“Leadership is not a title. Leadership is not a position,” Buck says. “But rather, leadership is a mindset. Leadership is a way of being.” – Michelle Buck.

First, leaders must leverage the power of reflection. While self-reflection has long been in the leader’s toolbox, it is a particularly important tool right now, Buck says, because it can provide stability in a time of so much tumult. Next, Buck encourages people to think about how they can generate transformation from adversity. That journey is considered heroic and courageous because it always involves a person stepping into an abyss, into some sort of struggle. Then the hero emerges on the other side having gained insights and wisdom that allow for a transformation. Creating a sense of safety might mean ensuring that employees feel comfortable speaking up, even if they worry their opinion will be unpopular. This includes letting the people you manage know that you are open to their constructive criticism of you, too. Lastly, Buck encourages leaders today to embrace “both/and” thinking as opposed to “either/or.” This lets leaders expand their mindset. Read More >>

All leaders need some way to evaluate their current performance so they can continue to grow as decision-makers, managers, and colleagues. But what is the best way to find a full, honest account of one’s strengths and weaknesses—and then to act on it? It is important to look beyond assessments. But the pair caution that these assessments should be thought of not as the end of the self-evaluation process, but as the beginning—as catalysts to start the kinds of discussions that lead to important insights. Those conversations can be timed to the assessments themselves, because their results make the request for deeper feedback a natural next step. Feedback is most valuable when it leads to important, actionable insights into your behavior, personality quirks, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Sometimes, reflection on your own emotional reactions to people and situations provides an opportunity to grow in self-awareness. Think of feedback as useful information that helps you expand your response toolbox, rather than someone telling you what to do. After all, there might be cases where a leader chooses to tell it like it is as a matter of strategy, knowing full well it will cause discomfort. Additionally, self-reflection only helps if it is done with a real purpose in mind, and that means thinking strategically about what is most important for the leader and the organization. Self-reflection isn’t just about looking backward; it also allows you to be proactive instead of reactive. Read More >>

The first face is heroic. It’s what leaders use to inspire and motivate, role-model behavior and express an enthralling vision. The second is more practical. It’s the face leaders assume behind the scenes as they preside over the processes that keep the organisation running smoothly. For their plans to succeed, leaders must face in both directions at once. The problem is that as leadership development ballooned into a global US$366 billion industry, it has fixated on the public face at the expense of the process-oriented one. Leadership is a hotter topic than ever, but its popular image only brings half the picture into focus. Star leaders should do the following heavy lifting in the background of their organization: scanning and sense-making, building and locking in commitment, handling contradictions, harnessing culture, and developing talent and capabilities. Scanning and sense-making allows leaders to reality-check their strategy. Building and locking in commitment to a strategy requires more than a dynamite PowerPoint presentation. First and foremost, generating consensus, or at least a good-faith acceptance, hinges on the level of openness involved in the process. Handling contradictions consists of trade-offs to help leaders cope with contrasting mandates, e.g. the need for hierarchy vs. the comparative agility of decentralized decision making, the wisdom of thinking long-term vs. the imperative to deliver quarterly shareholder returns. Harnessing culture occurs through indirection. Developing talent and capabilities encompasses more than spotting superstars in the making and giving them opportunities to shine.  Read More >>

Once upon a time, back in early March, many people expected that the coronavirus would place a temporary pause on normal life. People would be out of the office for a few weeks, kids would switch to remote learning for a bit, but then everything would go back to how it was. Now, three months later, it’s clear that we’re in this crisis—the public-health crisis and the ensuing economic one—for the long haul. It is important to make sure that whatever one is doing, one is acting in line within the values of one’s organization and personal psyche. This can be particularly hard in a crisis, when emotions run high, and stress takes a toll on people mentally and physically. Leaders should also be asking specific questions in the midst of a crisis because the landscape has likely shifted from where it was pre-crisis or even early on in the crisis. For one thing, risk may look very different than it did three months ago. Crucial in all of this is that leaders not overlook the human dimension of a crisis, which has been particularly acute during this pandemic. And business leaders should be seeking to help their communities these days.  Read More >>

