Weekend Leadership Reading: 9/13/19

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Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about leadership.

From Henrik Bresman and Deborah Ancona : Crafting Your Own Leadership Signature

“In an age where even Silicon Valley disruptors struggle to keep up, it is more critical than ever for leaders to know themselves. Otherwise how can they learn and develop? Or create a dream team, one that magnifies their strengths and remedies their weaknesses? Or avoid costly blind spots? Exceptional leaders need to have a thorough understanding of the world, their industry, their company and – crucially – themselves.”

From the London School of Economics: The collapse of leadership theories

“With competing definitions and attributes for each theory, comparing them has become impossible, writes Jon Aarum Andersen”

From Claire Lew: The value of conflicting advice: How great leaders think

“Here’s one way to create more mental wriggle room for yourself in tough situations as a leader.”

From Jeffrey Schwartz, Josie Thomson, and Art Kleiner: The seven stages of strategic leadership

“Strategic leadership is the ability to handle complex problems for which there is no obvious short-term solution, in which the stakes are high, and in which influencing others is essential. In our work with neuroscience and organizational research, we’ve found that some people become more skilled in this area over the course of their career. They explicitly develop adaptive habits that make this kind of leadership possible, taking advantage of an aspect of the human mind and brain known as self-directed neuroplasticity. The deliberate, repeated focus of attention rewires and strengthens certain brain circuits, and in this way, people can build their capacity as strategic leaders.”

From Ian C. Woodward: The Powerful Drivers and Blockers of Leadership

“Exploring the hidden forces that motivate and hinder you can make you a better leader.”

From Adam Bryant and David Reimer: Incentives for a strong leadership culture

“CEOs and leadership teams spend a lot of time and energy defining and discussing corporate values, but a company’s most powerful cultural signals aren’t communicated by talking points. They’re determined by who gets promoted and who receives outsized rewards. Yet compensation and bonus frameworks in most organizations are still based almost solely upon financial results. In an effort to rule out subjectivity, such plans emphasize — and often focus exclusively on — achieving numerical targets. This oversimplified focus on the what of results, without consideration of how the numbers were achieved, has triggered unintentionally lopsided cultures that promote short-term thinking and a tolerance for the proverbial high-performing jerks.”

Every Monday, I do a blog post about business reading and business books. Follow this link to my review of From Gutenberg to Google.

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