Positive Leadership: Be Passionate About What You Do

Positive Leadership: Be Passionate About What You Do

Positive Leadership: The Fiercest Women in Tech (and Why We Need More Like Them)

Positive Leadership: The Fiercest Women in Tech (and Why We Need More Like Them)

Positive Leadership: Authentic Leadership

No one likes to work with someone who is false. For people to trust that you’re being genuine, they need to know where you stand. 

Here are two ways to be sure you’re being true to yourself and connecting with others:

Have a point of view. Know your stances on major work issues and be open and willing to engage in conversations about them. To have leadership presence, others need and want to know where you stand — they don't want to have to guess or be blindsided midstream.

Be transparent about your position. Know the difference between navigating the political waters of your organisation and actually becoming the politics itself. Get support for your initiatives but be clear about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you are doing it.

For more, see: http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2013/04/improve-your-leadership-presen.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4nqCoIBtVo

Positive Leadership: Authentic Leadership

Positive Leadership: Hire Character, Train Skill

‘Hire character, train skill’ - as a leader, the next time you think of measuring your success, consider counting a different number, that is the number of great leaders (inside and outside your organisation) that you helped nurture and helped create!

Positive Leadership: Hire Character, Train Skill

Positive Leadership: Turning Your Great Idea into a Viable Product

Positive Leadership: Turning Your Great Idea into a Viable Product

Positive Leadership: Honesty and Integrity

Honesty is telling telling the truth — in other words, conforming our words to reality.

Integrity is conforming reality to our words — in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.

This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self but also with life.

One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present. When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.

Positive Leadership: Honesty and Integrity

Positive Leadership: Leading in a Crisis

When you are leading in a time-pressured, make-or-break situation, you might wonder if you should take charge and command action or take the time to enable the innovation of others. You can do both. 

Here are three things to do in a crisis that are both directive and empowering:

Set a vision that instills both realism and hope. Assess the current situation and how it’s likely to evolve. At the same time, articulate the possibility of succeeding against all odds.

Bring people in. Set clear boundaries for who is on and off the core team, but invite in helpful collaborators as well. People may have to work in fluid, shifting arrangements, rotating in and out of teams as the demands of the situation evolve.

Engage. Dive in and start doing the work. Lead a disciplined, coordinated execution while also encouraging innovation through experimentation and learning along the way.

Positive Leadership: Leading in a Crisis

Positive Leadership: Why Do We Argue?

Why do we argue? To out-reason our opponents, prove them wrong, and, most of all, to win! ... Right? Philosopher Professor Daniel H. Cohen of Colby College, Maine shows how our most common form of argument -- a war in which one person must win and the other must lose -- misses out on the real benefits of engaging in active disagreement.

Positive Leadership: Why Do We Argue?

Positive Leadership: Coming Up With Innovative Ideas

Zipcar founder Robin Chase shares how she comes up with her ideas, and explains the importance of starting with a "minimum viable product" when launching a business.

Positive Leadership: Coming Up With Innovative Ideas

Positive Leadership: Good Leaders Build Trust First

Most leaders today emphasise their competence, strength, and credentials, but none of that matters if people don’t trust you. Win people over with warmth. Here’s how:

Use the right tone. Speak with lower pitch and volume. Aim for a tone that suggests that you’re levelling with people and being completely honest.

Validate feelings. If you show your employees that you hold roughly the same worldview they do, you demonstrate not only empathy but, in their eyes, common sense. If you want colleagues to listen and agree with you, first agree with them.

Smile—and mean it. Smiling is contagious. When people see you beaming, they’ll likely smile too. But a polite grin fools no one. To project warmth, you have to genuinely feel it.

Positive Leadership: Good Leaders Build Trust First

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership: Change

Positive Leadership: Change

Positive Leadership: How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them

Why do people tell lies in the workplace?

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., an international keynote speaker specialising in leadership and nonverbal communication, explains why people tell lies, how to spot the non-verbal cues of a liar, and strategies for dealing with liars. 

The Mastery in Communication Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business hosted Goman for a lecture on her book "The Truth About Lies in the Workplace: How to Spot Liars and How to Dealwith Them." 

