Actionable strategies and techniques that are easy to understand and apply in real life.
In a fast-moving, ever-changing, dynamic work environment, the ability to collaborate effectively isn’t a necessity, it’s a superpower. When collaborating across teams, communication, coordination, visibility, execution speed, and decision-making can turn into a mess. Learn about the cross functional collaboration challenges and the steps managers can take to make it effective.
Authentic leadership goes wrong when leaders try to match their behaviors and actions to an idealized version of an authentic leader and feel exhausted and defeated when they fail to inspire the necessary changes in their teams and their organizations. By getting hung up on becoming their best versions, they fail to show up their authentic versions. To practice true authenticity, knowing what not to do is as important as knowing what to do.
Organizations that thrive are run by leaders who see opportunity in uncertainty, who cut through ambiguity, and those who lead with the mindset to gain clarity. Done right, ambiguity can be exhilarating, rewarding, and mentally stimulating. Done wrong, it can be exhausting, emotionally consuming, and even downright demotivating. Apply these 7 strategies to learn how to deal with ambiguity.
There are two types of people at work – those who like to make commitments and others who like to keep them. People who like to make commitments don’t pay much attention to how those things fit into their schedule. People who like to keep commitments are careful about their choices. They understand that doing something always comes at the cost of not doing something else.
A sense of control in our life not only rids us of the fear and anxiety that comes with feeling out of control, it’s the single most critical factor in helping us stay productive at work. It’s our internal sense of freedom to know that we have the autonomy to make corrections, drive to be persistent and the power to influence the outcome. Apply these strategies to feel in control, do more and achieve more.
Ostriches bury their heads in the sand when they sense danger assuming that the danger will pass if they just avoid it long enough. We humans are no different. When dealing with unpleasant information, or information that challenges us in a way that we don’t want to be challenged, we pretend the information doesn’t exist. We bury our heads in the sand just like the ostriches.
Negativity can be contagious. It may not be obvious at first, but it’s easy to get trapped into a negative person’s way of thinking if you are not careful around them. Left unhandled, their cynical, gloomy, and defeatist behavior can emotionally drain you, impact your productivity, and turn you into the very person you hated at first. Learn how to deal with a negative person without going crazy.
Becoming a manager isn’t easy. All the uncertainty and confusion can either leave you disoriented and feeling overwhelmed with a lack of control or you can embrace it and use it as the force to push ahead. You can succeed as a manager by looking beyond all the randomness and chaos to adopting a mentality where nothing can pull you down. You can lead and succeed by practicing these 20 principles.
Are you not getting the feedback you need because others aren’t giving it to you or is it because you aren’t taking the initiative to get it right? Getting the feedback that you need requires taking full responsibility with the belief that you have the power to drive your own growth at work as opposed to blaming someone else for not moving forward.
Delivering bad news to your boss is not exactly fun. Imagining how they would react, what they would say, and how they would judge you can be terrifying and reason enough to try to cover it up. But knowing that with the right strategies you can turn things around and even win their trust and respect, you can get over your fears and take the necessary steps.
Are you in a constant state of frenzy throughout the day moving from one meeting to the next only to be left exhausted, disoriented and grumpy? Don’t let the “too many meetings” and “this is a manager’s life” excuse go on for too long. Get over your own nonsense and start putting some sense into your work
Working with a dominant personality is not fun, but sometimes avoiding them is not an option either. Their authoritative behavior combined with a body language that reeks of dominance can be quite upsetting. When you can’t avoid or quit, what should you do? Learn to work with them
The person who makes it to the top isn’t the one who faces many hardships and obstacles along the way, it’s the one who persists and resists – persists in their efforts and resists the easy path to give up. In other words, it’s not our failure, but our reaction to it that determines where we end up
The simple three-letter word “yet” is the sound of possibility, a positive intervention in our life to help us see straight. The nudge we all need to take control of our life by looking beyond the obstacles in the present to the opportunities of tomorrow. “Yet” carries with it the expectation that we can reach our destination
Strategic thinking is a muscle that we all need to build because using it right at work can be a strategic advantage in your career growth as an individual. You need to cross the boundary of the comfort zone to think about an idea to its extreme without mental guardrails to put it down. You need to uncover new insights that moderate thinking would never surface
Promoting vacation time, taking breaks between work, doing walk-and-talk audio calls instead of video calls to deal with zoom fatigue, and even asking people to have no meeting days are all super useful techniques to deal with the problems of work related exhaustion, but by themselves they are not sufficient to solve the problem of burnout at work. That’s because work overload is just one of the causes of burnout
Irrespective of how much we tell our teams to move past failures and learn from mistakes, we know that it isn’t easy to accept a failure. The expectation to do well at work makes people believe that failure isn’t an option. There’s a huge difference between feelings of disappointment and letting those emotions turn into feelings of devastation. Building resilience as a team is all about understanding that difference
