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Maintaining a positive outlook in a downturn is incredibly important to individuals whose jobs have evaporated or to businesses whose work has dwindled. It’s not as easy as it sounds, as the many who’ve lost their jobs in the past year know. Workers and home-office inhabitants alike have seen their golden parachutes turn bronze, and watched employee severance packages shrivel. Venture capital and small business financing have also dried up. Regardless of whether you use a euphemistic adjective to describe the economy – soft, sluggish – or actually say the R-word, the bottom line remains the same. A business closes every three minutes, according to D&B, and we’re still nowhere near out of the woods.

If you’re operating within a team or contributing to a situation, you have to speak up. You have to ask questions, even at the risk of sounding stupid, and challenge ideas or practices that don’t seem to be delivering on the objectives. If you feel uncomfortable or unclear, it’s your responsibility to sort it out, not anyone else’s. And it’s not OK to keep quiet and then complain about something afterwards.

Do you live two lives? Why do you work? Is it simply to make money or does your job help your community and society? You might very well split your time between “working” and “providing service” to your community. But you might not be able to see how your day-to-day work provides a great service …

Organisations are often tied to a teamwork ideology. It’s just ‘the way things are done’ and how we are socially trained to think – isn’t it? There are trends in society that may change the way we think, the most important being the Internet and its applications. ‘Two heads are better than one’ assumes that heads (people) hold information. Of course they do, but in today’s wired world, a big part of the information we use in our daily work has relocated from heads to networks. You can find information either online by using search engines, or via networks that people are more or less loosely connected to (such as Facebook, Wikipedia or LinkedIn).

Stepping up to being a leader is a ‘state change’. It’s not – as many believe – a question of steps being put in place before it happens. It’s not a ‘tipping point’ from which a manager, armed with the right experience and the right circumstances, suddenly becomes a leader.

Here’s a topical, and radical, idea from Daniel Pink’s great blog: instead of making New Year’s resolutions, pledge not to change something in your life.

Here’s the next key concept: the foundation of all Leadership is Accountability. Accountability is being willing to make commitments and hold yourself to account for them, regardless of the circumstances. There are two aspects to your accountability: your willingness to make binding commitments for yourself, and your relationship with the circumstances that surround you.

Whether you’re thinking about sending a child to private school, where to go on holiday, or buying office supplies, every day you opt for one thing over another. Sometimes you’re choosing. Sometimes you’re deciding. Doing one when the other is called for can get in your way.