The way you think as a leader can leave gaps in the way your business and working relationships develop.
With awareness and know-how you can adapt your thinking mindset to suit the task in hand.
Here are three key strategies to help bring your thinking skills up to scratch.
Collaboration is a buzzword in modern business.
But it doesn’t happen overnight, especially if you are seeking to transform outmoded models of command and control, says Carol Kinsey Goman, writing for Forbes.
As a leader, you may not be able to alter the adverse circumstances you and your team face.
But you can choose how you respond, writes Douglas Conant, for LinkedIn Pulse.
For innovation to thrive, you must create space for open, free-form interaction and engagement.
Get it right – build and nurture innovation-friendly networks – and the ideas will flow.
Are you taking more days away from the office, or delaying replies to emails or calls?
These are all signs that you have become disengaged as a leader. And when you disengage, your employees could follow suit, writes Peter Crush for Raconteur.
Success increases when your teams have the incentive to push towards shared goals.
A Tour de France team manager describes how to convince your employees to surrender individual dreams for the common good.
In order to unlock the full potential of digital technologies and achieve “digital transformation”, your company must foster a digital leadership structure, writes Stijn Viaene for The European Business Review.
The aim is to enable your company to identify opportunities and take advantage of them quicker than your competitors.
A leader should be skilled at getting the best out of coworkers. But all too often his or her leadership style can have the opposite effect.
Karen Firestone, writing for Harvard Business Review, has some advice on how to avoid leader-induced stress.
Could you give up being the main driver and discover a more productive role in the company you created?
There comes a time when this fundamental shift will be the best way to keep your business growing, says Jim Krampen, Seven Corners Inc co-founder and executive officer, writing for Entrepreneur.
How can a CEO make an outstanding impression when moving to a new company?
Making the transition to a fresh role is a huge test for leaders in the contemporary business world. Getting your early moves right is vital if you want to get the existing team on board and guide the company to singular success.
With digital data increasingly driving performance, it takes a strong, forward-thinking champion to make sure your organisation embraces that shift effectively.
These days the role of CIO goes way beyond overseeing your company’s computer technology. With businesses from all sectors adopting a digital-first strategy, the CIO holds a transformational position.
Making your employees feel they matter is a powerful tool in the corporate world.
When a leader demonstrates concern for the wellbeing of his or her teams it generates a climate of safety and trust that positively impacts on their work.
Fostering a caring attitude can actively encourage an engaged and satisfied team as well as better productivity. But what if it doesn’t come naturally?
If you want to improve performance across your business, science prescribes this surprise superpower.
What would you consider the top skill you need as a leader? Chances are you wouldn’t pick empathy. And what does the term really mean?
In The European Business Review, Barbara Kellerman argues that the outcomes of leadership teaching are greatly diminished if the essential and growing importance of followers and contexts is not properly recognised.
Kellerman sees leadership not as a person but as a system with three equally important components.
If you want groundbreaking ideas you should encourage your employees to challenge the consensus.
As a manager, consensus might make for an easier life, but you risk losing a potentially game-changing idea by fostering a herd mentality. “Humans fear being a fool much more than they hope to be a genius.”
Organisational transparency – sharing information freely with your company’s employees – is said to empower people to make better, faster decisions.
The challenge for executives is knowing when to share information and when not to share information. There are three main areas where transparency can create problems and some measures you can take to avoid oversharing.
Whatever type of company you are running, the basics of good leadership remain the same.
Sophi Tranchell, CEO of UK-based social enterprise Divine Chocolate, and Bill Sandbrook, CEO of US based producer of mixed concrete and aggregates, US Concrete, are two CEOs from different backgrounds and companies who turned out to have a lot more in common than you might think. “Their insights make a great playbook for the leadership basics from which everyone can learn.”
As the digital world romps ahead at incredible speed, leaders need to be sure they harness the best and most relevant developments.
Technological innovations shake up the industrial globe every day. Keeping track of these – and understanding which ones are essential for your organisation – is becoming a priority for most CEOs.
Aspiring slavishly to contemporary ideals is a sure route to failure
Can you tick all the boxes on the popular checklist of attributes for successful leaders? Over the past few decades the qualities prescribed by the corporate training industry have focused on authenticity, trustworthiness, modesty, empathy, emotional intelligence and a desire to serve others – especially your employees.
If becoming a CEO is one of your ambitions, what is the best path to take? Writing on Raconteur, Peter Crush draws from a variety of sources to show how the nature of the job and the criteria for choosing candidates are changing.
Being dominating and being likeable can both be good qualities in a boss, and often a hybrid is even better.
In a New York Times article Phyllis Korkki explores the advantages and disadvantages of two key styles of leadership – the dominant leadership style where the boss is in control of everything, and the prestige style where the boss’s main motivation is to be liked or admired.
It’s the company you keep – in work and out – that colours your journey to the top.
The tactics most likely to increase your success as a CEO are not what you might expect.
Are you and your employees stuck in a vicious circle of firefighting?
Workers’ compensation business illustrates the cycle of rework – and more rework – that comes from not doing jobs right first time. Despite knowing that legal processes and costs could be slashed by contacting workers within 24 hours of injury, staff were too busy to do so.
It’s likely that you spend a fair proportion of your time problem-solving. What’s the secret to overcoming hurdles swiftly so you can get on with the important stuff?
