Tag: Leading change

Leadership

Why Your Most Powerful Tool is a Question Mark

I read this post by Nina Kern today about how to use questions to drive change. If you are leading a change project, I highly recommend reading the entire post here. Most change initiatives fail not due to lack of good strategy but due to lack of agency on the part of the people who need to make these changes. When we mandate change, we usually trigger a threat response within people who have to make the change. However, if we lead with curiosity and questions, we invite them to partner with us and define why and how they change. […]

Leadership, transformation

Turning Status Quo into Your Ally

I recently read a blog post by Seth Godin titled, “The four cohorts of the status quo“. It reminded of the fact that as leaders, we need to understand the concept of status quo, how to leverage it and deal with it, as appropriate. This ability to not allow status quo to hinder our pursuits is a high leverage or impact skill for any leader. In the post, Seth talks about the four kinds of people and their relationship with Status quo – those who actively benefit from it, those who care about the stability that it provides, those who […]

Leadership

Changing Beliefs Vs Replacing Beliefs

A couple of days ago, I took a flight from Mumbai to Delhi for work and when I was stepping out of the flight in Delhi, I saw the pilot for the next leg of the journey walk in. He then did something that was totally out of context but showed his culture and character. He bent down and touched the entrance of the aircraft and then with the same motion, touched his forehead. For all the Indians out there, you know exactly what this means.  He was praying to the aircraft. In Hindu tradition, you touch the feet of […]

Leadership

Overcoming Resistance to Change

We live in a world with accelerating pace of change. For all us leaders, this accelerating change comes with the necessity to respond to these changes in a coherent, strategic and urgent ways. This translates into starting and leading change initiatives within our teams. So much so that there is change fatigue that has started to set in. This fatigue often leads to resistance to change. There are many other reasons for the resistance to change. Tired leaders who forget to involve the teams in their thinking about the “Why”, “What” and the “How” of the change initiatives. Tired communications […]