Transforming core beliefs for a paradigm Shift ??

Core beliefs determine how we perceive and interpret the world. They sit in the basement of our mind. Each person evaluates and seeks sound reasons or evidence for these potential beliefs in their own way. Once a person accepts a belief as a truth they are willing to defend, it can be said to form part of his/her belief system.

A core belief is an idea that we hold as being true. We base a belief upon certainties (e.g. mathematical principles), probabilities or matters of faith.

“Belief has been a most powerful component of human nature that has somewhat been neglected,” says Peter Halligan, a psychologist at Cardiff University. “But it has been capitalized on by marketing agents, politics and religion for the best part of two millennia.”

Every individual is largely defined by his/her core beliefs which are either culturally influenced, while others may be within families, or individually adopted. These beliefs help in defining who a person is, how others see them, and how they see themselves.

Great leaders share certain beliefs which are core beliefs providing the foundation of the leadership. Some of these are as follows: balancing vision and execution, showing respect, accepting accountability, committing to courage, delivering inspiration, taking risks and learning from mistakes, exhibiting confidence, leading with integrity, encompassing humility, maintaining focus, embodying honesty and integrity, exhibiting appreciation and many more......

Great leaders, as Tom Asacker writes in his book "The Business of Belief", must design new beliefs. "Creating belief is about affect before effect. It's about finding people who want to believe and making them feel comfortable." It's about making it ours. The key is: "Making it ours is not giving us control of the ship. Rather, it's connecting the voyage—especially the questions, highlights and successes—to our desires and choices."

That's what leadership is.

For those connected with an organisation, either as owner/director or as an employee, workplace culture plays a big role in impacting and reinforcing beliefs. A company’s culture is an enactment of its core values which is a reflection of emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of the people who work there; as such organizations are huge transmitters of cultural norms. Some beliefs are “core” beliefs meaning that they are central to many of the things people do and most important – feel. Core beliefs are like many branches that enable smaller, intertwined beliefs. If we want to chip away a core belief, we need to first aim at the smaller branch.

Here are examples of some of the limiting beliefs :

• There is never enough time to do all the things I need/want to do 
• Other people don’t care (or can’t do) the work as well as I can
• It’s everyone else’s fault including my company’s

If we complete these sentences with our own words then what do we get? Is it a positive or a limiting belief:

I am ___________________

You are ________________

The world is ___________  

The above can help us to understand whether we are carrying a positive or limiting belief

Organizational culture comprises the unwritten customs, behaviours and beliefs that determine the "rules of the game" for decision-making, structure and power. It's based on the shared history and traditions of the organization combined with leadership values.

There are two levels of Organizational culture -

Level 1 -The most visible level of the culture that constructed the physical and social environment, and are the surface level of an organizational culture that is tangible, easily seen and felt manifestations - products, physical environment, language, technology, clothing(Dress Code of employees), myths and stories, published values, rituals and ceremonies, employee behaviour, mission and vision of an organization all of which decide the workplace culture.

Level 2 - The next level of organizational culture that includes strategies, goals, shared perceptions and assumptions, norms, beliefs and values instilled by the founders and leaders play an important role in deciding organizational culture.

Its the organisation's culture which creates a strong foundation for strategy and its the culture which makes or breaks a strategy thus a powerful and empowering culture is a sure route to organisational success.

"Culture determines and limits strategy" Edgar Schein

We must be able to articulate our beliefs in order to make clear, rational, responsible and consistent decisions. When we use our core beliefs to make decisions we focus on what is important to us—what we need to feel a sense of well-being - arising from the experience of being human and must be intimately related to our needs and not necessarily wants.

Establishing the authenticity of our beliefs is critical and this is how we can do this - here are the five critical questions to answer with regards to our core beliefs :

• Are my core beliefs transmitting a positive message or providing a solution
• Are the core beliefs that I hold to be fundamental regardless of whether or not I get recognition /award?
• If I wake up tomorrow morning with enough money to retire, would I continue to hold on to these core beliefs?
• Can I envision these beliefs being as valid 100 years from now as they are today?
• If I am going to start a new organization tomorrow in a different line of work, can I or am I willing to build the core beliefs into the new organization regardless of its activities?

These questions are crucial because they help to make a crucial distinction between core beliefs and strategies – core beliefs are fixed regardless of the time and factors, internal as well as external, affecting the organization, while strategies and tactics should be changing from time to time.

