A Look At What Real Leadership Skills Might Look Like

If you go into any bookstore and go to the section with business books, you will find enough books on leadership to fill its own library.

The problem with most of them is that they focus on how to get followers to follow the orders of the leader. To enact in real life, the old kids game of follow-the-leader.

It’s often about trying to get inside the head of followers to understand what makes them tick and how to motivate them. But suppose, the real power of the leader was not to try and motivate followers but to be clear enough about articulating his or her own intent in such a way that it becomes almost axiomatic for others to understand and want to follow. Suppose motivation came from within the leader, not from external forces or orders.

That’s at the heart of the approach to leadership put forth by retired US Navy Captain David Marquet in his new work Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say--and What You Don't.

My conversation with David Marquet:

With Each New Year, Do We Loose A Little of What Makes Us Human?

How much of your work day is about emails, texts, Slack, Basecamp or Shift? And how much is about phone calls or meetings or basic human contact? If you’re like most people today, a large portion is devoted to apps, to screens, and to technology. And less and less to human contact.

How many times have you sent a work text or email to someone yards or even feet away? How many Holiday texts or emails did you send, rather than make a phone call, or a date for coffee? All of this comes with a price. It disconnects us over and over again so that we begin to lose the basic skills of human contact and interaction.

According to Dan Schawbel, the price we pay is not just in the workplace but in the very act of being human. Schawbel writes about this in Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation.

My conversation with Dan Schawbel:

Now More Than Ever We Need Courageous Leadership

It was Winston Churchill who said, that we “should never let a crisis go to waste.” When the Chinese write the word crisis, the combine two symbols. One stands for danger, the other opportunity.

So it is that crises have the potential to break us, or to strengthen us. This is even more true for our leaders, who are in short supply these days. But at their best, they should have the ability to define the crisis, and while not necessarily leading us to the promised land, they should show us all that we have the ability, the strength, and the reason to walk through the fire to the other side. This is true of leaders on a grand global scale, or for leaders within a family or community. The skill set is similar.

That's the skill set that Nancy Koehn explore in in her book Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times.

My conversation with Nancy Koehn:

The Business Moments You Can't Ignore

It was actually Winston Churchill, not Rahm Emanuel, who said that we should never let a serious crisis go to waste.

A crisis often creates a great opportunity to face, to talk about, and even sometimes to act on issues that had been previously frozen

Or, as Donald Rumsfeld once inarticulately put it, “sometimes the only solution to an unsolvable problem, is to create a bigger problem.”

But often these problems come out of the blue; in life and in business. When they do, when those pivotal moments happen, it’s the culture, the people, the mission, in short the underpinning of the organization itself, that must become its survival mechanism, as well as the jumping off point for its future.

So just as we might prep for physical disasters, why not prepare and build an origination for the stress of those moments. That's one of the lessons from Malachi O'Connor and Barry Dornfeld in The Moment You Can't Ignore: When Big Trouble Leads to a Great Future.

My conversation with Malachi O'Connor and Barry Dornfeld:

Mmm Mmm good leadership

Whether you are working as a CEO of a company, or dealing with kids, we live in an age where interruptions are the norm. It's a time where the most carefully structured to do list is often out the window by 10:00 am. And it's going to get worse! But is there some hidden value in all of these interruptions? Do these interactions and distractions actually form the basis for a whole new way to interact with family and colleagues and in fact, to provide new opportunities for leadership? Doug Conant, one of our nations most respected business leaders and the President and CEO of Campbell Soup Co, outlines a whole new approach to modern leadership in his book TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments.

My conversation with Doug Conant:

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