Perfectly Awesome

These two principles are equally powerful and critical to manage behavior, but the order matters.

Discover the power of examples in shaping our lives. Explore quotes on example and how they inspire us to reach new heights.

What exactly is psychological safety? It’s a term that’s used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase “team psychological safety”: 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important? 3) How has the idea evolved? 4) How do you know if your team has it? 5) How do you create psychological safety? 6) What are common misconceptions?

Corporate leadership today is more public than ever before thanks to digital communication and the web. The status quo has been upended by the ease with

Have you ever wondered about internal organization dynamics and why some groups of people (who aren’t on the same team) are more successful than others? Why different “tribes” inside the organization seem to be at war with one another lowering performance in increasing politics? Why certain groups of people never seem to do anything? Or why …

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. An approachable and authentic CEO is essential to fostering a high-performance, open communications culture.

Here’s what the best leaders do.

U.S. Army Engineer School Commandant’s Reading List

How to minimize the drama and keep your team on track.

I’ve found the following to be common (and not easily taught) in people whose product skills I admire.

John Farrell took his team from the bottom of their division last year to the 2013 World Series with a set of tactics every manager should learn.

“I’ve probably revised this investor pitch deck 200 times,” a founder told me recently. She’d met with more than 50 potential investors before closing a seed round last month. This might sound excessive to some, but her experience is not unusual. Entrepreneurs often spend hundreds of hours raising funds from angel and venture capital investors. While these activities are clearly important, analysis of new data on startups suggests that founders should also dedicate significant time to something that many people overlook: recruiting great mentors. This simple strategy can increase a company’s odds of success more than almost anything else.

Awesome List of resources on leading people and being a manager. Geared toward tech, but potentially useful to anyone. - LappleApple/awesome-leading-and-managing

The home of Process Excellence covers topics from Business Process Management (BPM) to Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI, Lean Six Sigma and more. Latest news, freshest insight and upcoming events and webinars.

Apple is famous for not engaging in the focus-grouping that defines most business product and marketing strategy. Which is partly why Apples products and advertising are so insanely great. They have the courage of their own convictions, instead of the opinions of everyone else’s whims. On the subject, Steve Jobs loves to quote Henry Ford […]

Leadership Now is a leading source for leadership development and analysis. We believe that anyone can make a difference by leading from where they are.

"The success of your startup is determined before you ship a single line of code." Okay, you’re right, Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese war general and author

We all know that leaders need vision and energy, but after an exhaustive review of the most influential theories on leadership–as well as workshops with thousands of leaders and aspiring leaders–the authors learned that great leaders also share four unexpected qualities. The first quality of exceptional leaders is that they selectively reveal their weaknesses (weaknesses, not fatal flaws). Doing so lets employees see that they are approachable. It builds an atmosphere of trust and helps galvanize commitment. The second quality of inspirational leaders is their heavy reliance on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions. Such leaders are good “situation sensors”–they can sense what’s going on without having things spelled out for them. Managing employees with “tough empathy” is the third quality of exceptional leadership. Tough empathy means giving people what they need, not what they want. Leaders must empathize passionately and realistically with employees, care intensely about the work they do, and be straightforward with them. The fourth quality of top-notch leaders is that they capitalize on their differences. They use what’s unique about themselves to create a social distance and to signal separateness, which in turn motivates employees to perform better. All four qualities are necessary for inspirational leadership, but they cannot be used mechanically; they must be mixed and matched to meet the demands of particular situations. Most important, however, is that the qualities encourage authenticity among leaders. To be a true leader, the authors advise, “Be yourself–more–with skill.”

A company study found that a manager’s technical skills were far less valued by employees than people skills.

Tastes great, less filling

It’s really hard.

Fight the Good Fight The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. Try Honey Before Vinegar If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. On the contrary … …

The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership explores the classical figures to determine the ten crucial axioms of leadership. Rule 1. Know Theyself. Rule 2 ...

The ability to get issues on the table and work through them constructively is critical to having a healthy culture. Managers can normalize productive conflict on your team by using an exercise to map out the unique value of each role and the tensions that should exist among them. Draw a circle and divide that circle into enough wedges to represent each role on your team. For each role, ask: What is the unique value of this role on this team? On which stakeholders is this role focused? What is the most common tension this role puts on team discussions? Answer those questions for each member of the team, filling in the wedges with the answers. As you go, emphasize how the different roles are supposed to be in tension with one another. With heightened awareness and a shared language, your team will start to realize that much of what they have been interpreting as interpersonal friction has actually been perfectly healthy role-based tension.

It’s important to understand that when you, as a leader, communicate with your team, using weaker words weakens your message and blunts your ability to inspire people. It’s not enough to just throw thoughts out there and hope for the best. You need to actively recommend ideas and assert their worthiness in all of your communications. For example, consider these “power words”: “I’m proposing (not “sharing”) an idea that will make our process more efficient.” “I’m suggesting (not “sharing”) a new logo that better conveys our brand message.” “I’m recommending (not “sharing”) a campaign to make our workplace more diverse.” Ultimately, audiences respond more actively to big points than to small words, but thoughtful leaders need to assess both, knowing that the more powerfully they come across — even in small ways — the greater impact they have on the people they hope to inspire.

Industrial genius Carl Braun believed that clear thinking and clear communication go hand in hand. Here the guide on writing productively to get things done.

"Unconscious leadership happens when we aren't self-aware, which puts fear in the driver's seat."

The soft skills are what matter most.

The military's toughest training challenges have a lot in common with outdoor sufferfests like the Barkley Marathons and the Leadville Trail 100: you have to be fit and motivated to make the starting line, but your mind and spirit are what carry you to the end. A Ranger graduate breaks down an ordeal that shapes some of the nation's finest soldiers.

Airline pilot Alfred Haynes and other leaders who’ve saved lives show that modest people can achieve miracles under pressure.

How to bend people to your will.

Why do issues remain open secrets in organizations, where multiple employees know about a problem or a concern, but no one publicly brings it up? Researchers recently explored this in a set of studies. They found that as issues become more common knowledge among frontline employees, the willingness of any individual employee to bring those issues to the attention of the top-management decreased. Instead of speaking up, what they observed among their participants was something like the bystander effect, a psychological phenomena describing how people stay on the sidelines as passive bystanders, waiting for others to act rather than do something themselves. If managers want to avoid the bystander effect so that problems don’t go unresolved, they should tell employees that their voices are not redundant and that they need to share their opinions even if others have the same information.

The most successful outlaws live by a code, and in many ways John Perry Barlow was an archetypal American outlaw all of his life.