Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 28

What Kind of a Leader Are You?

Early today, when I opened up my LinkedIn feed, I saw a poll set up by Dr. Nirmalya Kumar. He is Lee Kong Chian Professor of Marketing at Singapore Management University and Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute. In the poll he talks about the three kinds of meetings that he has seen CEO’s run. You can access this poll and cast your vote here. Essentially, the options he shares are not just relevant for CEO’s and their meetings, but to all leaders and the kinds of culture we ...

Creating a 5 Star Employee On-boarding Experience is a Leader’s Responsibility

The responsibility of onboarding the employees we hire squarely falls on us as the leaders of the business unit. The number of times this process is delegated to some HR business partner or sometimes even to some HR executive is not a joke. The on-boarding process is our opportunity to start moulding the new hire in such a way that they can become fully productive and functional members of our team as quickly as possible. In a talk that I gave sometime back, to a HR community, I talk about how c...

This is the Highest Leverage Activity for Leaders

Don’t think of an elephant!! Did you think of an elephant? Did you think of how an elephant looks like? Did you see an image of an elephant? Did you think of a large animal? Did you think of black or a trunk or a sound or anything else that we can relate to an elephant? If you are like the most of us, when asked not to think of an elephant, we automatically think of something that is relates to an elephant. This is instinctual. This is what is called framing. In this example we activated the fra...

Culture is like Climate

If you are already a leader and lead a team or an organisation, I am pretty sure that you have at some point in time considered the questions around culture. The current discourse about culture is that this is an important element that could potentially determine a lot of things including your efficacy as a leader and the performance of your team or organisation. There is a lot of talk about the importance of building an inclusive culture or a creative culture or an innovative culture or a diver...

6 Ways to Solve Difficult Problems

Lately, I have been talking a lot about how to be creative on demand. I have shared my learning and insights with my colleagues, students, startups, leaders and creative professionals. This is one of the most fundamental abilities that we need to master if we want to do really well in our professional and sometimes personal lives. You can watch the recording of one of these sessions here. I have also shared my perspectives on “Where creative ideas come from” in earlier blog posts as well. So, th...

How to be an Agile Leader?

In a rather long blog post, Henna Inam shares her perspective on why board members of organisations need to be agile and also shares a framework from her book Wired for Disruption, which can be used to develop our agility muscles. While she shares this framework and how it is relevant for board members, I believe that this is as relevant for all leaders, irrespective of which level and how formal our leadership really is. So, assuming that we all agree that in a world which is moving fast, it is...

As a Leader, What are your Non Negotiables?

I recently read a post by Dr. Jenny Brockis about the non-negotiables. You can read her post here. While she talks about the non-negotiables as an individual and what we can do to honor them on an ongoing basis, I would like to talk about non-negotiables in a slightly different context – as leaders. Who we are as a leader is defined as much by what we do as it is by what we don’t do. What we don’t do at times is more visible than what we actually do. Stand up for your team Not standing up for ou...

How Buildings and Businesses Learn – Stewart Brand

I just finished watching part 6 of a 6 part documentary shot for the BBC, written and directed by Stewart Brand (the president of the Long Now Foundation), based on his book – “How Buildings Learn“. You can watch the entire series here. If you only want to watch the part 6, that I will talk about in this post, you can watch that here. When you watch this video, just swap the buildings with organisations or businesses and you will find that the entire video and you will realize that everything th...

Five-P factors for Root Cause Analysis – Gartner

I read a post by Lydia Leong of Gartner on her blog about the 5P’s for root cause analysis for any given problem (the 6th P). You can read the entire post here. In the post the 5P’s that she talks about allow someone to go deep to find out what really happened and understand why it happened, so that whatever correction action needed to be taken can be done to avoid a similar problem arising again. She picks this framework from Macneil’s Five P factors model used in medicine/psychology and applie...

Leaders are Curators of Culture

One of the responsibilities of leaders is as the curators of culture. It is pretty evident that the personality of a leader has an outsized effect on the culture of the team that they lead. I have seen people adopt the phrases used by their leaders in their vocabulary, the mannerisms of the leaders in their physical presence and the mental frames that leaders use in their thinking. If the leader responds to every email within an hour of receiving them, the chances are that their team is doing th...