Unless we identify and question the validity of a belief, it will persist, hence, a wrong has the potential to ruin us.

Values are stable long-lasting beliefs about what is important to us. They become standards by which we order our lives and make our choices. Once we get a 'YES' to all the above questions then our beliefs get converted to value.

“The voice in the head tells a story that the body believes in and reacts to. Those reactions are the emotions. The emotions, in turn, feed the energy back to the thoughts that created the emotion in the first place. This is the vicious circle between unexamined thoughts and emotions, giving rise to emotional thinking and emotional story-making.” Eckhart Tolle

Do we know what core beliefs are deeply held within us? Perhaps it is something we haven't ever sat down and thought about, but they do exist and these core beliefs play an important role in both society, and our own life, including how a person sees himself/herself and of course his/her self-esteem. On any given day, we’re driven by this entire network of beliefs that control what we do – and how we do it. Largely, these beliefs are unexplored and unchallenged. They form the basis of our assumptions and expectations about our own lives, other people’s experience – and what is happening in the world.

"If you want to change the world, if you want to change your world, if you want to succeed at work, in the marketplace, or in any other social endeavor or organization, belief is your Holy Grail" TOM ASACKER reveals the role of belief in leadership in his book "The Business of Belief"

Why this article?

I strongly believe that those who are self-employed (e.g. I am an independent consultant) need to develop individually adopted beliefs on areas of expertise as self-employed folks do not have an organisation's beliefs to back them hence, these individually adopted beliefs can help a self-employed person to better establish his/her worthiness.

Another perspective - if we start working on positive beliefs we can definitely overcome the limiting beliefs that we usually carry since our childhood and that's what can help us to grow. It's our childhood experiences (mostly limiting, e.g. we have often heard these in our childhood - don't do these activities, you are not putting enough effort, your concentration level is poor, all your friends are doing better than you, don't talk to strangers, you will fail if you continue like this, do exactly what you have been told to do, you are not obedient, you are a daydreamer which is why you are not doing well.......etc) which get converted to core beliefs as we grow up.

Core beliefs also help us to communicate to the world our highest priorities and positive core beliefs can define how we can best contribute thus can help us to lead a life of purpose.

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.” Allen Ginsberg

Its all about reprogramming our subconscious mind to achieve our dreams since it's our subconscious mind that holds all our core beliefs which are usually limiting.

Creating positive core beliefs is equivalent to making a positive promise to ourselves and to the world.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of my core beliefs:

?? Choosing the right Goal, objectives and strategy can help to identify highest-impact actions to overcome a high stake challenge or to seize an opportunity. It is a strategy which transforms goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives.

"Bad strategy is more than just the absence of good strategy. Bad strategy has a life and logic of its own, a false edifice built on mistaken foundations. Bad strategy may actively avoid analyzing obstacles because a leader believes that negative thoughts get in the way. Leaders may create bad strategy by mistakenly treating strategy work as an exercise in goal setting rather than problem solving." ................ obtained from Richard P. Rumelt's book - Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Here is another great example :

"A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done. Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into the “strategic plan.” Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long-term” is added so that none of them need be done today. As a vivid example, I recently had the chance to discuss strategy with the mayor of a small city in the Pacific Northwest. His planning committee’s strategic plan contained 47 “strategies” and 178 action items. Action item number 122 was to “create a strategic plan.”....................... obtained from Richard P. Rumelt's book - Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

?? No matter what effort is put in to improve sales, sales may not improve without a correct alignment between corporate, product/service, marketing and go-to-market strategy. Unless these strategies are well formulated, implemented and aligned sales might continue to struggle. Sales being an execution mechanism, can only be effective when it is well aligned with the plans or strategies. Here are two perspectives on factors which affect sales to a large extent and has the power to make or destroy a band -

• The balancing act 
• The right focus

Organisations must perform well the great balancing act - balancing between the promise makers and the promise-keepers of a business. The demand generation functions namely sales and marketing and the supply-side namely supply, production and the combination of logistics and distribution for delivering on that demand. When customer orders remain unfulfilled it creates opportunities for competitors to pitch-in whereas oversupply leads to either marking down or writing off - customers often get conditioned to expect the markdowns & they learn to wait and refuse to pay full price - aggressive discounting often leads to a huge erosion of brand value. An effective sales and operations planning (S&OP) process is critical for ensuring that organisations well perform this great balancing act.

