Tag: leaders worth following

Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Genetics and Epigenetics

Premise: Have you ever wondered why there are more and more re-orgs all around us. As a leader, you yourself might have restructured the org. You have updated the strategy. You hired better people. And yet — the same behaviors persist. The same challenges continue to plague the organization. Have you ever slowed down enough to think deeply about why this is the case? And how can we change this? Genetics and Epigenetics It is in this context that I think there is a lot that we can learn from the field of genetics and epigenetics. For decades, people assumed […]

Leadership

Exploit, Explore and Empower

There are three kinds of activities that we can do as leaders. Exploit: Engage best practises when you want to make the most of what is well know. You look to optimising for efficiencies. Explore: Identify next practises when you want to understand what works and what doesn’t. The end goal of all activities in this area is to end up in the exploit zone. You look to optimising for effectiveness. Empower: This is the high-leverage activity for a leader. When we develop the judgement needed to know the right time to delegate the power of this decision (to exploit […]

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 […]