leadership tagged posts
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1. No news is not good news
December 15, 2021
Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence 
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The longer leaders wait to tell the truth the deeper hole they will have to dig out of when they start. As human beings we are hard wired to constantly asses our environment for signs of threat.
We are not unlike the members of a baboon tribe who look towards the “alpha” every twenty to thirty seconds.
People tend to focus their attention up the hierarchy and in the absence of positive feedback imagine the worst. When we are under stress this tendency for trepidation is even greater.
Mill...
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2. Top down initiatives are viewed as personal attacks
December 15, 2021
Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence -
When confronted with a need for change either personally or professionally most people don’t differentiate “what they did” from “who they are”. Instead of focusing their creative resources to battle an outside enemy people view a “demand” for change as a judgment against them personally. Lasting transformation within complex social systems cannot and should not be dictated from the top down or outside in...
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3. Transformers resist positional power
December 15, 2021
Affective Leadership -
Successful change initiatives don’t require everyone, but they do need the situational leaders within the ranks. In describing the transformation to an “Employees First” culture of the 50,000 employee multinational IT
Company HCLT, CEO Vineet Nayar believes his employees fell into three distinct categories, lost souls (Zom-Bees), fence sitters and transformers. To accomplish their transition he focused on the transformers.These were not the happy “go along to get along” type but often t...
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5. Success lies not in the validity of our answers, but the quality of our questions.
December 15, 2021
Affective Leadership, Astonishing Service, Emotional Intelligence, Positive Deviance -
The best solutions are not told or sold, but encouraged and elicited. In the example cited in Transformers resist positional power the HCLT leadership team developed a Facebook style collaborative tool called U&I. Their
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intention was to share the goals and accomplishments of the organization with all employees. What they discovered was that the “Transformational” team members did not want to be told “what had happened” they wanted to be involved deciding “what would happen”... -
The Science of Emotion
December 15, 2021
Affective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Peer Powered Performance, Positive Deviance -
Leadership is a Science
Leadership used to be referred to as an art. Now it is a proven science. Every component of this process has a purpose. Like the endless lines of zeros and ones in binary code, it is not only the content of each component but the space between that produces the results.
Humor with a purpose
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In live presentations I am most often described as a humorist, but my purpose is not laughter. I use humor to share difficult lessons in an entertaining way...