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

[ Read more ]

Can you master the inner game of leadership?

Conflicting demands and challenges must be managed. Here’s how to do it.

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.

A CEO’s First 1,000 Days Begins with the First 100

The initial 100 days are a time for boldness and clarity—a time when CEOs can express the purest form of their vision for the company.

  • CEOs should create an integrated narrative that lays out their ambition as well as their plans for transformation, stakeholder management, talent assessment, and communications.
  • In addition to laying out their ambition and plans, they also have an opportunity to step outside their

[ Read more ]

The First 90 Hours: What New CEOs Should—and Shouldn’t—Do to Set the Right Tone

New leaders no longer have the luxury of a 90-day listening tour to get to know an organization, says John Quelch. He offers seven steps to prepare CEOs for a successful start, and three missteps to avoid.

The Five Cs Of Trust

Creating a high-trust environment isn’t easy, but applying these five principles on a day-to-day basis will get you there—and closer to real resiliency.

Admiral Jacky Fisher and the Art of Disruptive Leadership

Firms around the world strive for disruptive leadership. Through a case study of Admiral Jacky Fisher, who completely disrupted the immensely powerful British Royal Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, preparing it for the onset, just four years later, of World War I, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp identifies six key characteristics of disruptive leadership.

Class Takeaways: The Frinky Science of the Human Mind

Five lessons in five minutes — how to build emotional connections that back up your decisions.

Why Leaders Need to Broaden Their World View

Bias can marginalize employees and lessen their contributions. Leaders need to take corrective action to get the best out of their teams.

A Framework for Leaders Facing Difficult Decisions

Many traditional decision-making tools fall short when it comes to the complex, subjective decisions that today’s leaders face every day. In this piece, the author provides a simple framework to help guide leaders through these difficult decisions. By interrogating the ethics (what is viewed as acceptable in your organization or society), morals (your internal sense of right and wrong), and responsibilities associated with your specific … [ Read more ]

Can You Handle the Truth?

Three ways for leaders to stop missing essential information from across their organization.

What Machine Learning Teaches Us about CEO Leadership Style

Tarun Khanna and Prithwiraj Choudhury use machine-learning technology to look for links between a CEO’s communication style and company performance.

6 Steps Leaders Can Take to Get the Most Out of Feedback

Business publications are filled with articles about feedback: how important it is for leaders, how leaders can both give and receive it, what happens when leaders don’t get it, and even what to do if someone is not open to feedback they have been given. The focus tends to be on the transfer of data.

What is less explored is how leaders should respond once they … [ Read more ]

Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often, innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why.

Editor’s Note: for more on this theme, read “Visionary, Salesman and Pragmatist Model of Business Succes.”

Five Practices of the Most Change-Ready Leaders

We have identified five leadership meta-practices of athletic CEOs. Each of them allows leaders to effectively manage a particular challenge. Within each meta-practice, we found a number of very specific behavior strategies, which we called leadership practices.

Jim Collins: On Leadership In America

Chief Executive magazine interviews Jim Collins. This is the first of five parts.

Adam Grant’s Simple Matrix to Get Employees (or Kids) More Engaged and Creative

When it comes to praise, leaders of any type (be they managers, parents, or coaches) hold unique power. The actions they exalt become standards of success, while those they critique become standards of failure.
 
Too often, leaders praise the wrong things and leave good work unremarked upon. The effect is that the people over whom they hold influence (be they employees, children, or mentees) are more … [ Read more ]