Posts Tagged with "leadership"

#7c: Professional transitions and their challenges.

While your personal and professional growth may enable you to land a new role, it far from guarantees your success. The transition into a new role is a period of vulnerability for you as a leader; success or failure in your first few months is a strong predictor of overall job success.Read more →

#9: The definitions of leadership.

Leadership is predicated on people following; no leader is an island. And since leadership is defined through followership, there is no single prescription for it.Read more →

#9a: Leading with and leading without authority.

Compared to leading with authority, leading without authority is a stronger form of leadership. Since there is no explicit social contract or threat of punishment, followers choose freely to follow and hence follow more fervently.Read more →

#9a1: The role of strong connections in building influence.

The more general form of "leading without authority" is "creating change without authority". The ability to create change is enabled by influence. Influence is not a direct function of the count of your connections; rather, it comes from having strong connections.Read more →

#9a2: Your role in shaping positional authority within the organisation.

At higher levels in an organisation, positional authority becomes less important than influence. There are more politics and ego, and fewer concrete answers. Yet this does not mean you can ignore the impact of this type of power in your organisation.Read more →

#9b: Options and constraints inherent in different sources of leadership power.

The source of a leader's power provides different options to achieve the same goal in any given situation. What matter is their leadership type — leading with or without authority — not their style, which is unique.Read more →

#9c: Management vs. leadership.

Making it possible for people to work, getting a team to perform, and improving systems (through advancing organisational learning): these are key roles of a manager.Read more →

#9c3: Management should be well-defined.

The role of leadership is to inspire. The role of management is to execute. Leaders may exist at all levels, and their role as a leader may not necessarily be formalised. But management should be well-defined.Read more →

#9d: Leader as organisational architect.

The higher you climb in your organisation, the more you must take on the role of organisational architect. You are responsible for creating and aligning the key elements of the organisational system.Read more →

Reference #150: Peopleware

The best leadership often comes from those without positional authority. These leaders are chiefly the catalysts for action, not the directors of it. They exhibit leadership by stepping up for the task, doing it well, and doing so with the interests of those they are leading in mind.Read more →

Reference #192: The First 90 Days

The role of a functional performer requires different skills to that of a cross-functional leader.Read more →

Reference #194: The First 90 Days

Delegation is important at all level of leadership. The keys to effective leadership remains much the same: building a team you can trust, setting goals and metrics to measure progress, connecting high-level goal is to an individual's responsibilities, and reinforcing those through process.Read more →

Reference #196: The First 90 Days

As an organisational leader, your direct reports play a greater role in communicating your vision and spreading critical information. The ability of your team to communicate well is important.Read more →

Reference #197: The First 90 Days

Newly promoted leaders face, to varying degrees, five core challenges stemming from the following changes to their role:Read more →

Reference #198: The First 90 Days

Joining a new company is much harder than being promoted from within.Read more →

Reference #204: The First 90 Days

A failure of new leaders — and a particularly destructive one — is believing that they have "the" answer.Read more →

Reference #209: The First 90 Days

New leaders may find themselves moving into one of the five common business situations: startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success. These situations are collectively known as STARS.Read more →

Reference #210: The First 90 Days

Successful businesses do not remain successful forever. Due to internal complacency, erosion of key capabilities, and external challenges, they tend to drift towards trouble.Read more →

Reference #214: The First 90 Days

Different business situations require different leadership styles. Hence the success of a leader depends greatly on her ability to adapt her personal leadership strategy.Read more →

Reference #215: The First 90 Days

Leadership is a team sport. Business success — and your success as a leader — depends on having the right mix of people on your leadership team.Read more →

Reference #234: The First 90 Days

A large amount of the change instituted by a new leader comes within their first nine months.Read more →

Reference #240: The First 90 Days

While there is no single right answer for how to build personal credibility, in general new leaders are perceived as more credible when they display these characteristics:Read more →