Leadership anxiety can be a good thing when managed well. It can inspire you to question your choices, confront your own feelings and engage proactively with the desire to do better. The problem occurs when you let your leadership anxiety prevent you from seeing the reality of your situation. When you are so caught up in your own anxiety that it fogs your ability to think and see clearly
When your team members are fighting or are otherwise engaged in an uncordial relationship, the rest of the team can’t function very well. Freedom to disagree with others cannot be boundaryless and it cannot come at the cost of creating a toxic work environment for the team. As a manager, it’s your job to define a healthy boundary between constructive disagreements and destructive behavior
Caring for your people and holding them accountable for their work aren’t mutually exclusive. You don’t need to be nice and kind to people to show them you care. And caring for them doesn’t mean you don’t care about the outcomes. Build accountability at work by helping your employees differentiate between taking responsibility and showing accountability
Saying no is never easy. And saying no to your boss may actually backfire like it did in my case. But, saying yes to things you don’t want to do shouldn’t be an option either. You can either choose comfort in the moment by saying yes and then live with the regret afterwards or you can face brief discomfort in the moment by saying no to live a life in which you can feel at ease with your decisions later. Choice is yours
Robert Iger, now Executive Chairman of The Walt Disney Company is the former CEO of Disney. During his 15 years as CEO of Disney and as President of ABC Television prior to that, he led the company to amazing new heights. Under his leadership, Disney’s market capitalization increased from $48 billion to $257 billion. Every leader needs to embody his personal leadership lessons
The environment in which your employees operate can place a bound on what they can achieve. A powerful and empowering culture can enable them to achieve transformational results, while troubling workplace attitudes and behaviors can limit their effectiveness and undermine what they can accomplish
From strategy to execution to results, no leader can be effective without the foundations of trust. Trust is the single most critical driver of every leader’s effectiveness and the hidden element in the formula of every business’s success. Trust can only be earned and evolved by consistently practicing positive behaviors over long periods of time
When you meet a new person, you take time to decide if it’s a relationship worth investing in or not. When it comes to your job though, do you apply the same level of due diligence? Companies are after all in some sense similar to people. You can think of a company as a group of people with a shared identity. Spend effort into knowing this identity as you would with any new person. Determine if it’s a relationship worth investing
Being good at what you do cannot make you stand out at work. How you operate and interact with others play a crucial role in your success at work. You need to adopt powerful behaviors that can make you influential, impactful and move you forward. Adopting and practicing these behaviors will bring about the biggest positive change in your work life
Our life is nothing but a sum total of our decisions. From health to relationships to professional and personal growth, our decisions form an integral part of our overall well-being. An understanding of why you make bad decisions will profoundly enhance the success of all your future decision-making by preventing you from making choices you end up regretting
To delegate effectively, managers need to be intentional about the work that only they need to do and create clarity for their team on the rest. They have to learn to invest in those around them by letting go of control. Giving up control can feel hard, but it’s also necessary for growth. It’s the only way to scale for impact in an organization
The secret to getting ahead is not just doing great work, it also requires the ability to navigate office politics, not in an insincere or manipulative way, but rather as a skill to better handle the politics that goes on inside your organization. You simply can’t win people based on logic and rationality
Most managers discard the notion that they could be toxic due to a flawed assumption about what contributes to toxicity. The standard list of toxic behaviors is well known. What misses attention are the subtle behaviors that also impact employees’ well-being. If you are a manager, open yourself to the idea that your actions might be unintentionally contributing to a toxic work environment
What’s more crucial than not promoting the person who isn’t ready for one? The right kind of communication. Because this is where most managers fail to do their job. As the manager fails to communicate, the employees continue developing a chip on their shoulders with their unfulfilled wishes and desires. It amplifies every time they lose an opportunity to get promoted
Effects of the role conflict can vary from person to person. While some learn to deal with the friction that comes with a role conflict and thrive by staying positive and seeking measures to counteract it, others stop functioning and stop being productive by choosing to stay with stress and resentment. Learn to increase your productivity and general well-being when dealing with a role conflict
How can you bring your best to every situation when dealing with the pressure of high expectations? Performing under pressure isn’t some innate talent. Anyone can learn to tackle it. You may have all the expertise, skills and the knowledge to do well, but if you don’t know how to handle pressure situations well, pressure will make you do worse, and lead you to fail utterly
Growth mindset in the workplace shows up when hard work, determination and perseverance are valued over talent. Employees who work for growth mindset organizations have far more trust in their company and a greater sense of empowerment. They welcome challenges which makes them more successful learners and better contributors to their organizations. Learn to promote this mindset
