Leadership Lab Blog

There’s a seemingly simple exercise that can be very powerful in helping you identify how to strengthen your own leadership. It involves asking yourself five questions; you need to challenge yourself and be open to changing your assumptions. You might prefer to do this in private; or if you are brave you might do it with a coach, mentor, friend, business partner or life partner.

Can you demonstrate effective listening? This question falls within a cluster of behaviours that we call respect and empathy. This is important, because although listening is a skill that you can improve with effort and attention, it demonstrates that it’s part of a broader competency about your ability to genuinely connect with others.

It is easy to get disillusioned, feel defeated or beat yourself up when things don’t go as planned when, in the face of obstacles, you need to do the exact opposite. You need to admit to your frustrations and negative emotions, be kind to yourself, re-group, and if necessary, change your strategy. You need to get practical, emotional, mental and/or spiritual support to keep you going and moving forward.

When you set out to achieve your goals, do you expect your path to be straightforward, and assume that by positive thinking you’ll avoid any setbacks? Or are you not expecting any setbacks? Setbacks can be a sign that you are moving forward. So rather than be put off by obstacles, you can accept them as part of the journey and learn how to deal with them. Taking the metaphor of a car on a journey, you can stay parked outside your house and not encounter any traffic jams, diversions or oil changes. But you won’t get very far sitting outside your house! Once you venture out there may be difficulties ahead, but you also might find yourself somewhere new and fantastic.

In an intriguing set of experiments a few years ago, a group of American social scientists, led by Adam Galinsky at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, used the E test and some other techniques to investigate the connection between power and empathy.

Few of you would choose to do things you are not proud of – personally or in the business environment. However, recent years have seen a period of collective corporate madness, which seems to have started in the mid 1980s and appears to be ending now.

How can you become more effective in your verbal communication? By listening actively and questioning effectively. If you don’t question effectively during verbal communication, then it’s unlikely you’ll understand what the speaker is talking about and you certainly won’t be capable of offering help.

Many of us feel different when we return to work from a break. If you come back with better ideas, more energy and more creativity, it may be because your way of working is out of balance, or perhaps you’re just working too hard.

Change is inevitable for individuals, businesses, communities and nations. Your only choice is how you work with it – it’s as simple as that.

Risk management isn’t the most exciting part of running a business, but it’s crucial to realise just how important it is to get the balance of risk right. Too little risk and you can run a significant risk in itself – that your business does not grow or develop its full potential. Too much of it and you run the risk of losing everything, or at least, more than you’d like!