Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 24

Making Judgement calls

As leaders, one of the important responsibilities we have is to make decisions and sometimes difficult decisions, when we don’t usually have all the information that we need to make them and one’s that could have a significant impact on us, our teams and the entire business. I’ve written in the past about good decision making here (How to Make Good Decisions) and here (Making Infinitely Better Decisions in Life and In Business) and many more here. The more important a decision tends to be, the l...

Are you an Amateur Leader or a Pro?

I recently read a post by Steven Pressfield about turning pro. You can read the entire post here. That sparked the thought about leaders as pro. I have heard of almost all the fields having amateurs and professionals. I have never heard anyone being referred to as an amateur leader though. Does this mean that there are no amateur leaders? I don’t think so. Just because leaders are working professionals they don’t necessarily become professional leaders. In fact, just like any other field, I see ...

What Leaders need to know about giving Advice

As leaders, we are on a regular basis called upon to give advice to young professionals about life and career, to the people whom we lead about what they should be doing in a given situation, etc. So, an important aspect of being a good leader is to know when and how to give advice to the people who seek it from us. This post is inspired by a post I read by David Cain on his blog Raptitude titled, “Advice Gets Good When It Gets Specific“, which I thought had great advice on how to give advice. Y...

Lessons in Leadership with Ken Wilcox, Emeritus chairman of Silicon Valley Bank

In an interesting conversation with Todd Jick (Reuben Mark Faculty Director of Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School), Ken shares lessons in leadership from his personal experience having been a leader for more than 3 decades. This is a 45 mins video, which i would recommend that you watch. Have a pen and paper with you to make notes, and you will end up with a lot of notes. You can watch this conversation here. Here are the lessons I made a note of: Becoming a lead...

Three Modes of Communication – Where do you spend the most of your time as a leader?

As leaders, when we engage with our teams, we usually communicate with them in one of three modes and the mode that we use most often has a significant impact on the team and the kind of culture we create within the team. Here are the three modes of communications: Declaration (Tell): In this mode, we declare something to be a fact or truth or something that we want our teams to accept as it is. When we are using this kind of communication, we are typically engaged in a one way communication. Th...

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me: #15 Gary Zukav

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

How to be an Inspirational Leader?

One of the expectations as leaders that we have of ourselves is to be inspirational. Everyone talks about how it is important for leaders to be inspirational, to lead their teams to places that they may or may not want to go, to achieve a lot more than they would have achieved if it were not for the leadership. I strongly believe that we should not start with the goal of becoming an inspirational leader , as it is a self-centred perspective. However, I have been thinking about this topic for som...

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me – #14 Chip and Dan Heath

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory. Some of them are famous in their own rights and some of them are yet to be found by others. Some of them are young and some of […]

Leading in a VUCA World – One conversation at a Time

I recently read a blog post by Marcella Bremer for the Leadership and change magazine. You can read the entire blog post here. In the post she shares her learning from a talk that one of the founders of “Appreciative Inquiry” Ron Fry shared in one his talks during the Leadership Reset conference. Basically, the big idea from the blog is the importance of “Conversation” as the most significant and important tool in a leader’s toolkit in leading his organisation in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Com...

Wisdom and Leadership

One of the key responsibility of a leader is to be able to perceive the difference between reality and what appears to be the reality, i.e., we need leaders who are wise. The question then is what is wisdom and is there a simple way to becoming wise. An old Indian metaphor can come to our help. It is that time of the day when it is neither dark nor light. You are walking through a park and you see something lying on the ground and you instinctively jump. That is our body reacting to keep us aliv...