Any manager looking to grow into a leader needs to do a self-evaluation of their skills to the demands of the role. It’s only by staying true to yourself, you can embrace the role with openness and curiosity. Developing your leadership style is always going to be a work in progress. There’s no end state. But recognising a few essential traits can get you started and help you identify if you are ready for the leadership position
Most of us have many desires at work. We fantasize about a positive future. But we are always too busy or too lazy to turn them into goals. Without defining what it is that we want, we let many opportunities slip by. We fail to make the best use of every situation and let distractions eat away into our mental energy and time. Goal setting mitigates the problem by helping us step outside our dreams to execute in reality
Are you a bad manager standing in the way of your employee’s true potential? You may believe that you are clearing the path for employees to produce great work. What you may end up doing is standing over their heads thereby preventing them to think clearly. You know what’s worst about the worst boss? They are ignorant of their own ignorance. Learn to recognize signs that lead to bad boss behaviour
Confident humility is the confidence in a leader’s ability to make the right decision while acknowledging that they need others to do it right. It’s knowing what they don’t know and having trust in what they do. It’s having faith in their strengths, while also being aware of their weaknesses. It’s accepting that they don’t have the required knowledge, but enough confidence in their ability to acquire that knowledge
Managing conflict demands that we calm down and think clearly. Instead of letting our reaction slip through our unconscious, we need to take charge of it in conscious awareness. Instead of letting destructive patterns of behaviour be our default reaction, we can choose to engage in positive action. Seeing the conflict for what it is and not how it manifests at first
Even with the best of intentions, giving constructive feedback is hard. It isn’t intuitive and most of us aren’t good at it. Even when we dare to do the right thing, we may not do it right. Telling people what they are doing right and wrong is not enough, you need to learn the art of giving constructive criticism and positive feedback to your employees
Why are we so afraid to ask for help when we need it. Is it because we are worried others will question our intelligence and smartness? Asking for help signals self awareness of our own limitations, humility to accept what we don’t know and the courage to ask for it. It’s a sign that we are confident in our abilities to tackle whatever is standing in our way to get to where we need to go
Path to success goes through failure. It’s scattered with mistakes, big and small and when confronted with challenges, we emerge on the other side more confident than we began. Instead of letting self-justification cloud our judgment, we can learn to embrace those painful moments that are essential for progress
Greater achievement comes from realizing how our thinking impacts our goals. By adopting the right mindset and using the right mode of thinking, we can overcome the challenges that stand in the way of achieving our goals. Learn when to use the big picture “why” and when you need nitty-gritty “what” based thinking
How do you deal with adversity? Are you an optimist who is briefly disturbed by the experience but soon bounce back and storms out of the phase with the belief that it’s only a rough patch or a pessimist who continues to be paralyzed by fear of failure and spirals into hopelessness with the belief in the permanent nature of their situation. Learn to shift from learned helplessness to learned optimism
No doubt some people are bad at delivering criticism. But aren’t we far worse at receiving it? We don’t know when it’s useful to tune in to someone’s criticism and when it makes sense to politely shove it aside and move on. It is easy to ignore feedback with the attitude that it doesn’t apply to you, but accepting the uncomfortable truth, even if it’s painful at first is the only way to grow
Leadership isn’t about personal greatness and entitlement, it’s the humility to lead with courage and passion. Leaders who focus on their brilliant mindset spend time and money in enhancing their image, and use people in the company to feed their ego as opposed to leaders with a growth mindset who show drive and enthusiasm to grow their companies
Are your actions inline with the life you want to lead? The problem of work life balance isn’t about more work, it’s about staying productive in what you are doing. There will always be some obstacles, something more to be done to finally get the life you want, but knowing that these obstacles are also a part of your life can help you start now, this very moment
What’s your contribution to the communication structure of your team? What assumptions did you make, how did you separate what’s acceptable from what’s not and what problems do you see in the current way of working together. Letting every team member develop their own communication playbook is not only inefficient, it leaves a lot to interpretation
When leaders don’t practice effective listening, they are disconnected from their people and their problems. These leaders fail to recognise that true value is created only when people listen to each other, when they are free to share an opinion and when they feel heard and respected for their views
Learn how communication varies across cultures and how subtle differences in communication patterns can have a tremendous impact on how we understand one another and how we convey and interpret information
Lead with vulnerability. It’s the courage to let your guard down, courage to be seen, courage to accept you don’t know, courage to acknowledge mistakes, disconnect your identity from your ideas, embrace discomfort and the ultimate belief that you are not perfect, you are always work in progress
