Positive Leadership: How Bad Do You Want It?

Positive Leadership: How Bad Do You Want It?

Positive Leadership: Turning Pressure into an Asset

Pressure is nothing more than the shadow of great opportunity.’ – Michael Johnson, US Olympic Gold Medallist

Here are six things experienced leaders do that transform pressure from a liability to an asset:

Know Thyself: Leaders must know themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, and where they will and won’t compromise. When a leader is comfortable in their own skin they won’t fear dissenting opinion and diversity of thought, they’ll encourage it. Knowing who you are frees you to become a better thinker and a better leader.

Lead: A leader’s job is to acquire and develop talent. The larger the organisation you lead, the more your performance is dependent upon the talent of your team. The better the talent, and the better you utilise talent, the less pressure you’ll feel. The key to capacity, throughput, and scale is not found by doing – but by developing others to do. Leaders who feel the least amount of pressure are those who spend the most time acquiring and developing talent. Conversely, leaders who feel the most pressure are those who feel they must do everything themselves.

Keep It Simple: Complexity creates pressure. The best leaders look to simplify everything they can. Simplicity rarely equates to a lack of sophistication – it actually demonstrates remarkable elegance. Simplicity drives understanding, which leads to a certainty of execution. One truism you can count on is performance relives pressure.

Get Alignment: Great leaders strive for the following: one vision – one team – one agenda. Organisations that have a shared purpose, common values, and aligned interests are simply more productive than organisations that don’t. Alignment of values and vision take the complexity out of decision-making, and removes the ambiguity from the process of prioritisation. Leaders who have organisational alignment feel less pressure than those who don’t.

Focus: Focused leaders rarely feel external pressure. Unfocused leaders feel as if pressure is coming at them from all directions. Focus affords leaders clarity of thought that a cluttered mind will never realise. It’s not possible to lead an organisation toward a better future when a leaders mind can’t see through the fog. An organisation is never under greater pressure, or at greater risk, than when leaders lose their focus.

Create Whitespace: The best way to maintain focus is to make sure you’ve allowed for some whitespace EVERY day. Any rubber band stretched too tightly will eventually snap – there are no exceptions to this rule. Leaders who don’t create time for quality thought and planning end-up taking unnecessary short cuts and risks. They let pressure force them into making bad decisions that a little whitespace could have prevented.

Positive Leadership: Turning Pressure into an Asset

Positive Leadership: The Importance of Failing

The anatomy of a successful champion–in any field–doesn’t consist of 100% ‘perfection.'

There has never been an individual who has eased his or her way through a bountiful life with any struggles at all. To truly become a winner, one needs to step out of a comfort zone–and experience what people consider ‘failure’ at some point.

At Positive Leadership we don’t see anything as a failure. If you gave your all in something and were able to learn, it becomes a valuable learning experience, not a failure.

With great effort and great enthusiasm, any individual has the ability to succeed in any field. Focus on the things you can control and stay true to a keen vision of where you see yourself. In doing that, you’ll never fail.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Walt Disney was fired for “lacking imagination.” Oprah Winfrey was said to be “not fit for television.”

Remember, if you’ve never ‘failed,’ you’ve never tried anything new.

What will you become?

 

Positive Leadership: The Importance of Failing

Positive Leadership: The Meaning of Leadership Vision

The meaning of vision is not a license for dreamy fantasy or overweening ambition. 

It stands for the leader’s special responsibility:

- to see what is not visible to his or her people; to rise above and survey     the landscape

- to find ideas, resources and talent to feed into the ensemble

- to help people understand the forces that carry them between the past, the present and the future

- to see into people’s hearts and minds and imagine how they best work together

- to direct, align and shape the enterprise to achieve excellence.

This demands a mix of investigative and influencing skills. 

The former may mean going under cover in your own organisation, or, at the least, talking to people other than those who are closest to you and have a good opinion of you. Leaders can be coached in what we call “decentering” – seeing the world through others’ eyes – especially useful with one’s enemies! The latter means techniques that enable the leader to clearly and coherently shape the reality of his or her stakeholders: their beliefs, expectations, wants and vision of the future. 

The last of these calls upon the most important tool in the leader’s repertoire – the ability to create a credible and compelling narrative. This will have four elements:

• Who am I and why I am here
• Who are we and what do we stand for
• Where are we going and why
• Why we must change.

These help people make sense of the world they inhabit, to identify with the organisation’s central purpose, and to create positive engagement. 

But the most critical kernel of vision is the first of the stories. This is the leader’s value proposition – his or her narrative about their personal journey to now, the principles that guide them, and the promises they make to their people for the future. This is the real meaning of leadership vision.

Positive Leadership: The Meaning of Leadership Vision

Positive Leadership: Where Are US CEO's Educated?

Positive Leadership: Where Are US CEO's Educated?

Positive Leadership: Execution is Everything!

The Stanford Graduate School of Business View from the Top Series hosted venture capitalist John Doerr in a question and answer session where he helped enlighten students on such topics as start-ups, healthcare and jobs in emerging markets. 

Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, emphasised that "The best entrepreneurs are the ones who really go the distance with their companies, who are always learning."

