Considering new or different information and perspectives is crucial to engaging one’s emerging future. Different viewpoints can trigger new insights that open up to new possibilities. As you encounter a personal perspective-changing insight or article and wish to share it here, please contact us.
LEADERSHIP ALIGNMENT TO THE FUTURE
Transformational leadership requires gathering and focusing energy—both your own and your followers’—to sense, shape and advance an emerging future reality. This sharing of energy between leader and followers can either be mutual and empowering or individualized and disempowering. Central to predicting the outcome of this exchange, and successfully advancing to an emerging future, is an awareness and maturity about power and its intended use.
A recent New York Times article reported that former Exxon Mobile CEO and now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “keeps a low profile.” The conjecture was that Tillerson’s “cloak of invisibility” indicated being out of 45’s inner circle, or, conversely, it demonstrated a “highly strategic” and consistent element of Tillerson’s leadership style (putting things in […]
The primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. Consider noted Emotional Intelligence expert Dan Goleman’s perspective on the importance of presence and attention.
We have entered a watershed moment not only here in America, but also globally. It’s a moment that could help us wake up to a deeper level of collective awareness and renewal—or a moment when we could spiral down into chaos, violence and fascism-like conditions. As we enter this new period of leadership in the U.S., read the reflections of Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer at MIT and cofounder of the Presencing Institute, on what has led to this shift of leadership and some of its implications on the future.
The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, both for individual managers and for the organizations they lead. It generates passion and energy, which fuel growth and help companies sustain performance over the long term. But there is a dark side to overachievement when it comes to engaging and empowering others. See what Mary Fontaine and others at the Hay Group have to say about managing the Achievement Motive.