Tag: leaders worth following

Leadership

Why the Best Leaders Build Structures That Disappear

During my regular walk yesterday, I passed a building under construction and saw that it was surrounded by a web of metal poles, planks, and cross-braces wrapping the structure like a second skin or in a word – Scaffolding. And when I saw it and thought about what role it plays in the construction or maintenance of the building, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities with leadership. Here is what I think scaffolding can teach us about being an effective leader or a leader worth following. What Scaffolding Actually Does Before we stretch the metaphor, it is worth being […]

Leadership

The One Thing Leaders of Disproportionately successful Teams Do Differently

Here is a post by one of my all time favourite ad men – Dave Trott. I believe that this ability to engage in corkscrew thinking (as Dave puts it) or non-linear or non-obvious thinking is a necessary but not sufficient condition for disproportionate success in any endeavour. My podcast is called – Pushing Beyond the Obvious for a reason 🙂 In his blog, he lists out some of the results of corkscrew thinking and the impact they made on the world as we know it – Bletchley Park, Sten guns, anti-shipping mines, planes made of wood, inflatable tanks and […]

Leadership

Leading in Two Time Zones

Premise: One of the biggest struggles that we, as leaders, need to deal with is the need to balance activities that lead to high performance today, while getting the team ready to deliver high performance in the future or, in other words, display contextual ambidexterity, as defined by Gibson and Birkinshaw in their MIT Sloan Management Review article in 2004. This creates tension. In a fast-changing context, what drives high performance today, usually is not what drives high performance in the future. And it is easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much in delivering current performance while […]

Leadership

Curate A High Performance Culture by Celebrating Small Wins Daily

Premise: I did a 100-day challenge of clicking a picture and sharing it on Instagram of something that I thought was beautiful. Now, I constantly see beautiful things all around me wherever I go. Being intentional about what we want to notice, results in our brains getting very good at noticing it all around us. Leadership works the same way. Culture is shaped not only by strategy and incentives, but by what leaders consistently notice, celebrate and tolerate. From childhood we are trained to find and focus on what is wrong instead of focusing on what is right. When we […]

Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Improv Comedy?

Premise It was a Sunday evening, and we had decided to go attend a theatre performance. It was not a typical performance, well rehearsed, with carefully scripted dialogues, choreographed movements or a strong background music. Instead, two people walked onto a bare stage and asked us, the audience, some simple questions to come up with a scene, a place, some characters and a situation. There was no script. No rehearsal. No safety net. They had to act out the scene and move the situation forward. An actor starts the show and says something absurd (since it is a comedy show). […]