Effective focus - Where target purchaser and the consumer is not the same:- Old Spice did viral marketing with its humorous and out-of-the-box advertisement campaigns. It came out with its brand character, the Old Spice man who appeared in “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign in 2010. The Old Spice man Isaiah Mustafa created a stir with his ad, created to appeal to the female audience and gave a subtle message to men to buy Old Spice. The ad video got amazing positive reviews garnering millions of YouTube views. With the wise recognition that women were making most Men's grooming product purchase on behalf of them, P&G realised there was a need to speak directly to women but without alienating men. Moreover, the campaign went viral because it targeted folks who were influential in the online sphere: who would blog about it and share it on their channels, who then acted as brand advocates (whether intentionally or not), spreading the gospel.

?? Value, culture and core beliefs - A company’s culture is an enactment of its core values which is a reflection of emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of the people who work there and these core values creates the foundation for strategy. While values typically come from the top, the culture will develop through the actions of the people within the company. The values stem from the core beliefs which is directly related to the core beliefs of the organisation and the leadership team. if enough people including the key people do not act in alignment with the stated values, the culture will be driven by those actions. While values are the ethical part, authenticity is established through the culture. When an organization operates in an ethical as well as in an authentic manner it positively influences employees in terms of job satisfaction and engagement/collaboration which in turn creates successful customer engagements.

"Any exceptional enterprise depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people—the #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline. While you might think that such a culture would be characterized by rules, rigidity, and bureaucracy, I’m suggesting quite the opposite. If you have the right people, who accept responsibility, you don’t need to have a lot of senseless rules and mindless bureaucracy in the first place! ......to compensate for the wrong people’s inadequacies, you institute bureaucratic procedures; this, in turn, drives away the right people (because they chafe under the bureaucracy or cannot tolerate working with less competent people or both); this then invites more bureaucracy to compensate for having more of the wrong people, which then drives away more of the right people; and a culture of bureaucratic mediocrity gradually replaces a culture of disciplined excellence. When bureaucratic rules erode an ethic of freedom and responsibility within a framework of core values and demanding standards, you’ve become infected with the disease of mediocrity." .............obtained from How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins

?? Organizations strive to be successful in the competitive global market which happens as a result of enhanced productivity and performance of employees. Productivity and performance of employees improve when employees are actively engaged in their work; enjoy their work, committed to their work and last but not the least trust one other which helps them to effectively collaborate at work thus creating a collective intelligence. Today’s successful organizations have made innovation a regular practice where collective intelligence plays a critical role.

A good strategy is a must but unless there are required emotions and culture to support that strategy, expected outcomes are difficult! A year or two just before the iPhone came out Bill Gates got wind of Apple’s impending game-changer, tasked then-CEO Steve Ballmer with creating a similar device. Ballmer passed the word to his senior vice-presidents, each of whom had at his disposal thousands of engineers and an R&D budget running into millions of dollars. Their combined failure to produce an acceptable iPhone equivalent is the stuff of tech legend. Reason - Despite their shared mandate, the departments didn’t cooperate fully with one another due to, as experts agree, Microsoft’s infamous “stack ranking” system. If Mr X part of a team of 10 people, knows well that, no matter how good everyone is, 2 people will get a great review, 7 will get mediocre reviews, and one will get a terrible review. This leads to employees competing with each other where top talents try to surround themselves with employees who would make them look better by comparison. On November 2013, reports surfaced that Microsoft had abandoned stack ranking and three months later, Steve Ballmer stepped down as CEO.

?? A strategy has to evolve in a systematic manner to decide what not to do and for success, organizations must act on strategic initiatives with a sense of urgency - competitive advantages are not permanent phenomenon hence, in order to effectively utilise a competitive advantage a business must act swiftly. Identifying and creating competitive advantages has to be a continuous exercise with a clear understanding that there is nothing called the ultimate objective, rather change the strategy when an objective is met. Thus, business strategy is not a three-act play but a soap opera where organizations should be able to smoothly transition from one episode to another with the right strategy followed by effective execution.

