Tag Archives: Europe

Keeping your team innovative requires leadership finesse

Posted on

By Dr. Rachel MK Headley

Although often draped in HR-y words like “retention,” the success of your team is entirely in your hands. Their ability to execute on your vision is a choice that you make, and knowing how to leverage their strengths based on who they are will revolutionize your approach to leading your team.

 

 

The Challenge

I count myself among a growing group of entrepreneurial CEOs. We work crazy hours, want to create constantly and are eager to solve problems.

Entrepreneurial CEOs have special challenges when it comes to leading their team. There’s a constant level of change within their organizations. And, although your team knows that there is a dull roar of constant new ideas, this level of chaos can be difficult for your team to maintain for any length of time.

Continue reading →

Empathy is an essential leadership skill — and there’s nothing soft about it

Posted on

by  Prudy Gourguechon

I get tired of hearing about “soft skills,” even when it’s acknowledged they are important. No less a hard-muscled body than the U.S. Army, in its Army Field Manual on Leader Development (one of the best resource on leadership I’ve ever seen) insists repeatedly that empathy is essential for competent leadership.

 

Why? Empathy enables you to know if the people you’re trying to reach are actually reached. It allows you to predict the effect your decisions and actions will have on core audiences and strategize accordingly. Without empathy, you can’t build a team or nurture a new generation of leaders. You will not inspire followers or elicit loyalty. Empathy is essential in negotiations and sales: it allows you to know your target’s desires and what risks they are or aren’t willing to take.

Elsewhere I’ve proposed a short list of 5 essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader who assumes great responsibility must have. Empathy is one of the core five. (The others are self-awareness, trust, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.)

Continue reading →

The Three Altitudes of Leadership

Posted on

by Ian C. Woodward

Leaders must cultivate the seamless ability to mix forward-vision thinking, tactical execution and self-awareness – across the altitudes of leadership.

High altitudes hold a special place in the history of human achievement. We remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay as the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Other altitude pioneers include Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in outer space, and Neil Armstrong, the first person on the moon. More recently, in 2012, Austrian Felix Baumgartner skydived from a capsule at 127,000 feet.

In the world of leadership, altitudes are significant, too. However, the concern is much less about how high a leader can go, than about how he or she can seamlessly move between three distinct altitudes of leadership thinking.

Continue reading →

Corporate Heaven: The ‘Authentizotic’ Organisation

Posted on

by  Manfred Kets de Vries

How to create an organisation where people find meaning in, and are captivated by, their work.

The CEO of Wickrott Corporation was known as a suspicious control freak. Symptomatic of his leadership style were the numerous “internal consultants” hired to keep him informed of the goings-on in the organisation. Staff described their work environment as a cutthroat, Darwinian “soup”. Information was power; secrecy was the norm; transparency and teamwork were conspicuous by their absence. To add to the company’s paranoid culture, the CEO demanded pre-signed resignation letters from all of his senior executives so that he could fire them on the spot if he felt that they had transgressed. At meetings, he frequently subjected them to abusive, even profane tirades. During these humiliating sessions, he made it quite clear that the firm owed every bit of its success to him alone.

Continue reading →

Four pathways to authentic leadership

Posted on

By Peter Himmelman

I’m not at all pleased to report this, but even the good ol’ word leadership has become something of a buzzword — a term people bandy about without considering its deeper implications. It’s the same thing that’s happened with words like creativity, innovation and disruption.

In an attempt to service the ever-increasing demand for web content, the pace of creating content has also increased. Sadly, this is all too often accompanied by a decrease in serious analysis. To attract as many readers as possible to their sites marketers tend to overuse certain words that emerge as more eye-catching than others. The trouble is those words get used so often they begin to lose their inherent meaning. This is a problem for both society and individuals when it happens with words that deserve more, rather than less of our attention. To help refocus, here are four pathways to evincing more authentic… (and here comes the buzzword again) —leadership.

Continue reading →