Tag: Leadership

Ideas

Having Difficult Conversations

As leaders, it is inevitable that at some point in time we will need to have some form of a difficult conversation with someone. It could be as simple as providing someone with critical feedback that they might not like or as difficult as letting someone go. It is never easy and needs a lot of patience, care and empathy on our part, whenever we are called upon to have such difficult conversation. Recently, the CEO of Better.com had one such difficult conversation with his staff, when he had to let go of 15% of his staff. The way he […]

Creativity, Innovation, Leadership

Leading for Creativity and Innovation

One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is our ability to enable our teams to fuel their creativity and drive innovation. Kevin Roberts (who used to be the CEO and later went on to become the Executive Chairman of one of the most creative organisation – Saatchi & Saatchi) delivered a keynote on creativity and innovation and I think there is a lot that we can learn from the keynote. You can watch the entire keynote here. If you are tasked with coming up with innovation in your organisation, which typically, starts with coming up with creative ideas, I […]

Leadership

Making Judgement calls

As leaders, one of the important responsibilities we have is to make decisions and sometimes difficult decisions, when we don’t usually have all the information that we need to make them and one’s that could have a significant impact on us, our teams and the entire business. I’ve written in the past about good decision making here (How to Make Good Decisions) and here (Making Infinitely Better Decisions in Life and In Business) and many more here. The more important a decision tends to be, the less clear the choice seems to be. A lot of times, the options we […]

Leadership

Are you an Amateur Leader or a Pro?

I recently read a post by Steven Pressfield about turning pro. You can read the entire post here. That sparked the thought about leaders as pro. I have heard of almost all the fields having amateurs and professionals. I have never heard anyone being referred to as an amateur leader though. Does this mean that there are no amateur leaders? I don’t think so. Just because leaders are working professionals they don’t necessarily become professional leaders. In fact, just like any other field, I see a lot more amateur leaders than I see pro’s. The question then is – How […]

Leadership

What Leaders need to know about giving Advice

As leaders, we are on a regular basis called upon to give advice to young professionals about life and career, to the people whom we lead about what they should be doing in a given situation, etc. So, an important aspect of being a good leader is to know when and how to give advice to the people who seek it from us. This post is inspired by a post I read by David Cain on his blog Raptitude titled, “Advice Gets Good When It Gets Specific“, which I thought had great advice on how to give advice. You can […]