New work needs empowerment
Leaders, Do you need to control everything in your business? Are your people excessively reliant on you asking your permission for every tiny detail? How do you empower your people? Do you give them credit consistently? Leadership of today is quite different from that of Caesar, Plato, the Wilhelminian time, or the post-war period. Today's leaders utilize power-sharing, trust, team-building, and empowerment. It is important to think through what empowerment means and how best to employ it so your organization can harness its strength. Empowerment sounds great, but leadership is principally about the human dimension so nothing is always simple. What is (psychological) empowerment? Empowerment is made up of four aspects: a sense of real meaning in one’s work, a sense of making an impact through the contribution you make at work, feeling competent about your capacity to do your work, and a sense you have freedom to make choices [...]
The Dark Triad or the fifty shades of gray in leadership
Leaders, How dark is your personality? Are you a manipulative person? Can you switch off your empathy? Are you completely obsessed with yourself? If your answer is yes, you might want to pay attention to your dark side. “Dark” leaders may be toxic but still be as effective as pro-social, self-controlled, and “good” leaders. Let’s explore. The Dark Triad refers to personality traits that are different, yet related. These are narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Having them makes a person difficult to manage. Taken together, the most powerful tendency underlying all three Dark Triad traits is a knack for exploiting others. What are the three traits of the Dark Triad? 1. Narcissism: Seeks praise This term came about because of the Greek myth of Narcissus, a young man who fell in love with his reflection after looking at himself in a pond of water. He became so engrossed in it [...]
Time to forgive
Leaders*, What are your strategies for releasing pent-up anger? How do you ensure you communicate from a place of empathy? On a scale of 1 – 10 (10 = all-time hero), how good are you at accepting people for who they are (including yourself) with all their peculiarities, imperfections, and flaws? The biggest barrier to growth, healing and progress is anger, both, on a personal and organizational level. Anger, revenge and blame are unproductive responses to trauma, harm and injustice that you or members of the organization may have experienced. They tie up energy in destroying rather than creating. Exceptional leaders constantly make a lot of mistakes, own them and learn from them. They practice, foster and enable forgiveness, though it often feels counterintuitive. Forgiveness is a universal human virtue that occurs in collaboration with other virtues such as compassion, humility, gratitude, hope and love. Forgiveness involves acknowledging and reframing [...]
A better person every day
You know, I always thought that as a child, I suffered the most. Recently I found out, every one of my siblings, thinks they suffered the most. With 4 children and countless babies (mom babysits until I was in my 20s), my childhood was always like an organized chaos. There was never a moment of silence. You learn to navigate through the noise and pressure and people around you, but yet I always longed to be alone. My dad and me hanging out and having tea at a roadside stall back home in Malaysia My father is a man beyond his years. In his 20s, he got married to my mom, by the time he was 32, he had 5 additional mouths to fill. He worked two jobs, and studied in the night to get certified in certain fields of his work. We kept moving cities and houses [...]
The power of gratitude
Leaders*, Well, it’s the time of the year again to reflect on what we have and appreciate. What have you been particularly grateful for? Who deserves a heartfelt gesture of gratitude? Have you seen everyone and all contributions on your team? When it comes to business, it is easy to fall into the trap of not seeing people whom we work with. Been there, done that. Not good. What I learned as relates to relationships at work and in life is that nothing (absolutely nothing) can be taken for granted. And recognizing team members actually impacts business results. Gratitude helps you see the positive things in life, and it is the engine of asset-based thinking (as opposed to deficit-based thinking). Deficit thinking creates a mentality of fear, of failure of never being able to rise above the situation. It creates a culture where change takes an enormous amount of effort [...]
Aha, Woohoo and Wow: Design Thinking
Leaders, How do you promote innovation and creativity? Do you know what your customers or users really want? Are you allowed to experiment and possibly fail? Which product designs do you love? As a non-technical person, I am wowed by the aesthetics and functionality of Apple products. I also love the experience of getting a good Starbucks coffee, and I admire companies like AirBnB, 3M and Pepsi who prioritize design. Great design has that “wow”-factor that makes products and services more desirable and more appealing to users. Great design has become a key differentiator that drives organizations to outperform the market. “We have to be able to adapt to new situations. It’s another form of the definition of intelligent behavior.” Hasso Plattner, German entrepreneur and philanthropist (*1944) IDEO defines design thinking as “a process for creative problem solving that transforms organizations and inspires innovation.”. Design thinking attempts to produce the [...]