领导力资源月度摘要

At ConantLeadership, we’re committed to lifelong learning and continuous improvement. In service to your leadership growth, each month we curate this digest of resources from around the web to:

Share actionable advice from top leadership luminaries
Celebrate a range of viewpoints (inclusion is not an endorsement)
Contextualize workplace trends through a leadership lens
Support your personal development in life, leadership, & beyond

Want to work with us to lift your or your team’s leadership to new heights? Drop us a line or talk to Emma Anthony, our Director of Leadership Programs.

In this edition of the Leadership That Works Newsletter: Leadership lessons from George Washington, work should be fun, how to lead through a reorg, the seven skills of strategic thinking, a mentorship mantra, listen with your ‘third ear,’ and more.

New from ConantLeadership

3 Leadership Lessons from George Washington

In honor of the Fourth of July holiday in the US, we were inspired to reflect on the leadership of our first president, and we were struck by the persistent question, “what makes a leader?” We found three distinct answers to this question in Washington’s legacy and they all reveal that it’s not the position or rank that makes the leader, but the purpose-driven behaviors of people compelled to bring about change.

1. A leader focuses on the work, not the prize. Washington was not interested in glory or lavish rewards. He was committed to governance. When leaders become preoccupied with the trappings of success, it can cause them to veer off course. The best leaders immerse themselves in the work of bettering themselves and their organization; they don’t obsess after some prize.

2. A leader conveys clarity of purpose. Washington was not a brilliant military strategist. His success had less to do with battlefield prowess and more to do with his ability to rally people around a shared purpose. He reminded people why their contributions mattered and successfully tied the everyday challenges to the larger mission. The Continental Army was met with enormous obstacles—they were hungry, they were cold, many didn’t even have shoes—but they were able to prevail because the purpose of their efforts was clear and compelling beyond a shadow of a doubt.

3. A leader leads by example. As our nation’s first president, Washington was acutely aware of how important it was for him to model the values he hoped to instill in the nation for generations to come. He knew he would set the precedent for presidential behavior and felt a duty to exemplify the kind of leadership conduct that could endure through many successors. We’ve got to do the same as leaders. When we are tasked with bringing about change, delivering high performance, and creating superior value, we must show the way with our own actions and words first before we can expect to bring others along.

Get the full story here.

Yes, Work Can (and Should Be) Fun

“When we wish away the workweek, we wish away our lives,” writes Bree Groff in this excerpt from her new book, Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously), where she answers the crucial question, “What would it take for us to look forward to Monday?” She offers five key insights about making work fun, and here are three.

1. Most days should be fun. Pain is optional. “I don’t believe work needs to be drudgery . . . We don’t get paid because work is painful. We get paid because we create value. The pain is entirely optional. It’s fun to create something others appreciate. To show off our skills, learn, experiment, and build next to people we like. Sure, not every day will be fun, but when we falsely equate struggle with greatness, we’ve guaranteed we’re either happy or successful but never both.”

2. Friendship and relationships are important at work too. “What good is a strong bottom line if everyone’s miserable? If we know relationships are the secret to long-term human happiness, why do we pretend it’s different at work? You should like the people you spend your days with. Plain and simple. . . . Work is fun if we, together, make it that way.”

3. Get good at life, not just work. “The trouble with work is that it can be greedy. Sometimes you may work too much because that’s what the job requires. Other times it might be because you find it fun and even addicting. But either way, there’s a cost, and it can’t be avoided. When you overwork, you underlive. And that’s no fun. Our time is finite, and if more is spent working, less is spent on date nights, crossword puzzles, your health, or many other parts of your life that are important to you. . .You are more important than you think to those who love you. You are less important than you think to those who employ you.”

Get the full story here.

**For more on this, explore the entire chapter devoted to having fun in our book, The Blueprint: 6 Practical Steps to Lift Your Leadership to New Heights.

The Day After—How to Lead Through a Reorg

“Restructuring decisions often make sense on a spreadsheet. . . But once the dust settles, what’s left behind is rarely neat: Uncertainty, silence and disengagement ripple across the organization,” writes Gloria St. Martin-Lowry in this piece for Chief Executive. She says a leader’s job isn’t done when the reorg is announced or completed, “in fact, it’s just beginning.” And she offers “five strategic steps CEOs must take to lead effectively through the emotional turbulence of restructuring.” Here are three.