Not all CEOs are created equal, but everyone can come out of this crisis stronger. Keen CEOs spend sleepless nights thinking about the new opportunities the pandemic has created. They search for acquisition targets, design new products and services, and negotiate with suppliers and other partners to create new win-win arrangements. To them, the key challenges are keeping their team’s creativity up in times of remote working, reproducing as much as possible face-to-face interactions online, and retaining talent. The second category – tough CEOs – downplay the impact of the crisis on themselves. These executives consider themselves coolheaded leaders who are determined to persevere and lead their organisations to a better future. The main challenge for these leaders is to find the time, discipline and will to lead their organisations through the crisis. They consider protecting employees’ well-being and helping them stay productive their top priority. Edgy CEOs reported considerable levels of stress and anxiety, so we call them edgy. Their top concerns are the fate of the business, the health and well-being of their families, and their personal mental and physical health. They struggle with staying energized and motivated. They tend to focus on pressing issues, leaving strategy and institution building for better times. Personality seems to play a role too. The keen leaders whom we interviewed came across as optimistic, energetic and highly resilient. Most tough CEOs were self-confident, strong-willed and somewhat authoritarian. Edgy leaders often doubted themselves and their ability to navigate through the crisis. They expressed negative emotions and showed vulnerability. To lead effectively in what is likely to be a multi-year crisis, CEOs need to adjust how they think about their role and how they go about playing it. They need to motivate and enable their teams to learn and perform to ensure the renewal and sustainable development of their business. To achieve these objectives over the long run, leaders need to become more resilient. Finally, no CEO, however resilient, is immune to the novel coronavirus. Having a designated and trained successor or deputy ready to stand in for the CEO whenever necessary is more important than ever before.  Read More >>

When it comes to building strong, lasting relationships with clients and team members, it’s time to start thinking like CEOs but under a different definition: Chief Emotional Officers. We business leaders are often trained to focus on data, numbers, and “hard skills.” As leaders, we must equally engage our other skill sets, to focus on the skills of emotional sensitivity and empathy. It’s these “soft skills” that are crucial to cultivating psychological safety — the sense of trust and well-being that helps teams thrive. These skills can’t run on autopilot. They require self-awareness and intentional behavior. The following is a model that can help leaders build these skills: the AAA Model for Cultural Agility. It consists of three steps: aware, acquire, and adapt. Aware. Reflect on your own state of mind, biases, and assumptions. Acquire. Ask questions. Explore and engage with others. The information you gather should help you to understand where others are coming from. Adapt. Bridge the difference by adapting new behaviors and mindset. We can all be Chief Emotional Officers. It just takes daily intention and practice. Remember “AAA” — aware, acquire, adapt — and the title can be yours.  Read More >>

With lockdowns closing schools and offices around the world, it’s become commonplace to see dogs and kids barge into business meetings as the boundaries between work and life have blurred. A seamless balance is impossible. We have to do both – work plus managing our lives, our spouses, kids, pets and home – all at once.  Doing both depends on our ability to adopt a paradox mindset, to consider the world with a “both/and” approach instead of an “either/or” one. In times like these, times of change, uncertainty and scarcity, we need to do many tasks together. And people need to feel comfort with discomfort – these hurdles aren’t going away.  The paradox mindset suggests an alternative perspective, accepting and learning to live with the tensions associated with competing demands. It is an understanding that these competing demands are not really resolvable, in the sense that they can’t be completely eliminated.  A paradox mindset can be cultivated.  In the current crisis, a paradox mindset won’t solve every problem, but it is a helpful and relevant way of thinking.  A paradox mindset allows us to look at the challenge, understand the need to adapt and uncover a different way of working.  Read More >>

None of us are experts. None of us have all the answers. We are all feeling immense uncertainty and none of us are truly in control, really.  You cannot solve a complex, multi-step equation in your head. You need to be able to isolate variables, simplify pieces that can be simplified, think differently about terms inside versus outside the parentheses. You can only tackle one thing at a time.  In the business world, we talk about the power of networks—strong ties that provide us with deep connections, weak ties that provide us with informational flow. This has most often been applied to getting you the job/contract/opportunity you’ve been looking for. But extend this further.  Don’t let guilt get in the way of understanding and being a part of humanity.  There are going to be drawdowns, low points, periods of depression and anxiety. We are all being impacted differently, which means that we are all going to need to handle this differently.  If you’re the leader of a large organization, what are the two or three things that really made your first 5 to 10 customers passionately fall in love with your product or service. That’s where you’ll find your North Star, which will allow you to dust off old things or seek out new oceans.  Look for inefficiencies. Where are we lacking, where are things not operating as efficiently or as effectively as they could? There were inefficiencies that existed before this pandemic, and there are new efficiencies that have cropped up since. The ones that come to my mind immediately are things like supply chain issues, deliveries and goods out of stock.  Write a different story, with a different story angle, based on who you are and your before-and-after viewpoint before this tsunami uprooted all of our lives.   Read More >>

There are six common blind spots that severely constrain the performance of innovation labs. Research and Development accelerators and incubators have generated poor innovation results and poor investment returns. These blind-spots are weak navigational direction, a focus on tweaks and enhancements, a lack of credibility with the corporate core, the mismanagement of the fear associated with disruption, the failure to reconcile mindset differences, and sheer impatience. The best way to fight the effect of these blind-spots is to leverage team diversity and facilitate leadership capabilities.   Read More >>