I recently came across a company (somewhere on the social web) that claimed that they “shipped leaders”. It looked like they offered leadership training services. It took me back to the old debate of whether leaders are born or made. One thing is clear – leaders cannot be manufactured in a training factory and shipped. […]
In organizations, I have seen people who are “designated” as leaders. I have seen many such designated leaders, who raised their game to meet the expectations that come along with leadership. They make an effort to learn about leadership, read books, blogs and consciously put those lessons in action. On the other hand, I have […]
We live in times where more and more work is executed by teams that are geographically distributed. Leading a virtual team, fostering collaboration and binding them to common set of objectives is one of the key challenges for business leaders. In most of the troubled projects I have seen, the real challenges were not technical/engineering […]
The true test of a leader is when things don’t go as planned. Worst yet, when things fail. In an organizational context, I have seen so many leaders who drive the project/initiative right from the beginning – yet when the project fails, they blame others. They blame senior management, the organization culture, their own team […]
People deliver their best work when they are fully engaged with the purpose of their work. In an organizational setting, people only deliver their best when they are engaged with the purpose, vision and values of the organization they work with. Businesses can conduct an employee survey to determine engagement levels. They look at their […]
John F. Kennedy said this (one of my favorite quotes) – “There are risks and costs to a program of actions. But they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” Comfortable inaction is the state where the immediate implication of not doing something is not visible, but in a […]
Rapport building isn’t just something you do when you first meet someone or as a part of a sales call or a negotiation. As leaders (and human beings) one of our goals must be to build better and deeper relationships, and one of the tangible ways we can do that is through an ongoing other-focused […]
If you are a leader, you will invariably face situations where: People will criticize you for doing something. People will criticize you even for not doing something. Your decisions will go against you. You will face a lot of resistance in your initiatives. Roadblocks will be encountered People will closely analyze your decisions. You may […]
A few years back, I was facilitating a team that was responsible for pulling off a project in a completely new technology. This also meant that each one of the team members had to take initiative and explore new areas of the technology. While the project had a designated project lead, we saw many team […]