Leaders Must Get Real
Five ways to unlock authentic leadership
Key to Engagement
Leaders and employees working together
Culture of Collabration
What does crowdsourcing mean for HR?
Impostor Syndrome
Step into compassionate leadership
Leaders Must Get Real
Five ways to unlock authentic leadership
Key to Engagement
Leaders and employees working together
Culture of Collabration
What does crowdsourcing mean for HR?
Impostor Syndrome
Step into compassionate leadership
We are all prisoners of the familiar. Many things—the first iPhone, J.K. Rowling’s wizardly world, Lady Gaga’s sirloin gown—were difficult to envision until we encountered them. So it is with organizations.
Leadership is far less about what you are doing, than about who you are being. If you think about the people who have influenced you most over your career and life, it’s likely that what impacted you most was not what they did, but about who they were being while doing it: genuine, honest, courageous, resilient, real.
When we partnered with the Human Capital Institute (HCI) to study the three sources of employee engagement—employees, managers, and senior leaders—we discovered that independent of one another, none of these groups can sustain employee engagement: all three groups must work together.
Today, we’re on the leading edge of a major change in how companies are managed. Strategic leaders are talking about social hierarchies and social, community-based styles of collaboration and goal-setting. Companies are engaging their internal information markets (private information of their employees) in grassroots versions of management, as opposed to purely executive-driven, inflexible, hierarchical management.
MANY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE suffer from impostor syndrome—the feeling that you're a fraud—and that you'll be found out if you don't work longer and harder. You may believe others are more qualified than you, and when you succeed, you're not confident you can do it again.
Decisions are the most basic building blocks of successful change in our organizations, teams, and careers. The faster and more strategically we stack those blocks, the faster and more successfully we achieve change. Yet, change efforts often stall precisely because those decisions don’t happen. The question is why?
As the authors to this stellar edition of Leadership Excellence attest, great leaders think and act differently.
What is the definition and purpose of strategy? One of the three principles of strategic positioning, according to Michael Porter, a leading authority on competitive strategy, is to create unique and valuable positioning in the marketplace—involving a different set of activities or the same activities performed different from competitors.
The past few years have seen troubling disconnects in the workplace. One recent study found that employee engagement—the emotional commitment of workers to the organization and its goals—is a meager 40 percent. Another study found trust in leaders in even greater disrepair. The expectation that business leaders will tell the truth when confronted with a difficult issue is less than 20 percent.
Why do so many influential leaders engage in risky behavior that causes them to plummet from positions of power? Consider the cases of NYC mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner, Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, and hedge fund manager Steven Cohen.