MOR Insight

Today’s Tuesday Reading is a piece which I reproduce below “Using Curiosity to Create Accountability with Powerful People” by Roger Schwarz of the Skilled Facilitator.

In his piece, Schwarz notes that when people are accountable to you, you [should] expect then to explain the key decisions and actions they have taken.  Yet, when we are talking with people who have more power than we do, we stop asking questions, we stop being curious.  In this piece, Scvhwarz suggests four questions that you might ask in these situations along with ways to set the context.

Today’s reading “Lessons from Your Leadership Journey” is a recent entry in Brian McDonald’s blog at the ITLP Leadership Development Community Practice website <http://bit.ly/L7Om>.  

Over the past several years, I’ve seen a number of articles about personal branding.  My favorite is a piece Tom Peters wrote some two years ago – “The Brand Called You” – that appeared in FastCompany on December 18, 2007.  Peters' piece is this week’s Tuesday Reading.

Today, we turn to Business Week’s September 18, 2009 Leadership column for the piece “How Authentic Leaders ‘Walk the Walk’".

In the article, Alan Deutschman, says that being an authentic leader means two things:

1.  You must share the struggle and the risks with your people.

2.  You must make sure that your actions consistently reinforce the one or two most important values you hold up for your organization.

Today’s Tuesday Reading takes a look at Higher Ed 2.0.  Our reading is “Who Needs Harvard?” from the September 2009 issue of Fast Company.  The article’s subheading says it all:  “Free online courses, wiki universities, Facebook-style tutoring networks – American higher education is being transformed by a cadre of web-savvy edupunks.”  

For today’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to a Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Q&A – “How Team Leaders Show Support – or Not”– with HBS faculty member Teresa Anabile.

Though from 2004, the findings remain valid.  Professor Anabile’s research points to two key concepts for leaders who want to gain their staff’s confidence:

1.  Perceptions of team leader support are more positive when the leader

     - gives timely feedback

     - support the team member’s actions and decisions

This week’s Tuesday Reading is an entry –  “Humility as a Leadership Trait”– from John Baldoni’s Harvard Business Publishing blog.

Baldoni asserts, and I agree, that leaders who want to inspire followers need to demonstrate both their accomplishments and their character.  Key to demonstrating character is being humble.  And, humility is essential to leadership because it authenticates a person’s humanity.

The article suggests three ways a leader can demonstrate humility:

This week’s Tuesday Reading is from BusinessWeek’s August 25, 2009 Communications Column:  “How to Give a Lousy Presentation”. 

We all make a lot of presentations.  And, I know that you are like me and know that you are able to do better most of the time.  This piece gives you 15 excellent ways to make a lousy presentation.  It thereby gives each of us a set of solid reminders for all of us.

For this week’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to the Career Strategies Column in the Wall Street Journal for a short piece “You’re a Success, Now Get Down to work”.

Near the end of this piece, its author Alexandra Levit writes:  “Just because you’re skilled or talented in a particular area doesn’t mean you should simply pass go and collect your $200.”  Or, as Marshall Goldsmith puts it, “Strong leaders don’t coast.”

So what do you need to do:

Today's Tuesday Reading is “The Success Trap”, from Jeffrey Pfeffer's August 25th,  BNET Column, The Corner Officer on August 25, 2009.

Pfeffer’s thesis is simple:  When we become successful, it is very easy to drop our guard, to not maintain our standards (much less build on them), and to rest on our laurals.

He argues that to maintain our successes we have to understand the basis of our success and maintain a laserlike focus, discipling ourselves to maintain, and even improve, on what made us successful to begin with.