Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 19

Being Self-full

I was listening to Matt Church talk about the way we show up in the world and the impact that it has on people around us and I was stuck by the simplicity and the profoundness of the thinking. He simply said that we create the biggest impact when we show up being both selfish and helpful or in another way self-full. Being selfish means that we love what we are doing and how we are showing up. This also means that we know what we want to achieve from every interaction or in other words we are bei...

What differentiates Average Leaders from Good Leaders?

One of the characteristics that differentiates good leaders from average leaders is their ability to develop a T shaped characteristics. So, what does being T shaped mean? There are three characteristics when it comes to being a T shaped leader – Linking, Thinking and Doing. Linking Linking is all about the ability to link disparate things together to come up with novel ideas. This is the ability of mix and match both common things but even more importantly things that are not necessarily seen a...

The Four T’s of Empowerment

I recently read about Mike Shipulski’s post with a similar title (The Three T’s of Empowerment) made me think about empowerment in general. You can read his post here. In the post, the three T’s that he talks about is Time, Training and Tools. Time for our people to learn the tools and provide the necessary training so that they can really feel empowered and deliver on our expectations. Mike shares what happens when we miss any of these three in his post really well. I really recommend that you ...

Masterclass – How to Thrive as Leaders Alongside Artificial Intelligence

We are living in a liminal moment where the possibilities that AI (all types of them) and the challenges that they pose to individual workers is being explored and being discussed.  What is not being discussed is the implications of wide-spread deployment of AI and the impact it will have on leaders and how and whom they lead?  If you are a leader in an organization which is actively looking to deploy artificial intelligence within your organisations workflow, you would benefit from watching the...

Two ways to Drive Performance Improvements

A recent post on GapingVoid talks about another performance equation (I shared one yesterday on my blog here): Performance improvements = Reducing Errors + Increasing Insights – Gary Klein The author of the post argues that while there is a lot of focus on reducing errors in organisations, there is not enough focus or energy spent on increasing the number of insights that people could share and use to drive productivity improvements. I think there are many reasons for this behaviour. Firstly, we...

Leaders Unite – Unlocking Peak Performance: Insights from a 3 Time Olympian

In a captivating keynote, Janne-Mueller Wieland, an Olympian and captain of the German women's hockey team, shared invaluable principles for high performance. IN this post, I share my key learnings from the keynote to unlocking peak performance.

Leaders Unite – Leading in Uncertain and Chaotic Times

Unlocking Leadership Influence: The Art of Communication

As leaders, one of the thing that we are expected to do is to communicate with the teams that we work with all the time. In many cases, our effectiveness as a leader may even depend on our ability to communicate. We might communicate to inform, inspire or influence. We need different strategies for different objectives. If we are communicating to inform, we need clarity in our communication. If we are communicating to inspire, we need our message to have contrast and colour. We need to be able t...

Bear it with a Smile and Learn from Mistakes

Julia Child was a phenomenal cook and a TV personality. This is a quote from her book – My Life in France: Usually one’s cooking is better than one thinks it is. And if the food is truly vile, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile, and learn from her mistakes. – Julia Child, My life in france In my experience, what she said about one’s cooking is true about every aspect of our lives. We are usually better leaders that we give ourselves credit for, we are better person...

What can we learn from Bertha Benz?

I recently read a blog post by Dave Trott and was blown away by the story of Bertha Benz and the role she played in the wide-spread adoption of motor vehicles. You can read his post here. The story, in short, is as follows: Karl Benz built his internal combustion engine based vehicle (3 wheeled) and was continuing to iterate to try and make it perfect, without being able to sell them. Bertha at one point in time lost her patience with this continuous tinkering and decided to take things in her o...