Passing on Beliefs, Ideas, Practices

“To be a leader is to make others believe; in challenging times to convey that “everything will be okay,” and that together the team will find a way forward. As a leader, you must have confidence in your own ability, but most important in your team. Leadership is humbling, knowing that it is never about you, as the leader. Leadership is all about what others achieve.”

Gary Burnison is CEO of Korn/Ferry International, the world’s largest executive recruiting firm and a leader in talent management and author of the New York Times bestseller "No Fear of Failure" (2011) and  the bestselling "The Twelve Absolutes of Leadership" (2012).

“Every company touts their people as their greatest asset but very few actually believe it. Or act like it. Most spend the majority of their effort designing processes, tools, and methodology they hope are foolproof and then scale their operations by hiring poorly trained people to follow their flawless system. That creates mediocre results at best. It’s not flawless processes & tools that create powerful solutions. People do. Experts do. Experts who know how to apply their knowledge do.”

Peter Bregman, strategic advisor to CEO’s and their leadership teams, author, and regular contributor to HBR Bog Network.

“The best problem solvers see a complex problem through multiple lenses.” Authors Paul J. H. Schoemaker and John Austin list 4 critical thinking skills in their article on www.inc.com.:

1.   Slow down. Insist on multiple problem definitions before moving towards a choice.

2.   Break from the pack. Actively work to buck conventional wisdom when facing new challenges or slowly deteriorating situations. Don’t settle for incremental thinking.

3.   Encourage disagreement. Debate can foster insight, provided the conflict is among ideas and not among people.

4.   Engage with mavericks. Find credible mavericks, those lonely voices in the wilderness who many dismiss, and then engage with them. It is not enough to simply be comfortable with disagreement when it happens to occur. Critical thinkers seek out those who truly see the world differently and try hard to understand why.

Exactly my line of thinking as regular readers of this blog will know. Seek out non-like minded thinkers and seek to understand them. And use constructive disagreement and conflict to the benefit of your challenge or dilemma.

I highly recommend the complete article by Schoemaker and Austin, as I do many of the other writings on www.inc.com.