Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 3

Leaders Worth Following Never Leave Hiring Just to HR

One of the primary responsibilities of a Leader is to hire the right people for the right roles for their teams. It is such an important activity that it can’t be left to either the HR business partners or anyone else. One of the things we can do if we really want to become a Leader worth following is to always be recruiting or looking for people we can hire to be on our team. Apart from a host of other benefits that this has, it also has the added advantage of creating a pool of candidates for ...

The Key to Building High Performing Teams

People will do things that they are measured on, incentivised and that leads to be celebrated by their leaders. Many leaders often make the mistake of misaligning what is measured, incented and celebrated. The key to be intentional about designing behaviors that could unleash the potential for high performance is to ensure that all the three (behavior that is measured, incentivised and celebrated) are completely aligned. This is so simple and maybe that is why so many leaders miss doing this.

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How to Communicate like a Leader Worth Following

In this short video, I talk about how every piece of communication could be used to do one of three things: 1. Inform (share information or updates, etc) 2. Influence (Work towards changing the recipients thinking, beliefs or Behavior) 3. Inspire (Transfer of energy, enthusiasm or Hope). You would be better off, if you knew the purpose of each piece of your communication as the way you structure your speech / email / presentation would be very different if its purpose were to inform vs influence...

Becoming Leaders Worth Following – Learning How to Pay Attention

As a leader, we need to learn how to pay attention. WE could either pay attention like a laser beam (hyper – focused) or like a torch (Exploratory). How we spend our attention determines what we see and therefore how we react. Neither is the right or wrong approach. In order to become leaders worth following, we need to learn when to pay attention like a laser beam and when to do it as a torch. There is only appropriate level of focus for a given situation in a given context towards a given goal...

Transition from Middle Manager to Senior manager

In this short video, I share insights about the difference between expectations from a middle manager and a senior manager and how can one navigate this shift in expectations, which at times is extremely difficult. You get invited to the so called big boys table when you do exceedingly well at your tasks and show the potential to be a good leader. This required you to be able to have exceptional task focus and to a large extent be detail oriented. However, once you transition to a senior leaders...

Biggest Mistake Leaders Make When Trying to Solve A Tough Problem

In this video, I share some insights on solving tough problems as a leader. The biggest mistake is the temptation to start working on solving the problem as soon as it is identified. What manifests as a problem is usually a symptom of a problem creeping in elsewhere. So, solving that symptom will only lead you to a different problem cropping up elsewhere. Also, one of the things that our brains are really good at is to find answers to any questions that we post at it. So, it is important for us ...

Standing out in a World filled with Experts

I read a recent blog post on Gapingvoid based on a quote by Rory Sutherland: “Be good at two things.” – Rory Sutherland I think this is a great advice if we want to stand out in a world filled with experts. If we are an expert in a specific topic, the chances are that we will find thousands more who are either as much an expert in that topic as we are. However, if we combine that expertise with another topic, the chances of finding someone else who has the same two expertise goes down drasticall...

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me: #20 Rajinikanth

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 my 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 them are old. Some of them […]

The po...

Insanely Interesting People who Influenced me: #19 Rory Sutherland

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 my 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 them are old. Some of them […]

The po...

First Principles Based Leadership – How to Practice Mindful Leadership

Good leaders are students of human behaviour and psychology. In this short video, I share the insight on how our cognitive processing works and how learning this can help us become Mindful leaders. One of the most important aspect of leadership is our ability to choose how we respond to any given situation. Understanding how our cognition functions and where exactly in the process of cognition can we exercise choice has the potential to transform the way we respond to any situation. I was at a m...