Archive for category: Uncategorized

You may not believe in ghosts, but your ancestors definitely haunt you.

No, you don’t need to call the Ghostbusters; Deborah Liu, the president and CEO of Ancestry, told us in our podcast interview it’s their influence that continues to shape you through the generations. Their decisions continue to make an indelible difference today. It makes perfect sense; for example, would you be enjoying your current success if your great-grandparents hadn’t immigrated to your current country? Would you even exist if a marriage a century ago hadn’t been arranged? The list goes on.

Your leadership skills link directly to your ancestors, too. For example, family heritage affects your resilience.

Deb references studies demonstrating that merely knowing your family history helps build resilience. People draw strength from their roots. Often, that strength comes from knowing about the adversity some of your ancestors faced. If they could overcome their life-or-death travails, a difficult project at work takes on a much more balanced perspective. As Deb says, “We are the history of thousands of people who made millions of decisions that bring us the life we have today.”

Keep this in mind as a leader; when your employees can bring their whole selves to work, including their histories, they can draw from that collective strength, forging more resilient and adaptable teams.

More broadly, your leadership draws from community.

Wherever your family settled, they didn’t do it alone. Just as today, immigration happened in waves throughout human history. People rapidly mingle with other population groups, forging strong ties and building supportive communities. This creates all kinds of invisible networks of support: family, mentors, neighbors, colleagues, towns and boroughs, and so on. We like to think we achieve success on our own, but the reality is we do nothing in true isolation. Those communities are bolstering you in ways you most often take for granted; even something as simple as a neighbor letting your dog out so you can wrap up an important proposal can mean the difference between a promotion and staying stuck as a junior manager.

As a leader, make support visible at work. Foster a sense of community with team building, mentorship programs, and collaborative team structures – any opportunity for employees to connect and support each other will boost morale, increase engagement, and help people feel valued. Community is, in a word, empowering.

As you navigate ever more complex challenges in our continually changing world, resilience, community, and collaboration form your recipe for more effective leadership. You’ll develop professional humility, too; with an eye on the past, it’s easy to see that leadership isn’t about individual achievement, but empowering and elevating your team as a whole.

Your past makes you future-ready.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our podcast episode Looking Back to Look Ahead: Ancestry’s CEO on Leadership, Tech, and Knowing Your Roots.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

You trust us.

Trust is the fuel behind any relationship. Each week, you trust the information we curate for these articles is accurate and factual…even insightful. You trust your friends to support you in good times and bad. And your team trusts you to support them and guide them to success.

In fact, trust is the cornerstone of effective leadership. Without it, you can’t inspire your team, and they can’t rely on any information you give them. When your organization loses trust, it also loses customers, partners, and staff.

So how do you build trust?

Catherine Teitelbaum, Amazon‘s Head of Family Trust, shared the hard-won insights she’s gained overseeing (even founding) safety and trust programs for various tech firms.

First, understand that trust-building is incremental. Think of trust as a decorative wall, and each positive action or interaction adds another gleaming brick. The wall grows slowly and steadily. But negative actions are overpowering; each one is like a sledgehammer that swings in and shatters that wall. So be consistent: make sure your actions align with your words, and be a reliable presence for your team.

Lead with authenticity and transparency. Bad news in itself doesn’t erode trust; hiding it does. Teams (and customers) need open communication. Without it, you send the signal that you don’t trust them, so why should they trust you in return? For leaders, authenticity becomes self-transparency, being honest about your shortcomings not just with your team, but just as critically, with yourself. When you know and express your limits, your team will be more open to stepping in to fill the gaps.

Be resilient and adaptable. Leaders must expect challenges; they’re inevitable. Navigating them is part of leading – we wouldn’t need leaders in the first place if everything always ran perfectly and smoothly! The best leaders go beyond resilience, and actually embrace challenges, seeing them as opportunities to learn and grow. That enthusiasm readily spreads to your team, making setbacks a mere crouch as you prepare to spring forward. In fact, this aspect of trust makes your team more innovative. As they see you adapting and welcoming new ideas and approaches, they’re more willing to share their own ideas and insights.

Spread trust throughout the organization. Customers keep organizations alive; their transactions with your company are relationships. Violate their trust, and the relationship goes away. To value and nurture trust organization-wide, clearly communicate the firm’s values and the behaviors expected from all staff. Just as important, demonstrate that leadership trusts the staff: give them some degree of autonomy, and the ability to take ownership of their work.