Doerr serves on boards in the areas of Internet technologies and greentech, including Amyris, Bloom Energy, Essence Healthcare, Flipboard, FloDesign Wind Turbines, Google, iControl, mCube, Renmatix and Quantumscape. He also works with Groupon, Twitter and Square.

Positive Leadership: Execution is Everything!

Positive Leadership: It's Possible

'PAIN IS TEMPORARY!

It may last for a minute, or an hour, or a day, or even a year. But eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit however, it will last forever. I dare you to take a little pain. I dare you. I dare you not to go home. Somebody said "I feel bad, I'm gonna go home." Go through it. You’re not going to die!

At the end of pain is success. You’re not going to die because you're feeling a little pain. I'm not eating like I eat at home. That's why you're going to go to the next level, because if you ate like you ate at home, you're going to remain a boy or a girl. It’s time to become men and women. But I'm exactly where I want to be because I got to commit my entire being to this thing. I got to breath it, sleep it, eat it.

Until you get there, you'll never be successful in life. But once you get there, I guarantee you the world is yours. So work hard and you can have whatever it is that you want.'

 

Positive Leadership: It's Possible

Positive Leadership: Advice for #Entreprenuers in Building a #VC Friendly Business Model

This excellent discussion with Stanford University Professor Haim Mendelson explores the best approach for putting together a business model and how to use it for new business development opportunities.

Learn why the business model is a blueprint for planning, and then building, new businesses that include startups or a new line of business within an established company.

Positive Leadership: Advice for #Entreprenuers in Building a #VC Friendly Business Model

Positive Leadership: The Role of Sport in Facilitating Social Change

"Sport is one of the best tools for social change because it is a large part of cultures around the world and reaches into every socioeconomic class of society. If laws are put in place, the benefits will be beyond measure. Sport helps develop self-esteem and confidence; improve physical and mental well-being, serve as a medium of communication and empower women to improve themselves and their communities."

Nawal El Moutawakel, 1984 Olympic gold medallist, Morocco 

http://www.sport360.com/other-sports/nawal-el-moutawakel-golden-girl-who-sparked-revolution

Positive Leadership: The Role of Sport in Facilitating Social Change

Positive Leadership: Good Leadership and Good Performance - The Financial Facts

There is unequivocal evidence in every sector that there is a strong relationship between leadership capability and performance. 

Good leadership leads to a good organisational climate and good organisational climates lead, via improved staff satisfaction and loyalty, to sustainable, high performing organisations.

The impact of good leadership on organisational performance as measured by the business and commercial success is extremely well evidenced:

• A study in the Harvard Business Review (Bassi and McMurrer 2007) provides a strong link between leadership skills and the bottom line.
• The Institute for Strategic Change reports that the stock price of companies perceived to be well-led grew 900 per cent over 10 years versus 74 per cent for companies perceived to lack good leadership (2008).
• The Corporate Leadership Council estimates that employees working for good leaders put in 57 per cent more effort and are 87 per cent less likely to leave than those with poor leaders.
• The Hay Group study of 2012 demonstrated that the top 20 companies for leadership had a 36 times better shareholder return over a 5 year period than the companies with the poorest leadership.
• Murray Dalziel, Director of Liverpool Business School summarises: “There is incontrovertible evidence from the academic literature that leadership makes a difference. Across a wide range of industries about 15 per cent of the variance in performance can be directly attributed to CEO performance. This figure has been constant for over 25 years.”

Positive Leadership: Good Leadership and Good Performance - The Financial Facts

Positive Leadership: Winning Entrepreneurs

What are the most important characteristics of winning entrepreneurs?

They must have a strong desire to compete and win, an intuitive understanding of marketplaces and how to serve them, and a deep understanding of technology and how it can be used to serve marketplaces. Those three things are fundamental. A fourth is high integrity and decent behavior. If you don’t have that you will have a short run at success but you won’t make it long term. Also, we have never met a successful entrepreneur who didn't have zeal.

Positive Leadership: Winning Entrepreneurs

Positive Leadership: Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure

Here are a solid set of principles for making sound decisions under pressure:

1. Remove the rose-coloured glasses: A good cost-benefit appraisal can be trickier than you think. Why? Because most of us tend to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits – and to be generally optimistic about our ability to make things happen. Our analyses inevitably bend toward the outcomes we’re hoping for. Good decision-makers are wary of wishful thinking. Get a second or third opinion from sceptics you trust — the advisers who'll push back and make you defend your assessments.

2. Wield the red pen ruthlessly: When it comes to picking ideas, separate the elephants from the ants. Cross off everything but the top few priorities, and make sure you haven’t fallen in love with pet projects and ‘hobbies’ whose time may have passed. When it’s clear a pet project is ailing, hurry up and get out the rifle (so to speak). A few, clear, simple goals are more likely to yield results than complex “perfect decisions” that can bog down an organisation.

3. Don’t fall in love with percentages: Everyone likes a tenfold return, but you’re not going to be noticed by the Financial Times for turning £10,000 into £100,000. A mere doubling of £500 million into £1 billion, however, could be worth spilling some ink over. In many business decisions, it’s the long-term return that matters, and the highest absolute benefit wins over the highest percentage benefit.

