Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 7

Expectations and Innovation

First Principles Based Leadership: Improving our Social Awareness

In my first post (which you can read here), in a series of posts about “First Principles Based Leadership”, I shared the importance of developing five types of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systems) in order to build that foundation for becoming a First Principles based leader. Today, in this third post, we will talk about how we can improve our social awareness. When I talk about social awareness, I mean the ability to know what is going on with the people we lead and work w...

First Principles Based Leadership – Cultivating Self Awareness

In my last post, I shared the importance for leaders to work on five different kinds of awareness (self, social, cultural, contextual and systemic). Today and in the next four posts, I will delve into how can we go about cultivating and improving each one of these awareness. Today, let’s explore how we can go about cultivating and improving our self awareness. Any and all deep dive into self awareness can only start by delving deeper into our consciousness. We can do this in a few different ways...

Foundation For First Principles Based Leadership

Premise: One of the foundations for First Principles Based Leadership is for leaders to be aware. Leaders need to work on their awareness on five different levels. 1. Self Awareness: First and foremost is for us, as leaders, we need to work on improving our self awareness. When I talk about self awareness, I am referring to knowing what we want to achieve and why we want to achieve it. Is it for our own sake (ego driven) or is it for the sake of the team that we are leading (service driven). Whe...

Best Practices Vs First Principles Based Leadership

Earlier today, I read a blog post by Greg Satell titled “This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap“. In the post he shares his insight on how business fads are created, propagated and result in much waste before fading away. I agree with him whole-heartedly. Building best practices through case studies and interviews, in my opinion is somewhat similar to how blind men would define an elephant, just by feeling a part of the elephant. There is a lot that can go wrong in the proc...

The Focus…

Failure and Success

Failure is often considered to be the opposite of success. However, truly successful people know that failure is an integral part of any success! It’s very rare indeed that someone finds success without meeting failure along the way. If they do, the success doesn’t last as long as they would like it to! So, we would do well to learn how to look at failure and how we deal with it when we come face to face with it. When we do come face to face with failure, it would be great to look to what we can...

Winds of Change

We now live in a world where the winds of change rage faster and faster. The attitude and the ability to build windmills will make or break our careers in the mid-to-long term. Are you ready? Do we have the necessary mindset, the required toolsets and the skillsets to make this a reality? I have been talking about the need for leaders to understand that almost all leadership is about leading through change. So, if we want to be better leaders, we need to be able to lead our teams through the rag...

Elevate Your Leadership Effectiveness

Premise One of the core responsibilities we have as leaders is to think about our business and continuously reflect on how we can improve the overall effectiveness of our leadership, our teams and therefore the business. Here are four questions that we need to reflect upon on a regular basis, and when done well, they can help elevate the effectiveness of our leadership: Questions to ask Yourself Regularly 1} What am I not paying attention to? Why? What can I do about it? 2} What is being left un...

Future-proofing Your Team

As leaders, it is our responsibility to help those we lead become future proof, both as individuals and as a team. We are living in a world where things are changing really fast with AI technology leading the way. I would not be surprised if there is a big shuffle or restructure in terms of the composition of the workforce (human, robots and algorithms) and their respective roles in the organization. I believe that it is our responsibility to help our teams stay relevant in these turbulent and e...