We really can’t overstate the value of trust for leaders. It keeps your crew steadfast as you navigate every storm, and helps the full team surge ahead in clear weather. Morale, loyalty, productivity: they’re all bolstered. Just remember that building trust is far more than simply keeping your promises; it’s about clearly demonstrating, every day, that you have the best interests of your team at heart.

We’ve all experienced the extremes of trust at work: both the violation of trust and exceptional examples of genuine trust. What’s your story? If you ever lost trust, how did you rebuild it? Help other readers by sharing your wisdom in the comments.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our podcast episode Four Key Lessons on Trust & Safety from Amazon’s Head of Family Trust.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

Enron. Lehman Brothers. WorldCom. And your company?

You clearly want to avoid this list of major “too big to fail” firms that extinguished due to a lack of ethics. While many leaders view ethics as a vague extra that’s not critical to business, the death of these companies proves otherwise: ethics is critical to survival.

So how do you keep your organization off this list, and instill a strong sense of ethics into your company culture?

Our podcast guest, David Rodin, offers practical advice. A former Oxford ethicist, and current chair/founder of ethics consultancy Principia, Rodin says to start with distinguishing ethics from compliance and company culture. They’re very different things.

He uses three tools or tests to determine ethical choices:

1. The Good. Ethically good actions create benefits for people – the more, the better, in fact. Bad actions, on the other hand, create harm or risk for others. In other words, you gauge your plan or action based on the consequences it will have in terms of people’s happiness and welfare. If it will cause harm, your decision is unethical; it’s time to reconsider.

2. The Right. Does your plan or action fulfill a duty or obligation to someone? You’ll create an ethical quandary if it goes against an obligation. Contracts are a clear business example – violating them can be both a legal and ethical shortfall. But even handshake deals and promises reside in this category. “My word is my bond” speaks to your organization’s ethical character. Rodin points out a bigger picture overlaying here: fundamental rights, including human rights. These duties and obligations extend from the social or national culture in which your business operates.

3. The Fitting. This may well be the most difficult lens to see through: does your plan or action fit your firm’s character and espoused virtues? You’ll need to look inside yourself and the company’s leadership; often, company character and virtue are unspoken parts of the culture, rather than codified and written down. It might help to work backward – consider what vices and behaviors the staff is told to avoid, and what that indicates about the company’s ethics. Add yourself to this equation: what values and virtues do you want to bring with your leadership style?

None of this will be easy initially. Ethics is about using judgment across situations, so it’s a way of thinking through decisions you must make in those gray areas. Compliance feels easier in comparison; you’re following a set of rules, laws, or standards often defined by others. Check the box on the compliance list, and you’re done. Ethical gray areas, though, never cease to bubble up.

As you implement ethical training and codes, remember that they must be practiced company-wide, from top leadership to the front line. In almost every case of firms failing from unethical practices, it only took a few bad actors to bring down the entire organization. Ensuring everyone knows and follows your ethical guidelines improves your odds significantly.

And, perhaps, the best benefit of all: you’ll sleep better at night.

Did you ever find yourself in an ethical quandary at work? How did you resolve it? Let us know in the comments so others can benefit from your experience.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our podcast episode An Oxford Ethicist Reveals How to Strengthen Your Workplace’s Moral Compass.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

“I just want to be heard.”

Those six words resonate with every person on the planet, yet so many leaders ignore this universal need. Toxic leaders go further, actively shutting down feedback. Disengagement, low productivity, and turnover result. And, of course, these leaders miss out on operating improvements, new product ideas, and morale boosters from staff which could significantly boost the bottom line.

According to our podcast guest Michael Morrow-Fox, a leadership consultant, the solution is simple, though not easy: conversational receptiveness. The practice has several elements, but the starting point is active listening. That step alone works wonders.

How Can I Actively Listen?

To be blunt: shut up. Seems simple enough, but it’s difficult to do without practice. In normal conversation, our minds are running a mile a minute when others speak: judging what they’re saying, jumping to a conclusion, thinking about what we want to say, and even daydreaming if the other person is a bit long-winded.