"When Brian reached out to me for my advice on the situation, I too advised him not to buy Wimdu. The key issue wasn’t the price and dilution, but the way a merger could pose impediments to speed and success. “Buying [Wimdu] adds a substantial amount of integration risk, which tripped up Groupon after buying CityDeal,” I told him. “Merging company cultures and company management could create potentially fatal risks, especially if it slows us down. With Airbnb, we have a business that is already benefiting from network effects. We can win.” I stand by that advice today. In the end, Airbnb’s founders realized that they wanted to take on the Samwers—and they wanted to win. But how? The key was an aggressive, all-out program of growth that we call blitzscaling. Blitzscaling drives “lightning” growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in an environment of uncertainty. It’s a set of specific strategies and tactics that allowed Airbnb to beat the Samwer brothers at their own game".........obtained from Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman & Chris Yeh

?? The link between innovation, growth or rather sustainable growth and the business life cycle is strong and every organisation needs to recognise this connection and act accordingly. Innovation is the key for growth and whenever a company makes an investment it is done for one kind of innovation or another. Organizations must constantly innovate and make it a routine capability and must be able to manage four types of innovation.

Here are various types of innovation -

Potential products - this is created by focusing on the purpose it serves and the benefits accrued by the use of its offering. This is usually a minimum viable product (MVP) a version of a new product which allows the business to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Put simply, it's a very basic version of a product or service that is marketed to test the assumptions about the business model. It has the core features required for the product to work, and nothing more, however, its more than a prototype. MVPs are created by the process of idea generation, measuring, learning, and analysis.

Sustaining Innovation - The second type of innovation is sustaining innovation where the company make those products better adding more functionality to the offering to make it more attractive and sell at a better price. To promote this type of innovation an organisation must be very close to its customers to better understand what customers are trying to accomplish, their challenges and aspirations, then reflecting those observations back in the properties of the next-generation products.

Efficiency Innovation - The type of innovations requires an organisation to bring in operational effectiveness to its processes to produce or deliver its offering in a more efficient manner - Lean Six Sigma or bottoms-up idea generation process are great examples. This type of innovation helps reduce cost, free-up capital, and thus helps in maximising profit through effective implementation of operational effectiveness e.g. freeing up capital by developing a process to reduce the inventory cost....etc.

Disruptive innovation - This is the third type of innovation that grows markets and makes the product available to many and coverts noncustomers. An organisation can never see the opportunity by being close to its existing customers rather need to watch out for areas where potential customers can't afford or don't have the skill to use the mainstream offerings. When an organisation has improved its offering beyond the point that customers can't justify the utility of the offering vis-a-vis the price they need to pay to acquire that offering, then, it creates a vacuum underneath for a small company to come in with a less expensive offering with a good enough functionality and usually a very low margin thus initiating a disruption. A business unit cannot disrupt itself, rather it can only implement new technologies in a way that sustain its current business model. It can only apply resources to successfully commercialize an existing innovation through continuous improvement and thereby generate more revenue by better serving its customers with improved functionalities/supporting services.

If an organisation loses its focus by concentrating on disrupting initiatives then either the customers will leave them or the competitors will kill them, hence, business units cannot disrupt themselves, rather an organisation can launch disruptive innovations by keeping it separate from the main business unit with an investment of a considerable amount of capital to fuel disruptive innovation.

The Value Curve model provides a useful framework for identifying disruptive innovations (Creating uncontested Market Space thus making the competition irrelevant) by comparing products and strategies followed by a strong focus on factors that would help to differentiate.

Asking these questions may help identify these factors :

1 Which competitive factors are of little value to the competitive position?

2 Which factors are of high value and could be raised?

3 Which factors add no value and could be eliminated?

4 Which factors have not yet been offered therefore need to be created?

A mechanism to improve sustaining and efficiency innovations - Front line workers encounter many problems and come across more opportunities than their managers do. Statistics show that the ideas that an organization needs, 80% of them are in the heads of their front line workers, hence, ideas should come in bottom-up approach while supporting its sustaining and efficiency innovations. While creating sustaining and efficiency innovations organizations should try to implement small ideas rather than going after the big ones because small ides are easy to implement and also at a lower risk to implement. At the same time, unlike major innovations, most small ideas remain proprietary and can yield sustainable competitive advantage.

In order to maintain growth, an organisation must be able to promote all four types of innovation.

These four types of innovation can be related to BCG matrix where:

1. Potential products are similar to Question mark - Low Market Share and High Market Growth. These are the opportunities that need to be further investigated. These can also be related to disruptive innovation followed by MVP since many disruptive products initially do not look promising.

