Assignment:
4 PAGES NEEDED---1 (FULL) PAGE PER QUESTION THERE ARE FOUR QUESTIONS
Use the readings from this week to respond to the following:
READINGS ATTACHED & LINKS ATTACHEDhttps://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-to-master-the-seven-step-problem-solving-processhttps://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/to-unlock-better-decision-making-plan-better-meetings1.Share your thoughts regarding the importance of humility, curiosity, and leadership as you work on your leadership project.
2. As you consider the four manager mindsets, which mindsets represent your management team
3. What barriers do you anticipate that your team will face and how might you address them
4.Which article(s) in the
HBR Guide to Being a Great Bossprovided insightful guidance for you as you work on your leadership project?
1 | P a g e • 03-06-21 • LEADERSHIP NOW 3 leadership traits we desperately need in 2021 This year will not look all that different from 2020. The hope is that leaders are able to display three fundamental traits that would mitigate the extended consequences of this brutal pandemic. BY TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC In leadership, there are results and opinions. Most people view their own opinions as facts, but they are mostly expressions of their preferences, values, or beliefs. Sadly, people tend to opine on leadership and leaders without taking the time and effort to scrutinize a leader’s track record, and without fully understanding their leadership potential. This is true in politics, which explains why many countries in the world are poorly governed and some are even considered failed states. In business, the average experience people have of work and their bosses is far from positive. Engagement levels have been low for decades, people join companies but quit their bosses, and 35% of Americans would happily take a pay cut if they could get rid of their manager. Edelman’s most recent benchmark barometer on trust in leaders revealed a new dip in scores. Roughly one in two people distrust their leaders. A global pandemic makes matters worse. A devastating virus that poses both a health and social crisis means the stakes are high, failure is evident and consequential, and a leader’s performance is hard to disguise for the entire population of global leaders is facing the same challenge. COVID- 19 has provided a metaphorical standardized leadership test which leaves the bad ones with nowhere to hide. Coming to terms with the fact that this year will not look all that different from 2020, the hope is that leaders are able to display three fundamental traits that would mitigate the extended consequences of this brutal pandemic, and give us reasons to be optimistic. HUMILITY We have been venerating humility for some time now, mostly because it is rarely found in leaders. Ever since Jim Collins published his seminal book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, providing compelling data that the most effective senior leaders are not just remarkably persistent, but also humble, we can’t stop paying lip service to humility. Evidence also suggests that the chance of being promoted into leadership roles, climbing up the organizational ladder, or winning political elections, will be significantly higher if one is not humble. We mostly pick leaders based on their confidence, assertiveness, and ability to be unaware of their limitations. This is also why incompetent men are overrepresented in leadership roles, even when we try to help women get to the top. The recipe for success is to encourage them to be more confident, hide their limitations, don’t worry about what people think, and lean in even when they lack the talents to back it up. https://www.fastcompany.com/section/leadership-now https://www.fastcompany.com/90610607/3-leadership-traits-we-desperately-need-in-2021 https://www.fastcompany.com/user/tomas-chamorro-premuzic https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232604395_What_We_Know_About_Leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Fragile_States_Index https://news.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-BS-Fixing-Workplaces-Careers/dp/0062383167?tag=wwwfccom-20 https://www.edelman.com/trust/2021-trust-barometer https://hbr.org/2020/06/will-the-pandemic-reshape-notions-of-female-leadership https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996?tag=wwwfccom-20 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335800148_Playing_the_trump_card_Why_we_select_overconfident_leaders_and_why_it_matters https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-How-Much-Really-Need-ebook/dp/B00C5R77VG?tag=wwwfccom-20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAEFEXvcBg 2 | P a g e CURIOSITY Even the smartest leaders can’t rely on their intelligence, because the vast majority of problems they need to solve today are not well defined, and require a great amount of learning. Moreover, the majority of seasoned leaders spent a great deal of time relying on their past experience and drawing from their current expertise. Neither of these are particularly useful when dealing with an unprecedented pandemic. Curiosity is the best way to address this problem. A strong desire to learn, a passion to ask questions rather than provide answers, and the ability to listen, challenge one’s preconceptions, and identify gaps between what you know and need to know, are what can help leaders and their teams adapt to the current challenges. If you don’t have a hungry mind, you shouldn’t be a leader. Leadership, as Gianpiero Petriglieri says, should be an argument with tradition, and the best way to challenge tradition is to have the curiosity to explore alternatives, which includes valuing a diversity of views, values, and opinions. INTEGRITY People, organizations, and societies are generally better off when their leaders are honest and ethical, rather than immoral or corrupt. But if you open the newspaper on any given day you will see too many examples of leaders who put their own interest ahead of their followers. There are those who exploit their power and influence to take advantage of others, and have a total inability to resist the temptation to cheat, take advantage of their status, and corrupt their organizations and institutions. In fact, unethical leadership is far more pervasive than we like to admit. Bad leaders multiply