs to evolve from being the decision maker to the conductor of teams making the right decisions. In such a scenario, the primary constraint is no longer a lack of data, but an abundance of data and the inability to process them at the speed at which they are created. In a world which changes […]

Leadership

Adaptive Listening – How to be a Great Listener

I stumbled onto this TED Talk by Maegan Stephens & Nicole Lowenbraun on listening and loved it. I highly recommend that you take the 11 odd minutes to watch the entire talk. It is interesting, entertaining and highly insightful. The key insight they share is that there is more than one way to listen at work. The speakers share that every conversation at work has an underlying goal that requires us to show up and listen differently. Developing the ability to listen well is key if we want to build a high performing team and if we want to become […]

Leadership

Warning Signs to Watch out

Premise: In the early part of the 20th Century, the CIA (yes, that CIA) created a manual for its operatives to help teach them the art of sabotage. One part of the manual was meant specifically to train them to sabotage organizations. While you may not have someone actively trying to sabotage your organization (or maybe there could be), there might be behaviors that are unintentionally sabotaging your operations. So, it is a good idea to learn about these behaviors and nip them in the bud if we start seeing them playing out in our teams – intentionally or unintentionally. […]

Leadership, Podcast

The Paradox of Modern Leadership

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/pushingbeyondtheobvious/Comfort_the_Disturbed_and_Disturb_the_Comfortable.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Email | RSSPremise: Life and work are never static; they operate on an emotional roller coaster where peaks of success are inevitably followed by valleys of struggle. Far too many leaders view their teams as “resources”—cogs in a machine designed for output—rather than recognizing the complex human beings behind the results. The most effective leaders possess the strategic agility to serve as both a sanctuary and a catalyst – they act like a thermostat (constantly adjusting the culture) and not just as a thermometer. Our core mandate is to build an environment where […]