This Week’s Leadership Favs

The Get Your BIG On team’s weekly leadership favorites are an eclectic collection of articles, blog posts, quotes, pod casts and whatever else engaged our interest as we did our work over the past week. Some items are recent, others aren’t. Some are mainstream, others are off the beaten path. Enjoy! Learn, connect and share.

Are You A Power-Poisoned Boss? (Bob Sutton, Fast Company)

The BIG team is fascinated with power and how it all too frequently goes awry. Several of the stories will hopefully make you cringe (provided you haven’t been poisoned with power as Bob calls it).

40 Best Movies to Honor Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month. If you’re looking for a unique way to celebrate it, grab some popcorn and wine and sample 40 movies by, for and about women. (Lots of other interesting lists on this site, too.)

Old School Persuasion Tools You Learned, But Should Never Use (Persuasive.net)

If your efforts at persuading others are falling short, perhaps you’re guilty of committing one (or more) of the four erroneous practices described here that derail your ability to influence others.

Take 5: Why Men Should Care (Catalyst)

“Seventy-four percent of the men Catalyst interviewed in their Engaging Men in Gender Initiatives series identified fear and apathy as barriers to supporting gender equality.” Here they look at five reasons why men have a lot to gain and nothing to fear from equality.

Conforming to the Norm (Psyblog)

Ever wonder why most people join in and ignore the obvious and well-known elephant in the room? Read some science behind why “many people find their inability to conform is a real problem in their lives while others find it more difficult to break away and do their own thing.”

Fixing Your “Boss Problem” with Self-Supervision (Dawn Lennon, Business Fitness)

If you’re in the half of workers who have a problem boss whom you can’t trust, you might find a tip or two here for managing yourself to help you deal with the situation.

Rethink, reframe, renew. “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.” ~Gilda Radner

 

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This Week’s Fav Leadership Reading

Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership (Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis)

Fascinating stuff! Research in the emerging field of social neuroscience—the study of what happens in the brain while people interact—is beginning to reveal subtle new truths about what makes a good leader. Certain things leaders do—specifically, exhibit empathy and become attuned to others’ moods—literally affect both their own brain chemistry and that of their followers. The authors contend that leading effectively is less about mastering situations—or even mastering social skill sets—than about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.

Next Generation Leaders (Talent Management)

Is your organization wondering whether or not investing in leadership development is the right place to spend your money? If so, you’ll benefit from reading this well-written and researched piece (that does take several minutes to load so do be patient, the wait is worth it). The list of 10 expectations for evaluating the success of a leadership development program is quite interesting.

Can You Lead With Pictures (Center for Creative Leadership March 2011)

This post introduces “visual thinking.” “Visual thinking uses pictures and images to evoke ideas, thoughts and feelings and to foster powerful conversations,” says CCL’s Chuck Palus. “People use pictures as the starting point for talking about complex or difficult things.” The post contains a list of very provoking “framing” questions to spur creativity…techniques appropriate for every leader’s repertoire.

The Making of a Corporate Athlete  (Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review)

We used this piece in a workshop we facilitated this week to underscore the importance of self-care. Short-staffed organizations expect their leaders to continually do more with less. Thinking of oneself as a corporate athlete – and training mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually – can be a great boon in replenishing one’s leadership reserves so the well doesn’t run dry someday.

The Myth of the Ideal Worker (Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva for Catalyst)

In this recent report, Catalyst continues researching gender myths, this time focusing on the question of whether the gender gap persists because women and men adopt different strategies to advance their careers. Their discovery? That doing “all the right things” helped men – but not women – advance further and faster.

Quote of the week: “There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be - musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors - but somebody: to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring, not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion.” ~Tony deMello SJ, Indian spiritual leader and writer

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