2. Sustaining Innovation is similar to Stars - High Market Share and High Market Growth. Businesses and offerings in this quadrant are seeing rapid growth, similar to sustaining innovation where the offering gains popularity and the effort is to maximise its popularity by adding new functionalities in an effort to make it the market leader.

3. Efficiency Innovations are similar to Cash Cows: High Market Share and Low Market Growth. These businesses or offerings are well established and now the effort is to produce or deliver the offering more efficiently to maximise the profit from these offerings.

Usually, the cycle is like this - We start with potential products (which might be a disruptive offering), then move to sustaining innovation (make the product better), then efficiency innovations are used for maximising earning from the offering by efficiently producing or delivering the offering and then it becomes a dog where it comes to the end of its life cycle. It may, however, be noted that in order to be successful an organisation must identify disruptive innovation at the efficiency innovation stage.

?? When it comes to execution, two aspects are critical for success - an effective strategy and engaging employees as per their motivation. Motivation is our drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain, such that we either seek pleasure or try to avoid pain. Employees naturally get committed to the job which motivates them however, this motivation already exists in all of us, such that we either seek pleasure or try to avoid pain. High employee engagement and commitment is assured when employees are engaged based on an assessment of their dominant motivation.

Motivating through is critical but it cannot be a substitute for an ineffective strategy. Leaders may justly ask for “one last push,” but without an effective strategy no matter what effort is put in, it will not generate the required result, hence, it is critical to have a strategy worthy of the effort called upon.

"In 1917, around the village of Passchendaele in Flanders, British general Douglas Haig planned an assault. He wanted to break through the Germans’ fortified lines and open up a path to the sea, dividing the German army. He had been advised that shelling the German fortified positions would destroy the dikes and flood the below-sea-level fields. He shelled the German fortifications anyway. The shelling broke the dikes and churned the rich soil to sticky yellow clay, a quagmire that men sank into up to their knees and bellies. It drowned tanks, horses, and the wounded. Haig, stung by the death of 100,000 British troops at the Somme a year earlier, had promised to call off the advance if it did not go well. It didn’t, yet the doctrine of motivation and “one last push” continued for three months, despite appalling losses. In a final ten-day assault, Canadian troops pressed directly into the machine-gun fire, floundering in the mud and body parts of comrades; they suffered 16,000 casualties to take a small hill." ....................... obtained from Richard P. Rumelt's book - Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

?? Capabilities that an organisation develops generates out of its competencies - leading to operational effectiveness. The plethora of management tools and techniques e.g. Total Quality Management, Lean Six Sigma, Outsourcing, Re-engineering, Change management..... have ensured dramatic operational improvements, however, many companies have still failed to translate those gains into sustainable growth and profitability. This is because operational effectiveness alone is not sufficient to achieve a competitive advantage, these are best practices that can help in improving capability and efficiency, to be precise to reduce cost and improve quality and speed. Competitive advantage comes from the way all activities of an organisation are interconnected. This interconnection is like a chain – as strong as its weakest link. The competitive advantage thus arises out of many competencies cutting across activities and blending well into one another where improvement of one task will improve the overall performance and vice versa.

It is easy to identify those activities but very hard to replicate - a competitor seeking to match performance gains little by imitating few as its the array of interlocked activities which makes the difference.

The job of the strategy is to create strongly interconnected activities such that success equals doing all activities well— not just a few.

?? Effectively balancing between the two realms of leadership – The two dimensions are Task behaviours and Relationship behaviours. Task-related behaviours ensure that people, equipment, and other resources are efficiently utilised whereas relationship-related behaviours are used by leaders to enhance team members' skills, leader-member relationship, identification with team, unit or organization and commitment to the goals of the organization. Needless to say, both have positive effects and contribute to developing performance-related leadership outcomes and follower satisfaction aspects. Situations might differ, but each situation needs a degree of both task and relationship behaviours. Great influencers attract and motivate people with their ideas, knowledge, expertise, personality traits and skills. Influence is about 'pull' and not 'push', effective leadership is not about using positional authority /power to make people work for a leader i.e. don’t have to compel someone to work for a leader but naturally get their commitment because they are attracted towards the leader. A successful leader must influence the behaviour of other stakeholders, inside and outside the organisation, many of them cannot be controlled through a hierarchy. This means the most important mechanism is the quality of the relationships. A true leader makes all those people that he/she is responsible for feel secured and comfortable consistently. Influence is a commitment, not compliance!