Whether you are a homegrown startup or a multi-million multinational, obstacles will always be thrown in your path. As you try to concentrate on productivity and innovation, fresh difficulties are always around the corner.
Business can be a minefield, which is why employing a military mindset can be one of the most effective ways to direct your teams.
Strategies from the battlefield don’t sound like the natural choice for top-level business leaders, but successful companies actually share more common ground than you think with the US Marines Corps.
How well does your employer understand your role and the value you bring to your organisation? And do you fully understand it yourself?
Beneath your job description lies a “hidden curriculum of work”, or a “job-within-the-job”. Its unwritten challenges include continuous change management and workplace politics, for example.
The noise of modern life can distract marketing teams from creating their best work.
Whether you head up the marketing department for a lean, energetic startup or a powerful blue chip corporation, it is important that your team is consistently creative. There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your team is able to do its best creative work in an “always on” environment.
As the business world changes with increasing pace, leaders need to develop a new set of core skills if they are to keep up, write…
The success of your organisation depends on good decision making, a key requirement of good leadership.
The human brain has evolved to make most decisions automatically. Behavioural and neuroscience shows that our brains struggle with information overload, especially when multitasking, leaving them susceptible to subjectivity, bias and errors.
If landing a seat on a board is one of your goals, you need to do some serious preparation to make it happen. Writing for Forbes, Stuart R. Levine sets out six actions to increase your chances of success.
“It’s critical that you take smart steps to develop your resources and skills into assets that will showcase your credentials and position you for success,” Levine advises.
Digital technology has put a wealth of human data at our fingertips. How can we be sure we are using it responsibly and ethically?
There’s no doubt that facts and statistics offer valuable insights that can be employed to boost business. But it’s vital to lay down ground rules as a company before using personal information to our advantage, says Paul Daugherty, writing for MIT Sloan.
Five key leadership behaviours lay behind rare ‘breakthrough’ success in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) business.
‘Breakthroughs’ are products that expand or create new product categories – often required to maintain or grow a company’s market share. In the CPG market, 80% of growth comes from 1% of brands. Breakthrough success is so rare that of 3,500 new brands only 18 made the grade.
Giving feedback should be constructive and helpful, but that might not be how everybody views it
The key requirements of giving good feedback are good intentions, sound preparation and a calm response. The feedback process takes a lot of time, and can be a cause of anxiety for both manager and employee, particularly when you are dealing with somebody who might cry, yell or get defensive.
Trust takes years to build, yet can be destroyed in an instant. But retaining and regaining the confidence of your employees can be achieved if you modify your actions
Trust is a precious resource. Once broken it can be difficult for businesses and bosses to regain, damaging chances of future success.
Training alone often fails to develop today’s employees into tomorrow’s senior managers. It is systems and behaviours in the workplace that need to change before workers can take an organisation to the next level.
Several mistakes are routinely made when leadership training is offered in a bid to transform good organisations into great ones.
Not all of us are natural leaders, but mastering some fundamental skills can boost your confidence and performance.
If you struggle with leadership, you might be inclined to focus on your deficiencies. Learning and implementing some key techniques of success will be a more fruitful response, according to business psychologist Dionne Mahaffey writing for Forbes.
Help your managers make the most of their capabilities, and both they and your company will reap the benefits.
Natural born leaders are the lottery winners of the business management world. The rest of us need a little help, says CEO and leadership coach John Hawkins, writing for Forbes. That help can come in the form of purposeful leadership management development.
A good executive coach challenges your belief systems, helping you see what you’re doing wrong so you can get it right.
We all have our blind spots – preconceptions about ourselves as people and as leaders. If these are allowed to go unchallenged, our own lack of self-awareness acts as a block to our ongoing development.
Find out what good coaching is and why we all need it.
Even the most logical proposals for change can be met with suspicion unless executives deliver them with integrity.
But how do you consistently get your message across to your teams in a positive and believable way?
By taking three key steps, leaders can allow their sincerity to shine and have a greater chance of success. Here’s what a “credibility first” transformation model looks like.
You can’t avoid scandal, but you can prepare for it. Here’s how to plan for five of the most serious reputational risks to your business.
Design thinking can improve your health, wellbeing and, ultimately, your executive performance.
Companies certainly recognise the importance of management and leadership coaching, spending a global total of $24bn on it in 2013 alone. But in a tough economic climate, it’s often the training budget that’s first to feel the squeeze.
Writing for Harvard Business Review, Ron Ashkenas of Schaffer Consulting and the University of Houston’s Robert Hausmann propose a new approach to leadership training – one centered on real-world business problems.
If you struggle to secure buy-in for your proposals, then it might be time to change your strategy. There are a number of “issue-selling” tactics…
As the pace of business gets ever faster, leaders must learn to combine speed with effectiveness, say Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, writing for Harvard…
Become a great boss by thinking about the kind of boss you would hate to be, advises Avery Augustine, writing for Inc.com, via The Muse.…
Leadership is not all about you, write Sucheta Nadkarni and Andreas Richter on the University of Cambridge Judge Business School blog. A strong team makes…
Under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion – you sink to the level of your training. That’s just one of the lessons business coaches…
Becoming the authority in your field is a great way to grow your business, says Brian Horn, writing for Entrepreneur.com. The author outlines seven easy…
