Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 3

Leaders Worth Following Know When to Go Against Conventional Wisdom

I had seen this TikTok video a few months back and remembered about this again when I saw this LinkedIn post by Dr Paige Williams about the importance of knowing about positive deviance and how leaders worth following know when to apply this concept of positive deviance. In this TikTok video, Arielle Schmitt shares the strategy adopted by the Chinese team in the Youth Olympics. One of the athlete (the gold winner) adopted a unique strategy to win the race. The winner did something that has never...

Five Ingredients of True Improvement

In my last post, I wrote about the difference between Change and progress. Today, let’s talk about progress from the point of view of improvements. In one of his lectures, Peter Scholtes talks about 5 ingredients of true improvement. While his lecture is at least 30 year old, the principles he laid out still are practical and applicable to any innovation or change or improvements that we make in how we run our business. This is true for any innovation efforts or for any change that we want to ma...

Leaders Worth Following Understand the Difference between Change and Progress

The most common cliche today is “The only constant is Change”. As with everything else, not all change is created equal. In my experience, not all change leads to progress. Leaders worth following know this and are always intentional about any change that they are advocating for. They are always looking at and talking about the progress that the change will lead us toward. If there is a re-org being initiated, it should actually lead to a change in behavior for everyone who is impacted by the ch...

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...