Reference #241: The First 90 Days

The best way to lead change depends on the situation. After identifying the most important problem, you need to assess whether the organisation is ready to change — in which case a plan-then-implement approach will work well — or whether you need to engage in collective learning.Read more →

Reference #245: The First 90 Days

Leaders must be organisational architects.Read more →

Reference #248: The First 90 Days

Your organisation is an open system. It is affected by the external environment — such as customers, competitors, and suppliers — and by the internal environment — including morale and culture.Read more →

Reference #294: Empowered

On leadership, executive coach Bill Campbell said the following: "Leadership is about recognising that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.Read more →

Reference #295: Empowered

There are three important differences separating strong companies from the rest:Read more →

Reference #299: Empowered

The role of a CIO (or Head of IT) differs greatly from the role of a CTO (or Head of Engineering). While a CTO leads a product engineering organisation that should serve the customer, a CIO is there to serve the business.Read more →

Reference #300: Empowered

The responsibilities of leaders and managers are different, even though both roles may be covered by the same person.Read more →

Reference #302: Empowered

Communicating product vision, principles, and strategy is a critical role of leaders.Read more →

Reference #305: Empowered

Despite managers and leaders being responsible for building effective teams, the technology industry focuses little on developing their skills and competencies.Read more →

Reference #410: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Per Bales (1958), two kinds of leadership are necessary for the long-term performance of problem-solving groups: a task leader, and a social-emotional leader. These are usually different people within the group.Read more →

Reference #418: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural learning is mediated by leadership behaviour. For example, a leader may provide (model) a behaviour the group is not exhibiting but should be. Such cultural learning may also occur through a high-power leader, such as a founder, demanding a new behaviour to achieve some purpose.Read more →

Reference #431: Organizational Culture and Leadership

To change culture, leaders must have a detailed understanding of their culture. They must especially be able to identify the stable elements that have been the source of the company's success.Read more →

Reference #461: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Many organisational issues — especially safety issues in high-hazard industries and healthcare — are caused by poor cross-cultural communication.Read more →

Reference #462: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Leadership is the management of culture. The role of a leader with respect to culture varies with the stage of growth of an organisation.Read more →

Reference #463: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A model for the stages of group evolution was summarised by 1956 by Bennis & Shepard, then described "poetically" by Tuckman in 1965 as forming, storming, norming, and performing.Read more →

Reference #464: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a group realises (or has their leader point out) that their strength comes not from homogeneity but from variety, they move from norming to performing.Read more →

Reference #465: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A role of leadership is to make changes. If those changes produce success for a group, its culture evolves and survives. But if the changes aren't adopted, or they are but don't lead to success, the result is "failed leadership". We only call this behaviour leadership when it succeeds.Read more →

Reference #466: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Founding acts of leadership must fit the macroculture in which a group operates. A founder succeeds only when their acts fits within the existing cultural conditions.Read more →

Reference #469: Organizational Culture and Leadership

While frequent, it is not a given that founders automatically impose their assumptions on the organisations they create. It is possible for a founder to create an organisation that does not depend on her beliefs and values. This depends on the founder's needs to externalise her assumptions.Read more →

Reference #470: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every group has to go through Tuckman's stages of group development. They must answer questions of inclusion, identify, authority, and intimacy.Read more →

Reference #475: Organizational Culture and Leadership

There are six primary mechanisms through which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation:Read more →

Reference #476: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The mechanisms through which leaders primarily embed their beliefs — and in so doing teach their organisation how to perceive, think, feel, and behave — directly create the "climate" of that organisation.Read more →

Reference #477: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In addition to the six primary mechanisms by which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation, there are also six secondary reinforcement and stabilising mechanisms:Read more →

Reference #478: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The most powerful mechanism a leader has for communicating what she cares about is systematically paying attention to it.Read more →

Reference #480: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Whereas in the founding stage of an organisation, leaders create culture, in more mature organisations they are constrained by culture.Read more →

Reference #486: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Leaders in early-stage organisations can affect culture change by systematically promoting insiders whose core assumptions align better with the culture the leadership is trying to move towards than the status quo.Read more →