4. Don’t delay the decision: Time is rarely on your side. When did you last hear an executive say he made a tough call too soon. The same goes for making personnel decisions: if you’re not looking for ways to promote or keep current team members, it may be time to think about replacing them.

5. Feel the fear and do it anyway: Be careful about letting your feelings warp your perception of the situation. Fear can make you freeze up; but in almost every case, it’s better to make a call and deal with consequences than to leave things in limbo. Look the circumstances squarely in the face. As Sir Winston Churchill said, "courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

6. What would Kant do? It should go without saying that you want your decision to be an ethical one. So if your ethical compass needs a bit more calibrating, remember Emmanuel Kant. His “categorical imperative” is a useful thought experiment to help you decide if you’re doing the right thing. It’s a bit like “The Golden Rule” on steroids: what if everyone in the world, in your shoes, always made the same choice you’re about to make? If that's a world you’d want to live in, you’re okay in Kant’s book.

7. But can you execute it? Good decisions can become great ones if you execute them well. So for every one of your options, think about whether it’ll be easy to explain to your team and your organisation, or if it’s likely to be lost in translation. Will people be enthusiastic about making it happen? If not, maybe the idea's not as good as it looked on paper.

8. Think forward: Don’t relive past decisions – good or bad. Circumstances change, people change, and you change. Dwelling on past glories or failures is dangerous and unproductive.

9. Borrow wisdom: You’re probably not the first person to face a given predicament, so seek out anyone who might have been there before. Mentors have seen a lot of things – find a good one if you can. And make a habit of reading about how past leaders made momentous choices. Many of us have come to rely on our instincts to cut through the jungle of choices we face every day. Be careful, though: good intuition is not the same as good decision-making. In business, intuition works, but only in conjunction with calculation. Like a chess master, you should pick your move after weighing the outcomes. Then make it, implement it, and start thinking about the next one.

Positive Leadership: Making Sound Decisions Under Pressure

Positive Leadership: The Body Language of Power

When people want to make an impression, most think a lot about what they want to say. 

Stanford University Business Professor Deborah Gruenfeld cautions you to think twice about that approach. 

The factors influencing how people see you are surprising: Words account for 7% of what they take away, while body language counts for 55%. There is a body language of power. 

In this video, Gruenfeld introduces the body languages of authority and being approachable. Becoming fluent in matching body language to each situation can be a source of power and influence. Gruenfeld also shares leading social science research on the ways in which body language affects your psychology, in addition to influencing how others perceive you.

Positive Leadership: The Body Language of Power

Positive Leadership: Inspiration

Positive Leadership: Inspiration

Positive #Leadership: Imagine

Positive #Leadership: Imagine

Positive Leadership: Success

Positive Leadership: Success

Positive Leadership: Resilience

Positive Leadership: Resilience

Positive Leadership: Making the Big Choices in Life

Positive Leadership: Making the Big Choices in Life

Positive Leadership: Never Give Up

Positive Leadership: Never Give Up

Positive Leadership: How Much Do You Want To Succeed?

Positive Leadership: How Much Do You Want To Succeed?

Positive Leadership: The Virtues of a Leader

‘Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline . . . Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a leader.’ 

Sun Tzu

Positive Leadership: The Virtues of a Leader

Positive Leadership: The Athena Doctrine

At the BRITE '13 conference, John Gerzema, author of the new book "The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them)Will Rule the Future" talked about his two-year research effort which found that feminine values are ascending all around the world. 

His data shows that countries that think in a more feminine way have a higher per capital GDP and people who think in a more feminine way are nearly twice as optimistic about their future.

For more info on "The Athena Doctrine" visit: http://www.johngerzema.com/

The BRITE conference on brands, innovation and technology is hosted by the Centre on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School. http://briteconference.com and http://globalbrands.org

Positive Leadership: The Athena Doctrine

Positive Leadership: Getting Results

Positive Leadership: Getting Results

Positive Leadership: Three Keys to Acquiring and Turning Around a Poorly Performing Business

Which distressed firms are worth trying to turn around?

Focus on those companies with an iconic brand name, one that people remember even if the company is down and out; a credible product, or at least the prospect of a credible product; and finally, talent or the prospect that a talented team can be hired. Talent is the key.

How do you motivate talent?

Down-and-out companies don’t have much money to spend. This means you have to build a team of people who are willing to work for the end game. You need people who have the passion, the perseverance and the courage to really walk in the darkness every day, one foot in front of the other, until they see the light.

How do you determine whether people stay?

If something is deeply distressed, the chances are there is some fault with the people on the ground. Sometimes it’s the culture, further crippled by an exogenous force. You never want to eradicate all history and prior knowledge, so at least give people a chance. But if they are not capable of self-reflection, if they can’t take any responsibility for where they are, they will never be the team to succeed. The one thing about this world is that truth is cold and hard, but it’s the first point on the path to hope and salvation: If you don’t want to hear the truth, then there is no future for you in the company.

Positive Leadership: Three Keys to Acquiring and Turning Around a Poorly Performing Business