What's On Your Affective Dashboard?

Anyone who leads a business these days would be wise to learn from Charlie Chaplin. When “talking movies” became possible in the late 1920s, the actor and director resisted the change at firstーbefore eventually adapting and making some of the best talking movies of his generation.

Chaplin’s great transition from silent to talking movies is a lot like what digital transformation is doing to leadership, the author Michael Schrage said in a recent webinar hosted by MIT Sloan Management Review.

One recommendation he and the other presenters made was to create an “affective” (not just “effective”) dashboard for the teams we lead, something that gives us a view of our teams’ attitudes, feelings, and moods. Some of the factors that could be measured are stress levels, wellness, and grit scores.

We’d love to hear your ideas for making dashboards more “affective.” What have you started or would you want to start measuring in your business?

Has COVID-19 Changed What Leadership Qualities Are Valued?

Here’s something interesting. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the leadership qualities people value have changed. Technical skills and having a commanding presence are less valued than these qualities were before the crisis began.

The 3 leadership qualities that became more valuable? Resilience, empathy or emotional intelligence, and the ability to communicate effectively.

These are based on a survey of nearly 1,800 respondents in 71 countries by the University of Sydney’s Business School (CEMS).

How have you changed as a business leader in the past year? What have you discovered about yourself and what have your teams helped you learn? 

10 Leadership Prompts - Fiona Kesby

Leadership can be the most challenging choice we will make in life.

It’s also one of the most rewarding choices.

In every area where leadership will test us (and test us again and again)ーour mindset, technical skills, emotions, discipline, patience, curiosity, and ability to set and focus on prioritiesーit will also open doors and create paths for us. It’s a choice that few will ever regret making.

If you’ve read an article or a book in 2020 that has made you a better leader, do share the title in the comments.

 

Find a way to save your and your team’s ideas - GO Virtual Assistants (GO-VA)

 

Find a way to save your and your team’s ideas. 

For some distributed teams, using a good project management and collaboration tool can do this. When Leigh Thompson wrote about this idea, she pointed out that virtual collaboration tools make it so much easier to record all ideas so that these can be retrieved and used later. 

Here’s the link: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/virtual-collaboration-wont-be-the-death-of-creativity

“No idea is a bad idea” is a great reminder to share at the start of every brainstorming session with your team. Add this as well: “Keep idea vaults and boneyards.”

(Have I mentioned our GO-VA developers have built one such tool specifically designed for distributed teams?)

Do You Believe In “What you see is all there is” or “WYSIATI”

 

As business leaders, it’s important for us to know what we don’t know yet.  To avoid a condition that the economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “WYSIATI” or “What you see is all there is.” 

All the challenges of 2020 have reminded us to dig for verifiable facts (what we know) and to pay attention to the questions we and our teams ask (what we know we don’t know).

“Simply articulating this second category gives more nuance to your understanding,” Eric J. McNulty writes (“To See the Future More Clearly, Find Your Blind Spots”, 7 January 2021 in strategy+business). “Then, go deeper by getting curious.”

This story helps a lot: 

https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/To-see-the-future-more-clearly-find-your-blind-spots

Because our teams often lean on us to help make sense of what’s happening, it can be easy to forget sometimes that there’s much we don’t know yet. And that’s OK. If we can all commit to stay curious and work toward discovery, we’ll eventually know and understand more.

#Leadership

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