Power of influencing and collaboration

Here is a great example from history showing the power of influencing and Collaboration - When Sir Winston Churchill was appointed as Prime Minister of Britain on 10 May 1940 during the difficult days of 1940–41, the British Commonwealth and Empire stood almost alone in its active opposition to Adolf Hitler. The question was whether Britain should attempt to negotiate peace with Adolf Hitler, however, Churchill said “NO”, instead of Britain influenced the U.S.A. to join the war. When the war began, Americans viewed the conflict as Europe’s problem and wished to keep it that way. However, as the situation in Europe grew increasingly dire, the United States began to slowly edge toward war. The breaking point, of course, was the sudden attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

This is how Britain influenced the U.S.A. to join World War II - Few lovers expended as much ink and thoughts as Churchill did in his long personal letters to President Franklin Roosevelt, two, sometimes three times a week. The least patient of men, he displayed almost unfailing forbearance. He had met president, Hollywood stars and wealthy families such as the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. He had to play a clever game, balancing the need to present Britain as a prospective winner against the need to exert pressure by emphasizing the threat of disaster if America held back and Hitler won. 'We shall get the Americans in by showing courage and boldness and prospects of success and not by running ourselves down,' he declared.

By far the most important of the envoys sent to Britain to take a view of the country's predicament was Harry Hopkins, the president's personal emissary. He fell totally for the charm. 'I have never had such an enjoyable time as I had with Mr Churchill,' he said afterwards. During the month of his visit, the prime minister diverted his special guest with a succession of dinner-table monologues, strewing phrases like rose petals in the path of this most important and receptive of visitors. Hopkins had never before witnessed such effortless, magnificent talk. He was entranced by his host. 'Jesus Christ! What a man!'

He was also impressed by the calm with which the prime minister received bad news. Hopkins and Churchill were relaxing at the private viewing of a film after dinner one night when word came that a Royal Navy cruiser had been sunk in the Mediterranean. The show went on regardless.

In his report to the president, Hopkins concluded: 'People here are amazing, from Churchill down, and if courage alone can win - the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately.' Such opinions were crucial in shifting the mood in America Britain's way.

Finally, U.S.A. joined the war post the sudden attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, which made the balance shift and Sir Winston Churchill led Britain as Prime Minister until after the German surrender in 1945.

?? Lead from behind and create the context - In Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, in a passage Mandela recalls how a leader of his tribe talked about leadership: “A leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.” Leadership is also a collective activity - creating a system where others can step up and lead so that the group doesn't have to wait and then respond to a command from the front. The leader's role, in this case, is to create the opportunity for collective leadership, as opposed to merely setting direction.

?? Integrative thinking - The capacity to hold two opposing ideas at once and then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both. This process is called integrative thinking. Integrative thinkers start from a place of consideration — an openness to learning from other people’s ideas, especially those ideas that conflict with their own. This mindset allows them to approach challenges and problems from a unique position; where conventional thinkers opt to choose between points of view, integrative thinkers instead consider the value inherent in opposing models from more than one perspective.

After diving into opposing views of the world, integrative thinkers make sense of the tension between the ideas and reframe the problem to be solved in the light of what they now see differently. With a clearer perspective on the problem to be solved, integrative thinkers then explore possibilities and iterate on prototype solutions. The tools of integrative thinking provide the structure and pathways for ideation, guiding thinkers toward fresh outcomes.

At the end of the journey, integrative thinkers engage with others to test and experiment with the prototype solutions, building excitement for bringing the idea to action.

?? Magnanimous personality - It doesn’t matter whether or not a manager or leader has a charismatic personality but that person definitely has to be a magnanimous person. Humility and Selflessness are two most important character traits that the organization should look for in managers and leaders, other than skills, knowledge and experience.

