What it means to be a contrarian leader is often misunderstood. True contrarians do not try to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing, nor do they take a contrary stand just to be different. Contrarian leaders simply try to live in the future while everyone else is focused on living in the present.
At Some Point, You Have to Stop Repeating the Bad News.
When things go horribly wrong, leaders face the difficult challenge of repairing a reputation and credibility that is now suspect. This requires gathering the pertinent information and crafting a plan to respond that exudes the integrity and competence that will effectively address the misstep or error. Openly explaining what happened, why it happened, and what the remedy is going forward is all that can be done. People on the inside and outside naturally want to talk about this “news” and the shift in meaning it has created for them. They will ask repeatedly to go over the same ground as to why the event occurred and how it can be avoided in the future.
Trust in relationships, on a team, and within an enterprise is the critical building block of effectiveness. Without it, everyday tasks become burdensome and take longer, as people must find a way to get comfortable with what they are told. When trust is low, verification, second-guessing, and interpretation clog the ability to act quickly and smoothly. A lack of trust prevents a team from operating fluidly and without unnecessary steps. Establishing trust is an essential step in all great relationships and teams.
Unfortunately, building trust takes time. It is a conviction built slowly through experience. Trust requires a consistency and predictability proven through repeated interactions.
Nobel prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman passed away at the age of 90 a few days ago. Kahneman was a marvel. He proved through meticulous research that people’s mental biases — what he called kinks — warp their judgment and often lead them to act against their own self-interests. In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman made the case for rejecting intuition, the fast decision-making he called System 1 thinking, and to prefer a slow and deeper analysis where experience and data could be explored together (System 2 thinking). Fast thinking is emotional, while slow thinking is analytical. In his work, Kahneman set out to prove how wrong people can be and showed how experts tend to be overconfident and make fast predictions that lead to faulty judgments and decisions. According to Kahneman, too many important decisions tend to be driven by intuition, to the detriment of more favorable outcomes.
Keith R. Wyche uses his experience as a seasoned business leader and board director to present a candid discourse with real, actionable steps towards promoting real change in the corporate world. Professionals looking to embrace DE&I in their culture and improve the experience of their Black employees, colleagues, and leaders can displace the current systems of privilege and bias. Wyche’s insights and strategies can help any leader reinforce DE&I at all levels of their organization.
Good leaders are optimistic. By exuding optimism, they motivate, energize, and elevate the confidence of those around them. The ability to view challenge as opportunity, to believe in the potential of people and situations, and to celebrate short-term success without the fear of establishing a finish line is why teams stand behind optimistic leaders. Optimism is jet fuel for creating followership. Especially in the face of adversity and difficult times. Displaying leadership optimism is more than just having a cheery
The motivation behind offering criticism and critique to others has a profound impact on how people respond to feedback. It is painfully obvious to those on the receiving end whether a leader cares about them as people and whether the intention of their criticism is to make them better. Leaders who fail to spend the time to establish both the foundation of good intentions and caring will often find team members who disregard or resist their feedback.
People are suspicious of leaders who offer criticism without a clear motivation to help. They have the strong sense that evaluation and judgment without caring is cynical and scornful. And they would be right.
Leaders who are highly driven to learn and excel sometimes can become hypervigilant about everything in their world. Technically speaking, hypervigilance is an elevated state of constant assessment, usually regarding dangers and threats. For law enforcement and military professionals, this excited state of situational awareness can help to protect people from harm. But being on constant guard creates a host of problems.
The best leaders concede that they don’t have to have their way on many of the decisions critical for executing strategy. They know when to stand their ground over issues, which battles they must win, and when to allow the team to outflank them.
Sometimes, winning the argument is how to lose the team. But the vision, mission, and values of the team are never up for grabs. Input is welcome, but influence is unlikely to make for any real change. Good leaders defend the ground of values at all costs.
It is always a good idea not to let society or media define what we believe or how we should view the world or an issue. Homogenized thinking is always of a lower quality and is often wrongheaded.
Good leaders don’t leave the possibility of weak thinking to chance. They shape meaning by emphasizing the qualities underlying success and driving a narrative that people are empowered to define success in more realistic and personal terms.
Your success as a leader depends on it.
The most important ratio for a leader is not debt to equity, supervisor to employee, efficiency to cost, or price to earnings. The ratio that matters most for leadership success is the proportion of praise to criticism.
Leadership at its core is about making people and situations better. To help a colleague improve, leaders can emphasize what they believe the team member should amplify or do more of, or what they should do differently. Getting a colleague to do more of what they already do is all about positive reinforcement, such as praise, encouragement, compliment, and applause. To encourage others to do things differently, leaders turn to feedback, criticism, advice, and suggestion.
When Making Decisions, Acknowledge What You Don’t Know First
Brainstorming with colleagues to identify what the decision-makers need to know and what they don’t is a critical first step. This streamlines the information-gathering process and allows the team to create more clarity and certainty as they follow their preferred decision-making scheme. Acknowledging what you don’t know first seems intuitive, but too many decision-makers fail to do it. Instead, they dive right into their process and fail to identify the knowledge they must have to make a great decision. This is an easy fix.
In Culture Renovation, human capital expert Kevin Oakes shares a step-by-step blueprint for enacting a successful culture change initiative. Oakes’ approach to culture change, or rather culture renovation, draws on original research conducted by human capital research firm i4cp and follows three phases: plan, build, and maintain. The first phase of culture renovation centers on understanding the organization’s
existing culture to determine which elements should remain or be renovated. Next, Oakes describes how to build an organization’s newly renovated culture through consciously
collaborating, establishing a co-creation mindset, and providing training on the desired behaviors. The detailed guide concludes by sharing how to maintain a healthy culture once it has been established. Oakes takes one of the most daunting initiatives an organization can undergo and breaks the process down into actionable, easy-to-follow steps, ensuring that the best aspects of the culture remain.
Ironically, the more selfish a leader is to achieve personal growth and development, the better they are at helping others succeed. They learn about themselves with every choice they make for others. Even servant leaders appreciate the fact that they derive great self-satisfaction from service. The more they serve others, the more they learn how to serve themselves.
Perhaps the professor turned spiritual guru Ram Dass said it best: “I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people.” Working on themselves by helping others is what great leaders do. Think about it.