Leaders Worth Following Know When to Go Against Conventional Wisdom

I had seen this TikTok video a few months back and remembered about this again when I saw this LinkedIn post by Dr Paige Williams about the importance of knowing about positive deviance and how leaders worth following know when to apply this concept of positive deviance. In this TikTok video, Arielle Schmitt shares the strategy adopted by the Chinese team in the Youth Olympics. One of the athlete (the gold winner) adopted a unique strategy to win the race. The winner did something that has never been done before in such a race. The runner up (also Chinese athlete) […]

Leaders Worth Following Understand the Difference between Change and Progress

The most common cliche today is “The only constant is Change”. As with everything else, not all change is created equal. In my experience, not all change leads to progress. Leaders worth following know this and are always intentional about any change that they are advocating for. They are always looking at and talking about the progress that the change will lead us toward. If there is a re-org being initiated, it should actually lead to a change in behavior for everyone who is impacted by the change. If the behavior of people affected by the initiative doesn’t change, then […]

Leaders Worth Following Never Leave Hiring Just to HR

One of the primary responsibilities of a Leader is to hire the right people for the right roles for their teams. It is such an important activity that it can’t be left to either the HR business partners or anyone else. One of the things we can do if we really want to become a Leader worth following is to always be recruiting or looking for people we can hire to be on our team. Apart from a host of other benefits that this has, it also has the added advantage of creating a pool of candidates for us to […]

How to Communicate like a Leader Worth Following

In this short video, I talk about how every piece of communication could be used to do one of three things: 1. Inform (share information or updates, etc) 2. Influence (Work towards changing the recipients thinking, beliefs or Behavior) 3. Inspire (Transfer of energy, enthusiasm or Hope). You would be better off, if you knew the purpose of each piece of your communication as the way you structure your speech / email / presentation would be very different if its purpose were to inform vs influence or to inspire. Also, our communication (written or oral) has a better chance of […]

Becoming Leaders worth Following: The Importance of Nuance

Premise: If there is one thing that we lack in our society and as an extension within our organisations is nuance. Almost everyone is polarised on almost every issue. We forget that there is not many things in the world that can be binary in nature. However, almost all the conversations we are having in public or private seems to be binary in nature. In terms of good and evil. In terms of left or right. In terms of oppressors or oppressed. In terms of aggressors or defenders. In terms of right or wrong. In terms of intellectual or emotional. […]