Fred Luthans is the Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln specializing in organizational behaviour. In the 1980s, Luthans conducted rare observational research to answer the questions of "What do managers really do in their day-to-day activities?"; "What do successful managers (those who rise rapidly in their organizations) really do?"; and "What do effective managers (those who have satisfied and committed employees and high quantity and quality outcomes in their units) really do?" His research found that the relatively most frequently observed activity contributing to managers’ success was their social network skills (socializing/politicking, managing up and interacting with outsiders). Effective managers, on the other hand, were observed to give relatively most frequent attention to communicating and human resource management activities, with networking given the least attention. This finding that managers who were successful exhibited quite different activities than did their effective counterparts challenged the conventional wisdom that promotions are based on doing activities that result in effective outcomes. This research empirically demonstrated the importance of playing the game (networking, politicking and managing up) in order to get ahead in organizations, successful managers are on a relatively fast promotion track. Effective managers, on the other hand, have satisfied and committed subordinates who perceive quality over quantity performance in their unit. A comparative analysis of the activities of the successful versus the effective real managers reveals little similarity between the two.

This clearly explains what the real problem is!

Identifying the right people as a manager is one of the biggest challenges faced by the present-day management; humility and selflessness are two most important character traits that the organization should look for in managers, other than skills, knowledge and experience.

An arrogant manager would say "I may not listen to my team because I know it all", add selfishness to that - this manager would spend most of his time in socializing, politicking and managing up to move up the corporate ladder.

A great manager (an effective manager) blends professionalism with personal humility and never let personal ego rule the decision or get interested in personal gains rather put all efforts in making the organization great and create a culture where all employees get an opportunity to be heard because voices from all levels must be heard to arrive at the right decision!

If a manager or a leader’s mission is bigger than him/her then only people will follow that person, it doesn’t matter whether the manager or leader has a charismatic personality, but that person definitely has to be a magnanimous person. Power comes when the people that are being led give their support to the manager or leader, they offer the power and then they watch the manager or leader, if manager or leader take that power and deflect it back to the people then they get more power from the people but if manager or leader take some of that power then that manager or a leader start receiving less from his/her people. Those managers or leaders that accept the power make a critical mistake!

?? No matter how many times we fail we must never quit - We must stay with the problem till it is solved, problems unresolved are goals unachieved; to analyse the problem we can use diagnostics as well as analytical reasoning skills. We must also identify the root cause of the problem by using problem-solving tools such as the 5 Why technique or the Root cause analysis or severity and occurrence analysis; we will fail only if we quit. Let us rest whenever required but let’s not quit, success will come - it has no choice.

Here are two perspectives :

When we fall, we must not moan or whine, rather roar. A river when falls creates spectacular sight and sound, the sound of pounding water; that does not look like a tragic event! After the fall, the river becomes more forceful and gathers the momentum to meet the ocean, and that confluence is an equally spectacular sight where the ocean gives way to the river, hence, when we fall we are destined to become more powerful. We must believe that our sincere efforts will get required recognition in future; believing that life will take care and best is yet to come can help us to go further. The fall is just a way of becoming more capable, hence, we must never quit. 

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall" Confucius

Let us be laser-focused on the present by eliminating the unimportant which will help us not to quit. We must deeply concentrate on the present moment to make our today beautiful and use today's learning to make our tomorrow wonderful. To experience life in it’s fullest form, we must focus all out attention on our present activities because we can derive power from the present not from past and not in future, as such present hold the seed from which future will grow and unless we do justice to our present, the seed will not germinate into our desired future. If we quit, we will not do justice to our present.

?? Real integrity is doing the right thing even if nobody is watching, being moral doesn't mean much unless we can walk the talk. We need to be the same person publicly, privately and personally.

A CEO was about to retire in a year's time and he had to find his successor. He gave seeds to his leadership team, those that qualified to take his seat and told them to nurture their seed so that it becomes a plant, and bring that plant back on a specific date where the owner of the best plant would become the CEO. On that specific date, all leaders came back with huge plants except one who could not grow any plant from that seed. The CEO looked at everybody's plant and then declared the man who could not grow any plant as the CEO - do you know why? That's because the CEO had given dead seeds to his leadership team to test the integrity of his leadership team.

?? Last and most important one gratitude Silent gratitude does not mean much to anyone; gratitude is a supplement we need to take daily by offering honest appreciations and sincerely thanking all those who have helped us.

Thank you so much for your time ??

?? References and further reading :

•  Richard Rumelt Good Strategy Bad Strategy The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt, Year of Publication: 2011
• How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins, Year of Publication: 2009

• Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman, Year of Publication: 2018

• My LinkedIn articles on strategy, here are the links :