Tag: Leadership

Leadership

What does Riding a Bicycle teach us about Leading in Uncertain Times

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between knowing how to ride a bicycle and leading an organisation during uncertain times. However, watching a short video about how much we don’t really understand about how we ride a bicycle made me realise how much there is in common between this and leading an organisation in uncertain times. First things first, I would highly recommend that you watch this video and then we can continue this conversation. If you are anything like me, you’ve known how to ride a bicycle for years yet did not truly understand […]

Innovation, Leadership, Strategy

Dealing with Complex Adaptive Systems with Dave Snowden

We are living in a world where things are changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. In such a scenario, as leaders, it is important for us to learn how to deal with complex adaptive systems (which is how organisations and markets function – including us and the people who we lead). Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework that helps us understand the kind of system we are operating under and shares the way we could function within the system. I wrote about it last week here. In this video, Dave shares his perspective on how to […]

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 […]