Though quieting our inner voice to focus on our teammate’s voice may be hard, it’s easier if you enter the conversation remembering your intent: active listening means you’re listening to understand, not to respond. Each time your mind drifts, bring your focus back to the person speaking. It helps to keep your eyes engaged with theirs; this not only keeps your attention on them but provides a subconscious “body language” signal to them that they’re being heard.

On a conscious level, reinforce that signal by paraphrasing each major point after they make it. “Just to clarify, you’re concerned that…” will do. This demonstrates you’ve been listening and has the added benefit of letting them restate the point if you didn’t quite understand.

When all their points are expressed, summarize the conversation. Then offer a reflection on it all: “So X, Y, and Z have all been happening. I wonder if…” or even “Hmmm; that’s a perspective I’d not realized. May we break for a bit so I can think about this a little deeper?”

You may not have an answer, immediately or after pondering. But the other person now knows they’ve been heard, and are respected. You’ve expressed understanding, and even though you may not have an agreement, your simple act of validation will reduce defensiveness when your decision comes.

Why?

Because they know they’ve been heard.

From new ideas to opposing viewpoints, people everywhere need to know their voices count. We can help. Our ILI team has over half a century of collective in-the-field experience with effective communication for leaders. From coaching to courses, we can share that wisdom with you. E-mail us at inquiries@innovativeleadership.com to learn more.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our podcast episode Let’s Talk: Four Steps to Bridging Workplace, Political, and Family Disagreements.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

“Surprise!”

That’s a fun word when it launches an unexpected party. It’s not so fun when it launches your work day. Yet for more and more of us, the exponential acceleration of change in the world translates into surprises at work.

Fortunately, Chris Nolan and Mike Schindler—our podcast guests and creators of the It’s VUCA documentary—have already developed practical tools to keep your cool while you navigate life’s inevitable changes.

First, recognize your Micro Wins.

You’ve probably heard this advice before as some variation of “Celebrate the small stuff.” But most of us are so focused on the problems we face that we have difficulty seeing those little wins in the first place. So each day, before you check e-mail or glance at Slack, take just five minutes of quiet time to jot down a list of things that went right yesterday. It could be as simple as not spilling coffee on your brand-new slacks or as complex as your team finding and debugging one line of troublesome code—a win is a win. See it, then celebrate it.

Second, build your Three Disciplines.

Now it gets a wee bit harder as you grow into new habits, starting with Structural Discipline. Here, the focus is physical. You’re finding habits and routines that promote health: exercise, adequate sleep, good nutrition, and the like. This has double the impact, because what’s good for your body also tends to be good for your mind, which benefits the next step:

Reactive Discipline. Here, you’re learning to manage your responses to unexpected challenges by maintaining calm as they emerge. Think of pilot Sully Sullenberger who ditched his US Airways jet in New York’s Hudson River when the plane’s engines died. His calmness ensured no fatalities for the passengers. With mindfulness, deep breathing, and other techniques, you too can develop that calm, and make thoughtful decisions rather than reacting impulsively to surprises.

Rounding out this troika is Expansive Discipline. Now, you’re growing your mind in general—becoming a lifelong learner. Listening to podcasts (like ours!), reading books, taking classes: you let your curiosity fly, embracing both personal and professional growth. As the workplace continues to change, old skill sets may not be as useful, but continual curiosity keeps you current and better able to absorb whatever new skills and knowledge your team requires.

Third, Bring It On!

With those foundations underway, it’s time to embrace change instead of just facing it. Mike and Chris call this the Bring It On Tool. At its core, you visualize challenges: those looming now, and those you’d like to see in the future. As you picture those challenges, also see yourself embracing them, tackling them, solving them—and think of the benefits those wins will bring. Think of how you’ll celebrate them, too! This technique helps you overcome fear, anxiety, and avoidance as you move into proactive engagement.

Like all good things, these tools take time to kick in automatically when unexpected challenges arise. But with patience and practice, you’ll be turning every exclamation of “Surprise!” into “Success!” instead.

Many workplace surprises can be serious, but some of the biggest workplace surprises are pretty darn funny in hindsight. What’s the funniest surprise you’ve faced at work? Brighten our day by sharing your story in the comments.

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our podcast episode How Leaders Thrive through Rapid Change.

Thank you for reading our newsletter, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week.

We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. Are you ready? If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.