Everyday Leadership

Managing Your Employees' Motivations

Managing Your Employees' Motivations

Being an effective leader is about two core tasks: making decisions to address threats and opportunities, and implementing those decisions. Implementing decisions is about the willingness of the targets of implementation to exert effort. It is not enough for the targets of implementation to know what to do (information) – they also have to want to do it (motivation). 

Decision Making - How to Make Decisions as a Group?

Decision Making - How to Make Decisions as a Group?

Decision analysis provides individuals a systematic approach to making decisions. Unfortunately, no one knows everything and individual decisions are often biased by a decision-maker’s unique perspective. Inclusiveness – inviting others to help make a decision – should result in better decisions than any individual alone could make. Using a group of decision makers to make a decision should improve decision making quality because (1) more decision makers means more information, so decisions made by groups rather than individuals should be more informed decisions, and (2) more decision makers means more perspectives, so decisions made by groups rather than individuals should be less biased by any one individual’s unique perspective.

Decision Making - How to Make Decisions as an Individual?

Decision Making - How to Make Decisions as an Individual?

In this blog post, we're going to be talking about decision making. The central challenge in making good decisions is that we have to make decisions under uncertainty. The way we manage uncertainty leads us to make decisions in ways that are biased and not necessarily fully rational. So here we're going to talk about the biases that are triggered by making decisions under uncertainty and how to overcome those biases to make sound decisions. 

The Challenges of Everyday Leadership

The Challenges of Everyday Leadership

The challenge of leadership is that we live in a “fast” business world. That means things happen quickly in an organization’s environment, and in order to survive, leaders have to get their organizations to react equally quickly – and effectively – when those things happen. That ability to react quickly is called agility, and the best leaders use their leadership skills to make their organizations agile. 

How to Lead in a Virtual World?

How to Lead in a Virtual World?

In this post, we will discuss the concept of leadership in a virtual world. In a virtual context the role of a leader becomes more and more important, especially when bringing the teams together. This is because there are informational and motivational challenges associated with working together virtually.

The # 1 Leadership Tool That You Should Use Right Now

The # 1 Leadership Tool That You Should Use Right Now

In this post, we will discuss the # 1 tool that all leaders should use for effective daily leadership - Inclusiveness. Leaders have two main tasks - to make decisions and implement decisions. Making decisions is all about setting the direction of where we want to go and implementation is about doing the work to get there. 

The best leaders use inclusiveness as a tool to do these tasks effectively. There are two main benefits of inclusiveness

  1. Information Benefits 
  2. Motivational Benefits 

From an information standpoint, leaders can make better decisions as they receive information from everyone's real world experiences. At the same time, the quality of implementation can increase given the flow of information across the implementers. 

Additionally, there are motivational benefits as the implementers feel more involved in the decision making process and take ownership over achieving the final goal that the leader has set out. 

 

What Leadership Really Means In Today’s Agile Environment?

What Leadership Really Means In Today’s Agile Environment?

In this post, we will discuss what it means to be a leader in today's fast paced, competitive agile environment. We'll also use this as an opportunity to distinguish between leaders and managers. The gist is that leaders lead through influence, by bringing people together and influencing them to achieve a goal. Managers on the other hand use authrotity to make people do work.