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A natural consequence of believing myths 1 and 2 – that it requires special qualities, skills, expertise and knowledge to be a leader today – is that there appears to be a shortage of the right kind of people. And if you believe that leadership is scarce, you will naturally constantly struggle to find a sufficient supply of capable leaders.

In a 2007 article The McKinsey Quarterly used the following example to make the point that nasty people don’t just make others feel miserable; they create economic problems for their companies:

When did you as a business leader last systematically assess the state of health of your organisation? I don’t mean its financial state – I bet you check on that all the time. Nor do I mean the structures, systems, policies, legal compliance and other concrete issues, that I am confident you keep an eye on all the time. I mean the body of the organisation – its heart, lungs and circulation!

You hear a lot about change management, and how to deal with it effectively. But what about the period between the old and the new – the neutral zone?

Everyone is given an acre of attitudes at birth. It’s yours to tend and garden and weed and live with. You can plant bitterness or good humor. Feel free to fertilize and tend the feelings and approaches that you want to spend time with. Unless you hurt someone, this acre is all yours.

These days, success at work is more and more dependent on your ability to influence the people around you. As we’ve seen in our recent exploration of mindsets, you can’t force, persuade, bully or instruct someone into changing their mindset. You have to communicate with them in a way to which they will respond positively. And everybody is wired differently.

It’s easy to blame external circumstances when you get stopped – your manager, lack of time, a change in the market… But if anything really stops you short in life, it’s likely to be a self-limiting belief: a thought about yourself, reinforced by emotion.

One way to transform constrictive mindsets into expansive ones is to take the following steps. Try it on yourself first – you need to understand how hard this can be before you try working on someone else!

Forgive me for blowing my own trumpet, but I just got this, unsolicited from an client…

Following on from yesterday’s blog about ‘us’ and ‘them’, I dug up this wonderful quote from Tom Peters’ ‘In Search of Excellence’, written in 1982. Sadly this kneejerk mindset is still all too evident in some organisations today!