Throughout history, navigation and the ability to “Find our Way” has been an essential skill. When leading others, navigation and wayfinding is especially important, and in some cases a matter of life and death.

Mission driven nonprofits can teach us a lot about one of leadership’s most powerful levers: discretionary effort.        

Every successful leader must grapple with and answer this fundamental question: What do you stand for? A key element of leadership is tapping the hearts and minds and the discretionary effort of others. This happens when people understand and believe in what you believe.  

Disruptive innovation is all around us, and it’s causing disruptive change in our organizations at increasing pace and scale. Whether driven by technology, demographics, globalization or a host of other forces, organizations are wrestling like never before with delivering current performance while preparing for a changing future. This has profound implications for leaders in organizations.

“Your social skills are good for something”. This was the headline earlier this week from one of my favorite email feeds: The Daily Stat from the Harvard Business Review (HBR). It’s a quick read and often has interesting facts. Here’s the key statistic:

There was a striking confluence of events as I was concluding a webinar on the Economics of Trust late last week. I had just reviewed a slide citing corporate and government examples of the linkage between Leadership, Trust, Culture and Results.

The value of Balanced Leadership is clear: balancing your Orientation (organizational vs market), your Approach (analytical vs interpersonal), and your Horizon (tactical vs vision) makes you and the organization you lead more effective. Balance is good… or is it?