1. Don’t mistake silence for stability. After a reorg, “many CEOs look for visible signs of disruption: complaints, turnover, missed deadlines. But one of the most dangerous signals is actually silence. When employees stop asking questions, stop offering feedback or simply nod through meetings, it’s not a sign of calm; it’s a warning.” So, “your frontline leaders must be equipped to surface what isn’t being said and truly connect with your employees.”

2. Shift from control to connection. “A reorg naturally involves control—budgets, roles, reporting lines. But once the structural changes are made, CEOs need to pivot to connection. Employees who are still standing often feel like collateral damage. They weren’t laid off, but they weren’t untouched.” To build back trust, leaders must have “consistent, candid conversations,” and prioritize “one-on-one and team-level check-ins. . . when leaders show they care, people don’t just stay—they re-engage.”

3. Be honest—even when the truth is uncertain. “It’s natural to want to protect your people from worry, especially when the future is unclear,” but “withholding information or dodging hard conversations only creates more anxiety. Employees aren’t fooled by silence or overly polished messaging. They’re already worried, and when we pretend otherwise, we erode their trust.” Leaders must “normalize honest conversations, even when the answers are incomplete.”

Get the full story here.

**For more on this, explore our suite of resources on inspiring trust with your team.

Kindness Isn’t a ‘Soft’ Skill

Leadership experts are sounding the alarm that kindness isn’t some lovey-dovey ideal that’s nice to have in the workplace; rather, it’s a hard-edged necessity for high performance. Nicki Macklin, Thomas H. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson, the authors of this Harvard Business Review piece on kindness, issue this warning: “Organizations that neglect kindness face significant consequences, including employee turnover, absenteeism, eroded trust, poor communication, and customer dissatisfaction.” Conversely, they say, “workplaces that prioritize kindness see stronger relationships, collaboration, engagement, and retention.” Because the costs of lacking kindness are so dire—and the benefits of having it are so compelling—the authors are adamant that “kindness must be treated as a hard skill that can be taught.”

The authors are careful to clarify that kindness and niceness are not the same thing: “Niceness is about avoiding discomfort” by “sidestepping hard conversations and letting things slide.” Whereas, “Kindness is not soft. It’s not optional and it can’t be left to chance. Like safety protocols and performance reviews, kindness must be built into how people work.” Because kindness “is something we do, not just something we feel,” it requires effort and courage; it often means doing difficult things, “like giving tough feedback,” and “engaging in hard conversations,” all of which demonstrate “that you believe the other person has greater potential or that you want to help your team succeed.” The authors close on an urgent note, imploring leaders to “make kindness non-negotiable,” and to treat it as “something vital in board reports, leadership development, and performance conversations.” Get the full story here.

**For more on this, explore our recap of Doug Conant’s conversation with Amy Edmondson about psychological safety at a past Blueprint Leadership Summit.

7 Skills That Strategic Thinkers Must Master

Perhaps you’ve received this feedback in a midyear review or as you adjust to a new leadership role with more responsibility: “You’re too bogged down in the day-to-day. Be more strategic.” In this SmartBrief piece, Amber Johnson PhD, a leadership consultant, writes, “No matter when you first hear the message, you’re probably left wondering—what does it really mean to be more strategic?” She reassures leaders who may be hearing this feedback for the first (or tenth) time: “The good news is that this strategic mindset is a skill that can be built rather than a fixed quality you missed out on,” and there are seven essential skill sets that comprise “strategic thinking or capacity.”

Future-oriented perspective
Systems thinking
Prioritization & trade-offs
Pattern recognition and insight
Strategic communication
Data-informed decision making
Comfort with ambiguity

Johnson develops these seven skills with more robust definitions as well as reflection questions for each such as, “What trends are impacting our work? What future trends can I anticipate?” for the future-oriented perspective; “How could I map this process? What is a metaphor or analogy for the experience?” for the pattern recognition and insight skill; “How should this message be framed for the impact we need?” for the strategic communication skill, and many more. Get the full story here.

**For more on strategic thinking, explore our post on why if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

‘Give First’—A Mentorship Mantra

In this BigThink interview with Brad Feld, a tech entrepreneur and author of the book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship, Feld shares many insights for building deep relationships that inspire both parties to get better, in a freewheeling discussion with interviewer Eric Markowitz. Here are three takeaways from their conversation.

