Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 21

The Happy Leader: Boost Your Happiness and Leadership Effectiveness

Our emotional states as leaders have a direct impact on the productivity of our teams. Emotions are contagious.

Pushing Beyond the Obvious

In a recent blog, advertising legend Dave Trott shares the story of the insight that led the Wright brothers succeed in recording the first human flight in history, while everyone else struggled and failed. The key insight was that they understood that it was not the air under the wings that powered the flight but it was the lack of air above the wings that sucked the aircraft upwards. This was going against all known wisdom of the day. So, there is a time and place for following conventions and...

Leaders, Futures and Foresight

As leaders, we are expected to have a vision of the future that we are leading our teams towards. To build this vision, we need to be able to think of the potential and probable futures, to decide and pick the one that we want to move towards. So, we need to learn to think about futures and learn the skill of foresight. Here is a conversation in which futurist Sohail Inayatullah (from MetaFutures) shares his perspectives with examples about thinking of transformational futures. Here are some les...

Overcoming Resistance to Change

We live in a world with accelerating pace of change. For all us leaders, this accelerating change comes with the necessity to respond to these changes in a coherent, strategic and urgent ways. This translates into starting and leading change initiatives within our teams. So much so that there is change fatigue that has started to set in. This fatigue often leads to resistance to change. There are many other reasons for the resistance to change. Tired leaders who forget to involve the teams in th...

Learnings from Participating in an Intrapreneurship Program

This blog is co-authored by Makesh Gupta and Rena Yu Ning Wang, and it is about our journey participating in the SAP.iO journey, with the idea of building a SAP Live Shopping Platform. This was originally posted on the SAP Community blog and has been republished here with permission. Context: It was a late Friday evening and I was bored and so I did what I always do when most of us feel bored – pick up the phone and started scrolling through my social media feed – Facebook, instagram and then my...

3 Principles of Leading Under Conditions of Uncertainty

Premise: We are entering a phase where there is a lot of uncertainty. There is a consensus building up about an impending recession. There is a lot of flux within businesses. There are some sectors that are laying off people and at the same time struggling to find the right people to hire. The general tendency of the people towards work is shifting. Some want the flexibility of working from wherever and whenever and some want the benefit of the serendipity of bumping into colleagues at the water...

A Leader’s Super Power: Delivering Unprovoked Positive Antecedents!

I was reading a blog post written recently by Adam Voigt about UPA’s and I wanted to share that with all of my readers. Adam is first and foremost a skilled classroom practitioner and a highly successful Principal.  Earning his first Principalship at the age of 35, Adam has personally led full school turnarounds and also the design and establishment of a brand new school as its inaugural Principal. His audience is primarily school teachers and school Principals and maybe me. I find that a lot of...

Leadership and Happiness

One significant impact that Covid-19 had is that it has caused a sudden explosion of the importance of wellness all around us. The contrast between working from home and working from our offices has been stark. This has also initiated a lot of great conversations about mental health and the importance of the role of emotions within the business context. While this focus in the cultural zeitgeist is new, the research and our knowledge about the role that emotions play in our work place is not new...

Achieving and Sustaining High Performance

I had the opportunity to watch Gilbert Enoka present at one of the events that I was participating in. He has a long history of success as a mental skills coach with New Zealand’s corporate and sporting elite. He is internationally renowned for his 19 year history with the All Blacks (New Zealand Rugby team), first as their mental skills coach and now as manager. He has been with the All Blacks for over 250 tests and during that time the team has won back-to-back Rugby World Cups, one Laureus Aw...

The Power of Stories

Premise: Earlier today, I watched a keynote presentation delivered by Jonathan Gottschall on the Power of Stories. He made me sit up and think about stories in a new light. You can watch his keynote here. As leaders, one of the most important tools that we have in our arsenal is the use of stories. We use stories to communicate our ideas, to rally our troops, while leading change and influencing how people show up to and actually do their work. And I think it is important to understand all aspec...