Positive Leadership: 'Live in the Moment'
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Positive Leadership: Creating a Positive Workplace
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Positive Leadership: What Drives Great Leaders Through Setbacks
The greatest leaders we know were driven in their overall
work - and in their times of greatest challenge - by faith. For some their faith was religious. Others described their faith as
spiritual. We call it "faith"
because this mindset runs heavily against the grain of conventional
wisdom. Conventional wisdom says two
things: (1) Winning is what matters. Defeat is defeat. And if you've tried so hard
and lost, you deserve to feel awful (maybe for the rest of your life). (2) Take care of your own self.
Yet in the faith we are talking about, leaders show up with
two essential qualities:
First, the results of the past don't matter. They put themselves whole-heartedly into the
new moment they're in. Indeed, it's this
capacity and commitment to keep working, playing, fighting - even when they've lost
badly - that doesn't just prove, but builds and solidifies their character. Second, this faith clearly says: It's just
not all about me. In the times that are
hardest, these great leaders lead for others.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Positive Leadership: Remarkable is a Tough Choice
Too often, we're presented with choices that don't please
us. We can pick one poor alternative or the other. And too often, we pick one.
We were struck by Apple's choice to put a glass screen on the
original iPhone. Just six weeks before it was announced, Steve Jobs decided he
wanted a scratchproof glass screen. The thing is, this wasn't an option. It
wasn't possible, reliable, feasible or appropriately priced. It couldn't be
done with certainty, and almost any other organisation would have taken it off
the list of appropriate choices.
It was unreasonable.
And that's the key. Remarkable work is always not on the
list, because if it was, it would be commonplace, not remarkable.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Positive Leadership: Paralympics Opening Speech from Professor Stephen Hawking
“Ever since the dawn of civilisation, people have craved for
an understanding of the underlying order of the world. Why is it as it is, and
why it exists at all. But, even if we do find a complete theory of everything,
it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the
equations, and makes a universe for them to describe?
We live in a universe governed by rational laws that we can
discover and understand. Look up at the stars, and not down at your feet. Try
to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist.
Be curious.
The Paralympic Games are also about transforming our
perception of the world. We are all different, there is no such thing as a
standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.
What is important is that we have the ability to create.
This creativity can take many forms, forms, from physical achievement to
theoretical physics.
However difficult life may seem there is always something
you can do, and succeed at. The Games provide an opportunity for athletes to
excel, to stretch themselves and become outstanding in their field.
So let us together celebrate excellence, friendship and
respect. Good luck to you all.”
Professor Stephen Hawking, Paralympics Opening Ceremony.
London 2012
Saturday, September 08, 2012
Friday, September 07, 2012
Positive Leadership: Six Habits of True Strategic Thinkers
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
Positive Leadership: Mental Toughness
Whether you are an athlete in the Olympics or someone in the
boardroom, a certain quality is always found in those who remain standing when
the storm winds blow. When rejection
hits these people it bounces off them like hailstones. They bounce back quickly from setbacks. They feel energised to try even harder after
a defeat. That special quality these
warriors are showing is something called “mental toughness”.
Wikipedia defines this as “a term commonly
used by coaches, sport psychologists, sport commentators, and business leaders
– generally describes a collection of attributes that allow a person to
persevere through difficult circumstances (such as difficult training or
difficult competitive situations in games) and emerge without losing
confidence.”
Each of us will receive a hit at some point in our lives
that knocks the wind right out of us. Rather
than sitting around complaining when we are being pelted by chunks of hail the
size of golf balls, we can put on a suit of armour to deflect whatever life
throws as us. That suit of armour is
your mental toughness.
You can’t measure mental toughness; you measure its
effect. You can’t measure what’s going
on inside a leader’s head, but you sure can measure their behaviour! You can see mental toughness when someone is
running a marathon and they are gasping for breath, and the only thing keeping
them putting one painful footstep in front of the next is their strength of
will. You see it when someone is totally
exhausted, yet they keep throwing hundreds of shots into the basketball hoop to
perfect their free throw. Mental toughness is courage in action. When you’ve got it, you cope better than your
opponents with the demands you face.
How do we develop mental toughness? Here are a few principles to get you started:
Principle #1: Realise Mental Toughness Can Be Developed.
Some people might be born with a certain personality that
seems to handle adversity a little more effectively than others. But that’s not always the case, and either
way, anyone can develop this side of their personality. Don’t avoid the issue by selling yourself any
victim thinking, like “That’s just the way I am.” How do you build mental toughness? The same way you build muscles in the gym: by
pushing yourself to new limits and increasing the pressure or resistance you
are pushing against.
Principle #2: Mental Toughness in the Gym Correlates to
Mental Toughness in Life.
The gym is the ultimate proving ground for “tough guys”. You
really find out what you’re made of in the gym.
You don’t become successful at anything by letting your foot
off of the pedal when the going gets tough.
This includes the gym and your business.
When it hurts to do even one more rep of an exercise, that’s when the real
muscle development starts! If you throw in the towel on the bench press, you
train your brain to quit when things get tough.
When you force yourself to keep pushing the weight even when you want to
give up, you are training your brain to keep pushing.
Principle #3: Champions Fall in Love with Discomfort.
