Leadership

Many self-help programs try to help you achieve a state of equilibrium. You can align your chakra. You can balance your chi. You can even achieve inner peace. But what does all this equilibrium do for your business?

Businesses that try to achieve equilibrium have become our modern dinosaurs. Technology and customer preferences are evolving so rapidly that the only means to success is constant adaptation. By adopting a policy of disequilibrium, businesses can thrive by embracing this flux.

In this article , Chris Cancialosi discusses the importance of disequilibrium and how it can benefit your business’s ability to grow and adapt.

What’s in a name? Your company’s reputation means far more than just free publicity — it’s the factor that sets you apart from the competition and defines you as an industry leader.

Most people think a company’s success depends on creating a unique product and generating lots of sales, but truly successful businesses develop their employees into their industry’s future leaders. By establishing a strong leadership brand, you can distinguish your company’s promise and work to fulfill that promise in every aspect of your business.

In this LinkedIn article, Chris Cancialosi describes what leadership branding is and gives tips on how to strengthen your company’s reputation.

The VA debacle that’s dominating the news, unfortunately, highlights a disjointed and inefficient system meant to help our veterans. What caused such a divide between what the organization was intended to provide and what it actually offered?

Many signs point to unethical and disorganized bonus and incentive systems. Something that began as a way to encourage efficiency and customer service became corrupt, leading to many employees gaming the system.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi examines the VA scandal and explores the potentially dark implications of bonus and incentive programs for all businesses.

Tradition is safe, it’s easy, and it brought your business success in the first place. But the urge to uphold existing business methods can be detrimental to your company’s growth if you’re not mindful of changes in the industry.

For your company to pursue growth and innovation, you must be open to adopting new practices and be able to determine which methods are no longer valuable or need improvement.

In this Forbes article, Chris Cancialosi outlines how your company can break tradition and ultimately improve your bottom line.

Dov Seidman’s recent HuffingtonPost piece got me thinking about my own military experience and its non-basic training for business leadership:

As an organizational psychologist and combat veteran, consulting with corporate and government clients on the topic of organizational culture, I wholeheartedly agree. Military leadership may be perceived as “strict discipline” and “mindless followership” by those who have not experienced it firsthand, but the reality is, in today’s fluid combat environment, our leaders and soldiers must be able to adapt quickly and think on their feet. A core set of guiding principles and values in conjunction with intense training and development has enabled our military forces to adapt to the changing face of combat in impressive ways.

After our victory in WWII, it’s not surprising that the values to hierarchy and command and control would become engrained in the civilian sector as “the right way to do things” and, at the time, they were extremely effective, driving our economy to great heights, creating a strong middle class and creating the most highly educated society in the world. As the world situation evolved and warfare became less “stand toe-to-toe and duke it out” and more decentralized and nebulous, our military organizations had to adapt in ways that changed the face of warfare in dramatic ways.

Blind followership would become less effective as warfare became more dependent on small units operating somewhat independently across long distances. Small unit leaders and their soldiers had to learn how to succeed in very nebulous environments, to accomplish their mission nonetheless. They did this by rightfully training their leaders to lead by a core set of fundamental principles and to do the “right thing at the right time” as LTC Glick stated in the article.

While the military doesn’t need to show profit every month, I would argue that the price they pay for failure is exponentially greater than any for-profit business could ever fathom. Leaders in the civilian world who fail to understand that the world is evolving around them and who attempt to shape the world to fit their ways of working rather than adapting to be most successful certainly run the risk of becoming extinct.

I use the principles that I learned as an officer in the Army every day in my own business with great success. Not only is my team fully capable to working in nebulous situations, they are able to do so while working with ever-changing team structures, designed to best serve the diverse needs of our clients. My team is guided by a clear set of fundamental core principles and ways of operating and they are given an enormous amount of autonomy in HOW they actually accomplish their mission.

If the civilian sector can get past the stereotypes that many hold about the military I would suggest that there are a great many lessons that could be adapted to their work. These lessons have be learned as a result of a great many lessons learned and lives lost and if they are passed off as ‘only applicable in a military context’ I’m afraid that we may be missing some extremely valuable learnings.

Leading at the top of the organization is lonely. According to a recent study called by The School for CEOs, 93% of top leaders require intensive preparation to take over an organization. Technical skill gaps that a leader faces as they take on positions of greater responsibility, such as making decisions about organizational structure and managing various stakeholder groups, often times receive more attention than some of the emotional and psychological hurdles they face. Impostor syndrome, for example, a major phenomenon that many leaders experience as they navigate a more complex landscape often causes people feeling ill-equipped to do the job. This has real performance implications both at a personal level and for the organization.

Leaders that experience impostor syndrome generally feel like a fraud. Often times, the story that replays in their minds is that they are going to be “found out”. In fact they often attribute their success to other factors – “ I was in the right place at the right time” or “I ended up here because I got lucky”. It’s also common to see executives that suffer from impostor syndrome not taking credit for their accomplishments. And if they do, they are usually pretty convinced that they won’t be successful the second time around.

It turns out that execs with impostor syndrome, tend not be vulnerable and this lack of vulnerability inevitably leads to a lack of self-awareness and development . To overcome this, creating a peer support system that can become a trusted network of advisors and serve as a go-to resource can be helpful. Working with an executive coach to look at some of the underlying beliefs and assumptions that are driving certain behaviors and then creating strategies to overcome them can also be of tremendous value. So if you or someone you know is feeling like an impostor, it’s normal and there are things that can be done to address it.

First published in Full Start, March 23, 2014

People tend to automatically think of leaders as extroverts. After all, an outgoing nature, openness, and inherent sociability are all basic requirements to being a leader, right? Not necessarily.

Research shows that 4 out of 10 top corporate executives are introverts — and for good reason. Introverted leaders bring quite a few qualities to the leadership table, such as their ability to form deeper relationships and think through decisions. These traits make them a powerful force in a business setting.

In this Full Start article, Chris Cancialosi discusses the misconceptions people often have about introverts and explains the hidden values a more reserved leader can bring to a company.