Looking at Leadership
If you like what you read, please "tweet" or "like" a post.
Create or Else: Tham Khai Meng
Creativity can be scary. If you are really 100% sure about an idea, then how fresh is it?
- HR person A: He's pretty self-aware
- HR person B: Yeah. He's pretty good at disingenuous self-deprecation.
Four easy-to-master traits from great leaders such as John F. Kennedy, Sam Budnyk, and Gene Kranz.
- Aspire
- Plan
- Inspire
- Execute
The word change has different connotations depending upon who you are. For some, it incites fear. For others, it is thrilling and the focus of their work. In my experience, leadership is about harnessing an ability to be visionary and anticipate change while also being able to understand your…
Collaboration is in. But it may not be conducive to creativity.
I seriously love this concept.
Instead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity. Consequently, people I work with want their email to recommend who should be added to the list of colleagues getting a document for review and comment; or have their calendar suggest additional invitees for a planned project review; or give them a reminder that they have a relevant Excel spreadsheet macro when they’re revising a financial plan. They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
I’m a parent of a very active 2 year-old boy.
Trying to get him to obey me is somewhat of a constant challenge. He’s not willfully disobedient… he just regularly likes to push boundaries (and my sanity levels).
My wife and I have agreed upon a parenting strategy which entails positive reinforcement. That is, we praise him when he obeys and when he needs to change his behavior we ask him to do what we want him to do (not what we want him to stop).
Case in point. Over the weekend, we ate dinner at my in-laws. My son thought it would be fun play in the formal front room. Knowing my son’s Tasmanian-devil-ish tendencies to quickly dismantle and/or destroy a room, I was worried about an unsupervised outcome. My initial instinct was to yell, “Don’t play in the living room!” Instead I found myself semi-stumbling out, “Don’t… er, um, please go play in the kitchen!” He obediently obliged, but after a few minutes he returned and I suppressed my urge to tell him what I didn’t want him to do. We rehearsed this exercise several times and each successive occurrence it became increasingly difficult for me to speak to him in positive terms. I obviously didn’t want him to play in the living room… what I really wanted him to do was to play in the kitchen where I could more easily watch him. It was simply easier and more natural for me to identify and articulate the behavior I wanted him to stop.
I’ve thought about what my son actually hears when I speak to him in negative terms. I’m not sure if this is actually how the developing brain processes information, but it helps drive the point home for me.
Me: “Don’t play in the living room!”
What he hears: “….play…living room!”
On the other hand, if I speak in positive terms, I imagine he hears the following:
Me: “Go play in the kitchen!”
What he hears: “…play… kitchen!”
When I speak in negative terms, I get frustrated when I don’t get the outcome I want. How is my son to know what I want him to do if I only tell him what I don’t want him to do? When I speak in positive terms, I may not get the desired outcome every time, but at least there is no confusion as to what is expected from my son.
In organizations positive reinforcement has the same effect. If managers and leaders constantly harp on what actions or behaviors they don’t want to see, they will get unsavory outcomes.
When I tell my son what I want him to do, I am much happier with the results than if I simply tell him what I don’t want him to do. Adult brains are much more mature than my toddler son’s. But I wouldn’t doubt if information is processed in very similar ways. Perhaps subconsciously, the adult brain has trouble processing the expected behavior embedded in negative statements.
Learning to train your speech patterns to reflect positive reinforcement is difficult. I am constantly catching myself and rephrasing my language at home and work to center around the actions and behaviors I want… not what I don’t.
If you are a manager and are tempted to tell your employee, “Don’t miss the deadline!”… it would be worth remembering that he/she may have subconsciously heard “… miss the deadline!”
1) Gather Information
Learn all you can about the problems you see in your community through the media, social and civil organizations, and by talking to the people involved. Also learn what the people who disagree with you are thinking about this situation.
2) Educate Others
Armed with your…
Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as “leadership development,” which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks “hi-pos” and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
What if, instead of stuffing people with curricula, models, and competencies, we focused on deepening their sense of purpose, expanding their capability to navigate difficulty and complexity, and enriching their emotional resilience? What if, instead of trying to fix people, we assumed that they were already full of potential and created an environment that promoted their long-term well-being?
In other words, what if cultivating a successful inner life was front and center on the leadership agenda?
