Tag: Leadership

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 […]

Leadership, transformation

Lessons in Leadership with Ken Wilcox, Emeritus chairman of Silicon Valley Bank

In an interesting conversation with Todd Jick (Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School), Ken shares lessons in leadership from his personal experience having been a leader for more than 3 decades. This is a 45 mins video, which i would recommend that you watch. Have a pen and paper with you to make notes, and you will end up with a lot of notes. You can watch this conversation here. Here are the lessons I made a note of: Becoming a leader is an intentional decision. Reflect and think about why we want […]

Leadership

Three Modes of Communication – Where do you spend the most of your time as a leader?

As leaders, when we engage with our teams, we usually communicate with them in one of three modes and the mode that we use most often has a significant impact on the team and the kind of culture we create within the team. Here are the three modes of communications: Declaration (Tell): In this mode, we declare something to be a fact or truth or something that we want our teams to accept as it is. When we are using this kind of communication, we are typically engaged in a one way communication. This is all about sharing our perspective […]

How to be an Inspirational Leader
Inspiration, Leadership

How to be an Inspirational Leader?

One of the expectations as leaders that we have of ourselves is to be inspirational. Everyone talks about how it is important for leaders to be inspirational, to lead their teams to places that they may or may not want to go, to achieve a lot more than they would have achieved if it were not for the leadership. I strongly believe that we should not start with the goal of becoming an inspirational leader , as it is a self-centred perspective. However, I have been thinking about this topic for some time and I believe that there are a […]