Mukesh Gupta's Blog, page 9

Knowing What Matters

Leveraging Unofficial means of Communication

We live in a world where each and every one of us faces a deluge of information and there is a war out there to get and hold our attention. Given this is the case, as leaders, how can we ensure that important communication that our teams need to know is not lost in this deluge? There are a few things that we can do to improve the effectiveness of our communication (more on this here). There are a few things that we can do by mixing up our communication medium (written, spoken and visual). We can...

How to Get People to Listen to You?

This post talks about 7 things we can do to get people to listen to us and what we have to say. If we want to lead and grow in our organisation, it is important that people we lead, who lead us and our peers listen to us, our ideas and take them seriously.

Importance of Humility for Leaders

This quote by Mike Tyson is a timely reminder for all of us to remain humble. This is more relevant for leaders than anyone else.

More Random and Less Rational

As leaders, we would do well to remember that life is more random than we think and our response to it is less rational than we think.

Navigating Perspectives: A Leader’s Guide to Effective Storytelling

Almost all good stories, whether shared by a leader or a professional storyteller, share a common attribute. They always share the perspective or the world view of a characters. Another common thread among all good stories is that they have simple storylines about complex characters or situations. As leaders, when we are sharing stories, we need to keep in mind the perspective are we telling the story (ours or the audience or someone else) from and be consistent with it. It is easier said than d...

Why do Stories Work the Way they Do

In the past few days, I have written about the importance and power of stories and how important telling stories can be for leaders. Today, let’s explore why stories work. What is it about stories that make them such great transport for ideas and help shift states. For us to understand why stories work, we need to first understand how our brain works. There are two important properties of brain that are relevant for us in understanding why stories work. Brains are pattern matching machines Every...

The Most Important Stories we Tell

The most important stories we tell are those that we tell to ourselves and about ourselves. The collection of these stories then become our operating system. The operating system of a computer or our mobile phone puts the limitations that all the other applications or programs that we run on that computer need to follow and adhere to. Similarly, our stories create the limitations under which we end up operating. It doesn’t matter what these stories are. They create the boundary conditions under ...

Metaphors and Leadership

One of the responsibilities of a leader is to simplify complexity in a way that everyone can relate and make sense. One of the best ways to do is by the use of metaphors. Metaphors are used to explaining something (new and unknown) by comparing it with something else (common and known). We generally use a lot of metaphors in our day to day conversations. Some of become cliches and enter the collective consciousness of a generation if not more. While we can continue to use such metaphors, when th...

5 Types of Stories Leaders Need to Tell

This post talks about the 5 different kinds of stories that leaders need to be able to tell, based on the situation, if they want to become "Leaders Worth Following".