Reference #487: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a mid-stage company whose founder has moved on is faced with a crisis (as slipping performance or an acquisition), a new executive leader is often brought in. This leader can fail in three ways:Read more →

Reference #488: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture serves different functions over an organisation's lifecycle. Leader therefore must consider different issues of culture change at each stage.Read more →

Reference #516: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

When building trust within a team, the leader's role is to be the first to demonstrate vulnerability. This vulnerability must be genuine.Read more →

Reference #519: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

As a leader, to build an effective team you must allow healthy conflict. This may run counter to your natural inclination to interrupt disagreements and protect your team from harm.Read more →

What you need to know about culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. While the truth of that statement is contested, it's clear that culture matters. Your role as a leader is to manage culture. But what is it? It's more than the vibe. It's more than the values. Here's what you need to know.Read more →

Seeing your organisation as a system

Have you had all the right elements for your team to perform, but didn’t get the results you wanted? Have you tried changing one thing, only for something else to break? I have. I know why. The secret comes from seeing your organisation as a system.Read more →

Principles for effective coaching

Great managers are great coaches. Great coaches help others develop their potential. Yet most managers have little formal training in coaching. In my roles as manager, leader, and coach, I've come across a few principles that I've found useful.Read more →

The Three A's of Empowered Teams

According to a 2015 study, team empowerment accounts for almost 25% of team performance. Empowered teams are high-performing teams. Here’s what I’ve learnt about growing them.Read more →

The most important skill? Listening.

When did you last feel truly heard? What impact did that have on you? How did you feel? That’s the feeling I try to bring into every 1:1. And the most important skill I bring to the discussion is listening. But it doesn’t come naturally to many of us.Read more →

Leadership is direction, alignment, and commitment

Can you describe what good leadership looks like? What does it mean for leadership to “happen”? And are you doing it?Read more →

Do you need leaders or managers? You need both.

“We need leaders, not managers.” No. You need both. We look to leaders for inspiration. Where does a company go without inspiration? We look to managers for execution. How does a company get there without execution?Read more →

Why don't leaders and employees understand each other?

Why do leaders sometimes get it so wrong? Why do policies created with the best of intentions meet with resistance? Why does it seem like leaders and their employees speak different languages? The answer is that employees don’t trust their leaders and don’t feel safe.Read more →

Knowledge: the hidden cost of layoffs

It is a truth universally acknowledged that layoffs suck. They suck for the people laid off. They suck for the people left behind. Layoffs incur huge emotional and monetary costs. And there’s another, more hidden cost to layoffs: knowledge. You might save on salaries, but you lose a lot of learning.Read more →

Do you know how to delegate?

Delegation isn’t about making your work easier. Delegation isn't a reward. It’s a powerful tool to develop your employees. Yet most managers don’t understand delegation. Are you one of them?Read more →

The hidden story of growth at startups

Why would anyone join an early-stage company? Equity, excitement, "changing the world"? For me, it's about one word: growth. The kind that's rarely mentioned. When people talk about growth in startups, they often mean growth in revenue and headcount.Read more →

Everyone is bad at their job (why strengths matter)

Everyone is bad at their job. Put another way, we have many, many more weaknesses than we have strengths. And that’s okay.Read more →

Are you an expert in your craft, or the system?

In my previous job, I was an expert. I was the first employee. I knew the ins and outs of the system. I helped the company grow. I was often the most senior person in the room. But in truth, I knew nothing. So, I quit.Read more →

Authority: the first foundation of an empowered team

Empowered teams have authority. Without authority, there is no empowerment. Authority comes with many rewards for a team, but it's not without challenges.Read more →

What does it mean to be authentic?

As a leader and a coach, I’ve struggled with authenticity. “Bring your whole self to work”, they say. But I am large, I contain multitudes. Parts of me only my friends and family will see. Some parts only show up at work. Which me is authentic?Read more →