Tag - leadership

Leadership @ work

I recently received a promotion, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a manager versus a leader, what kind of leadership I want to provide, and what kind of a leader do I want to grow to be …This is tough stuff, and I’m pretty sure I have a long way to go. But I think the critical piece is summed up in this advice that I found on PositiveSharing (the chief happiness officer’s blog):

A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence,not so good when people stand in fear,worse, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.But a good leader who speaks little,when his task is accomplished, his work done,the people say “We did it ourselves.”

The person who said that lived 2500 years ago in China: Lao Tzu.[tags] leadership, office, work, lao tzu, john koetsier [/tags]

on leadership …

If only public companies understood this:

In fact, sometimes, as the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber orchestra shows, the best leadership is less leadership. No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources.

Seen today in Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer.

In my experience, publicly-traded companies are the worst at ignoring this, as they continually dig up the seeds and check them, while managing for the quarter.

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