Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 23

Three Primary Roles of a Leader

There is a lot of expectations from leaders, specially when we are in an environment that is ambiguous. Matt Church in his “Speakership” programs talks about the role of leaders and he says that there has ever been only three things that leaders have ever done. Replace fear with confidence: This assumes that we, as leaders know what our teams are afraid of. Some of the fears are easy to guess (fear of getting sick) and some not so. So, it is important that we learn how to understand what are the...

Under the Surface

Yesterday, I watched the movie – Encanto streaming on Disney+ and really loved the movie and the underlying concept that it is based on. This song encapsulates the feeling that the movie handles. I would recommend you watch this 3 min song (and the entire movie if you have the time). I think as leaders, it is our responsibility to learn the way we and the people we lead feel under the surface (in addition to knowing how we feel under the surface ourselves). This is as simple as asking and as dif...

What does Riding a Bicycle teach us about Leading in Uncertain Times

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between knowing how to ride a bicycle and leading an organisation during uncertain times. However, watching a short video about how much we don’t really understand about how we ride a bicycle made me realise how much there is in common between this and leading an organisation in uncertain times. First things first, I would highly recommend that you watch this video and then we can continue this conversation. If you are anything like me, yo...

Dealing with Complex Adaptive Systems with Dave Snowden

We are living in a world where things are changing at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. In such a scenario, as leaders, it is important for us to learn how to deal with complex adaptive systems (which is how organisations and markets function – including us and the people who we lead). Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework that helps us understand the kind of system we are operating under and shares the way we could function within the system. I wrote about it last week here. In thi...

The Art of Kintsugi and Lessons in Leadership

Kintsugi is an old Japanese art of repairing broken ceramic pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. Instead of hiding the fact that the ceramic was broken, the art accentuates and celebrates this by converting the ordinary piece of ceramic to a piece of art. You can find more information about this art and the philosophy behind the same in the video here. There are many some very important lessons in leadership that we can gleam from this art, if we so desire. Ceramic articles t...

Lessons in Leading Product Designers or Innovators from James Dyson’s AMA

If you are leading product development or any form of design teams or creative professionals or leading an innovation effort, I think you will find the short video very insightful. In the video, James Dyson answers questions on product design curated from twitter. I think that the selection of questions and the answers given by James Dyson as part of this AMA are really worth listening multiple times. You can watch the entire video here. One fundamental learning for us as leaders from his respon...

Having Difficult Conversations

As leaders, it is inevitable that at some point in time we will need to have some form of a difficult conversation with someone. It could be as simple as providing someone with critical feedback that they might not like or as difficult as letting someone go. It is never easy and needs a lot of patience, care and empathy on our part, whenever we are called upon to have such difficult conversation. Recently, the CEO of Better.com had one such difficult conversation with his staff, when he had to l...

Decision Making Frameworks – The Cynefin Framework

As decisions, we are all expected to make decisions all the time. As I have mentioned in my earlier blogs, it always helps to have a model or a framework to help us make sense of all the information that we come across and then decide the course of action. One such decision making framework is “The Cynefin Framework”. You can listen to Dave Snowden, who created the framework, explain the framework here. This model is a big help in both sense making and decision making. It is a very short video (...

Leading for Creativity and Innovation

One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is our ability to enable our teams to fuel their creativity and drive innovation. Kevin Roberts (who used to be the CEO and later went on to become the Executive Chairman of one of the most creative organisation – Saatchi & Saatchi) delivered a keynote on creativity and innovation and I think there is a lot that we can learn from the keynote. You can watch the entire keynote here. If you are tasked with coming up with innovation in your organisatio...

A System for Becoming Better Leaders

One of the most important thing that we can do as a leader is to find a way to continue to grow as a person and as a leader on a regular basis. This is one of the fundamental habits that transforms us from being amateur leaders to professionals. I was first introduced to the Shamrock system for continuous and holistic growth in my conversation with David Burkus on my podcast. You can listen to my entire conversation with David here. This is a very simple system that was created by the legendary ...