Winners know that the path to success is steep and rocky,
and the path to defeat is like a sign pointing at a waterslide that says,
“Slippery, Fun and Easy to Reach the Bottom in a Jiffy!” Bad habits are easy to slip into, like a warm
bed when you’re exhausted. Good habits
are pretty much guaranteed to feel tough for most people because you end up
denying yourself luxuries and pleasures. You must learn to do what is
uncomfortable for you. To develop the psychological edge, you must have extreme
discipline to give up the comfort zone that you train and live in. Delaying
immediate satisfaction is the ultimate sacrifice that all warriors must choose.
Monday, September 03, 2012
Positive Leadership: 9 Attributes That Differentiate CEOs
Becoming a CEO is the greatest leap that an executive can
make in his or her career. What makes it such an extraordinary transition, of
course, is the complexity of the role and the skill that is required to manage
that complexity successfully. So, what exactly do CEOs have that other leaders
don’t?
To answer that question—and, by doing so, help aspiring CEOs
optimise their trajectories and assist current CEOs and boards in making better
CEO succession planning decisions—Russell Reynolds Associates analysed its database of nearly 4,000
executive assessments, including over 130 CEOs. These tests measure a number of
competencies, such as relationship skills, communication skills and
decision-making approaches.
Their findings reaffirm with quantitative
evidence what is perceived to be true about the capabilities that differentiate
CEOs from non-CEOs.
For more, see: http://www.russellreynolds.com/content/making-it-top-nine-attributes-differentiate-ceos
Friday, August 31, 2012
Positive Leadership: Finding the Power Within
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Positive Leadership: Unleashing Collective Genius
As business leaders, each of us is faced with a similar
dilemma today. How do we need to change to stay effective despite the rapid and
continuous change we are faced with in the business environment today?
Linda A. Hill, Professor of Business Administration at
Harvard Business School, a widely read author, and the Faculty Chair of the
Leadership Initiative, discusses how leaders need to be value creators and game
changers.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Positve Leadership: #UsainBolt - The Art of Winning
Positive Leadership: Team Turnarounds
In today’s uncertain economic environment, teams are asked
to do more with less. With resources stretched thin, turning around a
struggling team has never been harder, and managers must work to identify and
maximise whatever potential strengths a team already has. As sports fans
already know, behind every great underdog story is a leader who roots out the
competitive advantage that will propel the team to victory. In their excellent book, Team Turnarounds, Joe Frontiera and Dan Leidl share how this fine art of the
turnaround really works, from how to inspire the team to the actual tools for
change.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Positive Leadership: The Lost Culture of the Financial Services Industry
Culture is everything when it comes to responsible,
long-term business success.
Culture is what exists before any given leader
shows up, and it is what exists after any given leader moves on. Culture is in
the DNA of an organisation. It is not something that a leader necessarily goes
out and creates. A leader’s job is to discover, communicate and reinforce
culture. If you don’t get culture right, nothing else matters.
Many of the financial services organisations that have gone
astray recently have done so because they lost touch with their culture. They lost touch
with their stewardship mission, purpose, values and responsibilities; core elements of the historic culture of the financial services industry.
What we need to do today is not so much invent or create a
new culture for the industry but find the way back to the culture that should have
been there all along.
Most financial services firms have a culture that at some
point, somewhere, was about serving the needs of their clients. It was not just
about making money. It was about helping clients achieve their objectives,
promoting economic growth and performing a social good. Chances are the people
at the firm came to the firm because of the chance to make a positive
difference in the world. That ethic is used to be embedded in most financial
institutions. Unfortunately we have just lost touch with it in too many cases
recently.
As Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, said recently: "Motivation does not come from financial incentives alone. Again, the financial sector has done us all a disservice in promoting the belief that massive financial compensation is necessary to motivate individuals".
As Sir Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, said recently: "Motivation does not come from financial incentives alone. Again, the financial sector has done us all a disservice in promoting the belief that massive financial compensation is necessary to motivate individuals".
Restoring the culture of financial institutions to what it
ought to be is the number one leadership challenge right now in the financial
services industry. Regulatory reform is not enough. If we are going to keep
future financial crises from happening, we have to address cultural failings at
the heart of the financial services industry.
Whether or not we get it right will be a case study in leadership for years to come.
Whether or not we get it right will be a case study in leadership for years to come.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Positive Leadership: A Leadership Skills Gap
Fortune 1000 companies do not have enough leaders coming up
through the ranks to fill open and future leadership positions, according to a
survey by The CARA Group, Inc.
To remedy the current lack of leadership skills
and limited talent pipeline, caused in part by recession cuts to critical
leadership programmes, the survey reveals there is an emerging renewed commitment
to leadership development among companies of all sizes.
Key findings of the 2012 CARA survey include:
- More than half—62% of respondents—say their organisations face a leadership skills gap
- 84% of respondents say their organisations have increased leadership development focus in the last two to three years
- Only 9% of respondents say their current leadership development programmes are “very effective,” while 56% describe their programmes as only “somewhat effective” or “ineffective”
- The top three most critical skill gaps of leaders-in-training are leading others (54%), managing change (43%) and strategic planning/vision development (40%)
- Online learning and development (66%) is the number one way companies are leveraging technology in their leadership development programmes.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Positive Leadership: How Priming Impacts Your Performance
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