Positive Leadership: How to Spot Liars at Work and How to Deal with Them

Positive Leadership: Better Governance

From left: Secretary of State George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan and Walter Annenberg on the golf course 

Former Nixon and Reagan cabinet member George Shultz offers compelling analyses on the topics of governance, the economy, energy, drugs, diplomacy, and nuclear security. In this how-to guide, Shultz charts a path to a better future for the United States and the rest of the world.

In Part 3 of an 8 part series, George Shultz asks what's wrong with governance today and discusses how we can fix this essential process. "If you are able to confront problems effectively and take advantage of opportunities fairly, you will be able to govern. So the issue of governance is an appropriate starting point for this exploration of how to achieve a better future."

For more information visit: http://www.hooverpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1593

Positive Leadership: Better Governance

Positive Leadership: Avoiding Presentation Mistakes

There are three common mistakes people make when giving presentations.

1. Lack of preparation. Preparation is the key to success but so many people don’t prepare properly. Sometimes it’s due to an inability to overcome the fear factor but it’s crucial you manage this - preparation is key to success.

2. Worrying too much about yourself. Your presentation is not about you – it’s about the audience. When people worry too much about themselves they forget to make the audience the hero.

3. Rushing through. Don’t speed through your presentation. Slow down, take your time and keep it simple.

To avoid mistakes when presenting it’s worth using visualisation to overcome any fears. You can do this by visualising yourself giving a really good presentation and what you want it to look like. Then, take the time to think what the audience needs and is hoping for. Finally, less is more – slow down and remember to pause in between each thought. The slower you are the more the audience will remember.

For people who are prone to making mistakes the key is not to get too anxious. All you have to do is be as good as you can be – you can’t do more than that. Nobody is perfect but getting too wound up and nervous will make you more likely to make mistakes. If you do make an error or two, then that’s ok. People like to see a human being giving a presentation – it makes it real. Make sure you rehearse so that your message is clear but remember, it’s not the end of the world if you do make a mistake on the day.

Positive Leadership: Avoiding Presentation Mistakes

Positive Leadership: High Performance Leadership

Daniel Goleman and George Kohlrieser discuss 'High Performance Leadership':

Positive Leadership: High Performance Leadership

Positive Leadership: Vision Without Execution Is Hallucination

When you're clear in your company purpose--your "why," as leadership author Simon Sinek puts it--your strategic direction becomes self-evident.

Positive Leadership: Vision Without Execution Is Hallucination

Positive Leadership: Yet!

Suppose your boss pulls you aside and tells you: “You don’t have the right skills for the project.”

Then suppose a different situation, where your boss tells you: “You don’t have the right skills for the project, yet” or “You don’t yet have the connections to make this deal happen.”

The word yet makes all the difference in the world. In the first example, you feel like a failure. In the examples with “yet,” you feel like you may not be ready now, but you could be in the future.

Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor who’s researched the idea of a “growth mindset,”elaborates:

By [using the word "yet"] we give people a time perspective. It creates the idea of learning over time. It puts the other person on that learning curve and says, “Well, maybe you’re not at the finish line but you’re on that learning curve and let’s go further.” It’s such a growth mindset word.

Positive Leadership: Yet!

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership

Positive Leadership: Stand Out!

Don't be afraid to standout from the rest! That is what leadership is all about.

Positive Leadership: Stand Out!

Positive Leadership: Attracting Talent

Talented people used to want high salaries and stable career paths, but now they want work with purpose. 

Here’s how your company can offer candidates meaningful and attractive roles:

Get serious about impact. Determine the positive impact your organisation seeks to make in the world. You don’t have to be a social enterprise to do good.

Tell that story well. Call it marketing or storytelling, but make sure you're communicating how much you care about your mission and how you're working toward it.

Design roles for their future, not just yours. Many people see a job as one of many stepping-stones they'll visit over the course of a career. Focus on making your stone as attractive and inviting as possible. Decent pay, rewarding perks, and large doses of autonomy demonstrate that you take professional development seriously.

Positive Leadership: Attracting Talent

Positive Leadership: Women Should be as Ambitious as Men

Tory Burch says women entrepreneurs should find their passion and be just as ambitious as men. She founded the Tory Burch fashion label in 2004. Her clothing line is now carried in more than 800 stores worldwide. She also heads the Tory Burch Foundation, which offers mentorship opportunities to women entrepreneurs and provides micro-loans to women-owned businesses.

Positive Leadership: Women Should be as Ambitious as Men