like bacteria in contaminated environments. They act in parasitic ways, getting fat while debilitating their systems, and failing up because the rules of the game are rigged. Their Machiavellian politics turned out to be more adaptive and effective as a career lubricant than actual merit (talent and effort). Our only hope is that leaders can master the art of self-control, find reasons to be guided by empathy or sympathy, and understand that leadership is not a personal privilege, but the ability to convince a group of people to collaborate effectively in the pursuit of a common goal: for example, to contain a pandemic or stop a virus from killing people. There has never been a better time for humble, curious, and ethical leaders. The hope is that those in positions of power find ways to display moral courage in order to mitigate the pain for everyone else. Instead of asking people to develop resilience—which is sadly a reflection of the leaders we have in place—let us demand a higher level of competence and performance for our leaders. The challenge is still on. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in leadership assessment, people analytics, and talent management https://hbr.org/2014/08/curiosity-is-as-important-as-intelligence https://www.facebook.com/HBR/videos/the-psychology-of-human-curiosity-with-tomas-chamorro-premuzic-hbrlive/10154807456372787/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qssrRL1Epo&t=2907s https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6180164/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6180164/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222521379_The_toxic_triangle_Destructive_leaders_susceptible_followers_and_conducive_environments http://www.drtomas.com/ Leadership Are Your Managers in Sync with Your Change Strategy? by Joseph Fuller and Bill Theofilou March 04, 2021 Summary. Steven Errico/Getty Images According to new research conducted by the authors, C-suite executives and upper management often don’t agree on how their organizations need to remake themselves for a post-Covid world. As a result, when CEOs and their teams begin implementing their plans,... A few years ago, we noticed something curious: Successful business transformations were slower, fewer, and further between than we would have expected. Companies were moving toward more https://hbr.org/topic/leadership https://hbr.org/search?term=joseph%20fuller https://hbr.org/search?term=bill%20theofilou cloud-based operations, but often without urgency. They were trying to shore up profits through cost optimization, but their efforts often sputtered after the first year. Industry leaders, fearing encroachment by disruptors, implemented changes to encourage innovation and customer-centricity. But few achieved any meaningful progress. Most transformation programs yielded only a modest lurch forward, rather than the great leap their sponsors were hoping for. Then the pandemic hit. The circumstances obliged companies to shift gears quickly, legitimizing remote work, accelerating the digitalization of business, and making the health and welfare of employees their overarching priority. Companies began to talk of managing “three years of transformation in three months.” A year in, it’s clear that the pandemic has indeed had a massive impact on how business is done. There now seems to be no going back. But as companies seek to transform themselves for the post- Covid world, they still confront significant challenges. We know this because we recently surveyed executives in the United States — at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue — about their attitudes toward post-Covid transformation. We spoke to 300 in the C-suite, 500 in upper management (managing directors, senior vice presidents, plant managers), and 500 in middle management, and we were surprised to discover that C- suite executives and upper management often don’t agree on the effects of the pandemic and how to respond to them. In fact, middle management was more consistently aligned with the C- suite’s views than upper management was, despite being farther apart on the organization chart. Disconnects at the Top Some of our data reveals clear variations in outlook. Not surprisingly, most executives told us the pandemic was having a negative impact on their companies. Significantly, while more upper managers felt that way than did C-level executives (82% versus 67%) — a gap of 15 percentage points — they also were more likely to feel that the impact would be limited to the short- term (72 % versus 51%). Upper managers were also considerably warier of initiating profit- improvement initiatives in both the short term (within three months) and longer term (after six months). The difference was particularly acute when it came to the short term: Forty-five percent of the upper managers we surveyed were comfortable moving forward, whereas 60% of the C-suite executives were — another 15-percent gap. As companies begin to turn their attention to the question of how to recover from Covid, many will find that their management teams don’t share a sense of the importance of the pandemic’s impact, or of how to move forward. To better understand the differences in the mindsets of both upper and middle managers, we asked two key questions. First, did the executives we were surveying lean toward a business-first or people-first approach? (To be sure, companies need both.) Second, did they show a strong commitment to — or relative disconnection from — the organization? The answers we got to these questions allowed us to identify four distinct mindsets. Four Manager Mindsets Business Operators. Business Operators represent the single largest segment of managers. They express significant confidence in the company’s leadership and appreciate the growing concern for people. At the same time, this group sees the need to make tough decisions to stabilize the business as a priority. Upper and middle management appear with almost identical frequency in this area (42% versus 43%). These are the managers who will reliably do what needs to be done and respond well to the rhetoric, rationales, and messaging emanating from senior leadership. People Champions. Managers in this group have often worked at their companies for a long time and have shown a strong focus on employees’ personal needs during the pandemic. For example, they express strong support