Marty Linsky
Leadership is about disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.
Content: Quotation | Author: Marty Linsky | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Leadership
Claire Hughes Johnson
Build self-awareness to build mutual awareness. If you don’t understand yourself—your work style preferences, your motivators, your strengths, your blind spots—you’re going to have trouble being an effective manager and a leader.
Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development
Emily Anhalt
Successful leaders keep an eye on the personality traits that have helped them achieve their success. Strengths without self-awareness become weaknesses. Strengths examined regularly become superpowers.
Content: Quotation | Author: Emily Anhalt | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development
Warning: Upgrade your personal operating model
Effective leaders continually adapt their priorities, roles, time, and energy practices to stay ahead of new realities. Here’s why you need to do the same.
Content: Article | Authors: Arne Gast, Suchita Prasad | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Personal Development
David Reimer, Harry Feuerstein, Adam Bryant
We have developed two simple frameworks—an authenticity index and a self-awareness index… To gauge authenticity, we ask an executive to choose ten from a long list of values that they hold dearest. We then ask 20 to 30 people who work with the executive to select from the same list the top ten values that best describe the leader. Comparing the candidate’s top ten to … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Bryant, David Reimer, Harry Feuerstein | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership, Management
Gianpiero Petriglieri
Leadership, at its core, is an argument with tradition. As a leader, you are always relating to a tradition that you are trying to preserve, expand, or change. That means, a priori, that you must care about the tradition. Or, more precisely, you must care about what the tradition is trying to accomplish.
Content: Quotation | Author: Gianpiero Petriglieri | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Leadership
Ginni Rometty
Resilience is the most important characteristic, along with curiosity, for any leader. It’s not exactly about what you know; it’s about those two dimensions. I think there are two ways to develop resilience: one is through the relationships you have… The second way is through your attitude.
Content: Quotation | Author: Ginni Rometty | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Leadership
Why so many bad bosses still rise to the top
Narcissism. Overconfidence. Low EQ. Why do we persist in selecting for leadership traits that hamper organizational progress—and leave the right potential leaders in the wrong roles?
Content: Article | Authors: Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Leadership, Organizational Behavior
Roberto Setúba
All CEOs need to ask themselves, “What do you want to be remembered for—as a great person or a person who made the company great?” If you want to make the company great, then you must think about the company first, yourself second. It’s human nature to want to be recognized, so it’s not easy to put the institution ahead of yourself.
Content: Quotation | Author: Roberto Setúba | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership
Five Essential Elements to Build the Capital You Need to Lead
The path to leadership can seem unclear in competitive organizations. In the book The Treasure You Seek, Archie L. Jones offers a roadmap to help aspiring leaders discover their strengths, communicate effectively, and build meaningful connections.
Content: Article | Authors: Archie L. Jones, Dina Gerdeman | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Career, Leadership, Personal Development
Nathan Furr
We all want possibility, transformation, change, and innovation, but the only way to get to that is through uncertainty. If we want those things, we need to get better at navigating uncertainty as individual leaders, as teams, and as organizations. Organizations need to ask themselves, “Do we have the ability to face uncertainty? What is our uncertainty ability?” I believe uncertainty ability is like a … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior
Nathan Furr
Great leaders challenge their organizations. They see the opportunity that uncertainty creates to learn quickly, to do new things. But they also, on the other hand, support their people and pay attention to the anxiety that uncertainty creates. Great leaders create a rich soil to sustain their people.
Content: Quotation | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Leadership
Jeffrey Pfeffer
No one is hired to win a popularity contest—you’re hired to get things done. You’re hired to make things happen, so when you show up to lead a group of people, those people want many things from you. What they don’t necessarily want from you is your authentic self.
What they need from you is inspiration. They need energy, even if you’re not feeling energetic that … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development
Turning Superheroes into a Super Leadership Team
In a complex, fast-changing world, leadership teams are facing challenges that are bigger than ever while trying to reach goals that are sometimes seemingly at odds. A super leadership team must:
- Guide the organization’s transformation while ensuring near-term performance.
- Shift from being a group of individual “superheroes” championing their own domains to putting the enterprise first—sometimes at the expense of team members’ individual agendas.
- Recognize the necessary behaviors
Content: Article | Authors: Brittany Heflin, Jennifer Thomas, Jim Hemerling, Megan Lindley | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership
Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer
The strategy, purpose, and values discussions—what Kevin Sharer, the former CEO of Amgen, calls a company’s “social architecture”—have often felt like separate exercises, but they now need to work in concert. “If you don’t have a social architecture that’s solid, well-accepted, and can be operationalized against the most important decisions you make, that’s leadership’s fault,” said Sharer.
Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Goals, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy, Values
Sally Helgesen
Overconfidence should actually be viewed as a warning sign that someone will turn out to be a poor leader — immune to feedback, resistant to change, and unlikely to consult others when making key decisions.
Content: Quotation | Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Organizational Behavior
Can you master the inner game of leadership?
Conflicting demands and challenges must be managed. Here’s how to do it.
Content: Article | Authors: Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Leadership
What Kind of Leader Are You? How Three Action Orientations Can Help You Meet the Moment
Executives who confront new challenges with old formulas often fail. The best leaders tailor their approach, recalibrating their “action orientation” to address the problem at hand, says Ryan Raffaelli. He details three action orientations and how leaders can harness them.
Content: Article | Authors: Ben Rand, Ryan Raffaelli | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Decision Making, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development
Harrison Monarth
It’s not enough to make sure the right people are on the bus and in the right seat on the bus, as Jim Collins enlightened us in his book Good to Great. Great leaders understand that even the best players on their team need coaching and inspiration.
Content: Quotation | Author: Harrison Monarth | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Training & Development
Scott Keller
The best CEOs don’t just tell people, “This is where we’re going,” and expect them to follow. They understand the underlying psychology at play. For example, researchers have done experiments where they give lottery tickets to a group and half get a ticket with an assigned number and the other half gets a blank piece of paper where they write their own number. Then, before … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management
