The Leadership and Team Insights You Might Have Missed–But Shouldn't Miss Out On
As each year comes to a close, it’s good to reflect on what we learned and celebrate successes as you plan for the future. To help you, we compiled a list of our top learning and development posts of 2020. You might have missed them at the time, but we don't want you to miss out on these insights!
We hope you will find inspiration and valuable action items in these posts as you continue on your leadership development journey.
1. Leadership Trends that Shape the Future of WOrk
With everything going on around us, it’s no surprise that our workplaces and leaders are facing numerous challenges. We see four components of what our business leaders are facing: Disruption, destabilization, decentralization, and disillusionment.
2. 4 Leadership Tips to Inspire a Shared Vision When Leading Virtually
With virtual teams being the norm today, creating cohesion and inspiring others is more important for leaders than ever before. One of the key practice areas effective leaders demonstrate is to Inspire a Shared Vision to help employees see a deeper meaning in their daily work, instead of feeling as if they are performing routine tasks that don’t contribute to the bigger picture.
3. How to Recognize and Thank Employees During Tough Times
How can organizations build or continue to nurture an appreciation-rich culture when times are challenging and it doesn’t feel like there’s much to celebrate? You don’t have to do it alone. Tap into the power of peer recognition and engage managers in the effort.
4. Are You Thinking About Your 'Why' As a Leader?
In challenging times, it's important to rely on and communicate your why – the reason you keep showing up. As we know from The Leadership Challenge, it’s during times of high challenge and crisis that we most need to be reminded of our vision – our why. Right now, all of us need to tap into the human part of our work.
5. Agile Leadership Could Be Our Path Forward
Our traditional organizational model relied on and created stability in a well-known environment. We had predictable work, a static and siloed structure of hierarchy, the ability to conduct linear planning, and easy control over execution. As the world grew more complex, we saw a rise in matrix-like structures, more rules, and more control in an attempt to cope. With COVID and other social and economic challenges, we’ve reached the limits of this approach. Our leaders and our organizations feel as though they are drowning in complexity. Could agile organizations be our path forward?
6. How to Lead When Everything Is Constantly Changing
What’s the antidote to the white water rapids we experience in work? Where we want our leaders to be, and where their team needs them, is serving as leader: helping them to ride the rapids, moving forward, recognizing the obstacles of the path, achieving small goals. We may come out a little worse for the wear, but we will also be accomplished, knowing we’re taking on one of the biggest challenges we may have had to face as a leader.
7. Leading in Turbulent Times
The unknown can be unnerving and fear-inducing if we let it. It can also be an opportunity for heightened creative thinking, more authentic connection and courageous leadership. We have some leadership advice for leading during uncertain times – and 5 things to help you get through it.
8. Don't Avoid Giving Feedback When Working Virtually
As many workplaces have shifted to virtual teams, giving regular performance or development feedback may have fallen to the wayside. Giving feedback can be difficult — even during the best of times. Receiving feedback, no matter where or how it is delivered, can be an emotional process — triggering embarrassment, fear, anger, defensiveness, and denial. Given today's challenges in the workplace, how we give and receive feedback has shifted.
9. 7 Tips for Managers to Become a Better Coach
Every manager has opportunities to incorporate coaching skills into their relationships with employees, even in fields where processes and structures make it challenging, or in today's volatile business landscape. Coaching, in essence, helps people identify – for themselves – the power of their potential. Through coaching, employees learn to solve problems on their own. Instead of giving them step-by-step instructions of exactly which roads to take, you are handing them a map and a compass and allowing them to find their way to that end destination.
10. Leadership Lessons: Practice Gratitude and Gain Resilience
This year has been filled with leadership lessons, thanks to shifts and challenges galore. When facing this much uncertainty, resilience comes to mind as an increasingly critical skill. Resilience enables us to remain optimistic amidst disruption and destabilization.
Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash
