The following are resources I shared on social media in the past week, with the accompanying quotations and my observations.
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The calmer we are, the stronger we are.
Great leaders lead by example — and are calm.
Candace Smith: “Silent Moments as an Etiquette Skill” (11-26-22).
“[O]ne of the most calming things to do is to step into silence.”
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Great leaders take responsibility for all aspects of an organization, including its management. Developing good managers begins with leading by example.
Jim Detert, Kevin Kniffin, and Hannes Leroy, MIT Sloan Management Review (Fall 2022):
“Saving Management From Our Obsession With Leadership:
Lofty notions of leadership have captivated our collective imagination — and we’ve underappreciated and underinvested in the everyday management skills that organizations desperately need.” (8-24-22).
“[I]mplementing a mission or vision is every bit as critical as imagining it, and we need to start treating it that way. That means bringing in more executives who value good management and continue to practice it in the upper ranks — and deliberately building these skills when developing midlevel folks who aspire to take on bigger jobs.”
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John Spence: “How To Turn Ideas Into Action” (11-21-22).
“[T]hree questions:
What does this mean to me?
How can I apply this idea?
What can I do right away?”
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Samuel Gregg: “Why Business Should Dispense with ESG” (12-1-22).
“Something else, however, is more fundamental. And that is the emergence of a measured self-confidence among business leaders in the essential rightness of focusing their organizations on the pursuit of profit. …. At stake is much more than the basic legitimacy of commerce. Also threatened are the very real economic and non-economic benefits that business delivers to society when commercial enterprises concentrate primarily on doing what they are designed to do: i.e., business.”
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Carmine Gallo: “How Great Leaders Communicate” (11-23-22).
“Transformational leaders overcommunicate. They repeat the mission so often, it becomes a mantra. …. If your mission stands for something, then stand up for it.”
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David Burkus: “The Secrets to High-Performing Teams” (11-28-22).
“The third secret to high-performing teams is that they build trust at a higher level than normal teams. Trust on a team is a prerequisite to honest discussions and productive conflict. Teams need to trust that they can speak up when they disagree and not have the conversation devolve into argument.”
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Carolyn Dewar, et al.: “Starting strong: Making your CEO transition a catalyst for renewal” (11-17-22).
“The best leaders in transition know that it is better to listen and find out what is really going on before making broad declarations or premature moves.
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A powerful tool to mobilize the organization in the desired direction is to distill the company’s transformational vision and strategy down to an elegantly simple ‘one-pager.'”