Give first. Feld says “You have to be willing to put energy into a system without knowing what you’re going to get back,” even though it is reasonable to “expect something back; you just don’t know when, from whom, over what time period, or in what form.” He makes the distinction that “‘Give first’ is a philosophy, not a religion. In religion, you follow rules to achieve salvation. A philosophy is ideas and theories about how things work, and you pick and choose what to incorporate into your own worldview.”

Be present and less transactional. “We’re conditioned to think in very short, transactional ways. But most of the truly important things that create value are serendipitous and unmodeled,” says Feld. He acknowledges that “our ability to live in the moment and be fully present is extremely hard because of all the stimuli around us,” but it’s worth the effort because “if you combine being present with openness to randomness . . . magical things happen.”

Flatten hierarchies. Feld tells Markowitz: “The most meaningful relationships in my life are peer relationships, not hierarchical ones. Even this conversation exemplifies that— it’s been a back-and-forth where we’re both learning, rather than a one-sided interview. That’s what great mentorship looks like: when both parties learn from each other.” And he has this message for fellow leaders: “Start by focusing on what you can control—how you behave, how you engage with others. Ask yourself: Are you trying to be the person with the most success, or are you trying to contribute meaningfully to the things you’re involved in?”

Get the full story here.

**For more on this, check out our ‘How Can I Help?’ chapter in The Blueprin twhich celebrates starting more interactions by offering help and focusing on the other party.

Learn to Listen with Your ‘Third Ear’

In this edition of McKinsey Author Talks, Raju Narisetti talks with Emily Kasriel, author of the book Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes about “the common barriers that keep us from really hearing each other and practical strategies to overcome them.” Kasriel shares many insights about deep listening in the full interview and here are three key takeaways.

Deep listening starts with listening to yourself. “You can’t be open to listening to someone else until you’ve truly listened to yourself. If you haven’t taken the time to listen to yourself, you might find that you’re closed off from what the person is trying to communicate to you. Memories, strong emotions, prejudices, or an unacknowledged agenda can really distort an exchange, if you haven’t recognized and addressed these internal challenges first.”

The best listeners use their ‘third ear.’ “Your ‘third ear’ enables the whole of you to listen to the whole of them. The term was coined by psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who was a pupil of Sigmund Freud. The third ear senses what is important and unspoken but is lying in the speaker’s unconscious.” Tapping into your third ear allows you to listen more intuitively: “Sometimes our own instincts can be more insightful than our conscious intelligence . . . rather than anticipating what someone will say, you can be attuned to what emerges instead.”

Learn to ‘hold the silence.’ “People fear awkward, hostile, or intimidating silence, but silence doesn’t have to be defined by aggression or emptiness. Instead, silence can be warm, inviting, nourishing, and empowering. The opposite of silence is interrupting. Silence gives the speaker the opportunity to reflect, clarify, and go deeper, and it gives you, the listener, the chance to make meaning from what you’ve heard. It allows you both to begin to trust each other.”

Get the full story here.

**For more on listening, explore our “Listen, Frame, Advance” framework for making every interaction count.

For Better Meetings, the Boss Should ‘Speak Third’

“If you’re hoping to solicit new ideas or feedback from your team during a meeting, you might think the best way to loosen people up and get the conversation flowing is to start things off yourself,” writes Sabina Nawaz in this Wall Street Journal piece on how to run effective meetings. Nawaz says that too often, when senior leaders speak first, it can stifle innovation: “Bosses who don’t invite input from others before voicing their own ideas and opinions often discourage their employees from asking questions, providing dissenting views or pitching ideas of their own,” and she observes that, “when this dynamic becomes the norm—with you speaking first and/or the most during meetings—your employees are likely to disengage and perhaps even multitask their way through meetings, mindlessly agreeing with everything you say.”

This doesn’t mean leaders should not offer input—their voice is critical in setting the direction and advancing the agenda—but they can be more strategic about when they speak to get the best outcomes. Nawaz advises leaders “to make it a goal to be the third person to speak in meetings.” Why? By not speaking first, bosses “make it easier for people to express unbiased opinions” and set the stage “for more robust debate,” and at the same time “managers shouldn’t wait too long to speak either,” because “if you take too long to weigh in, your team might wander off topic or read something into your silence that just isn’t there.” So she says speaking third is the sweet spot. Get the full story here.