Friday Five: The Art of Intentional Leadership

Friday Five is a new weekly series at QAspire where I curate five articles (with excerpts)/quotes/tweets/visuals shared on my personal learning network each week that I found particularly useful, and hopefully you will find some of them valuable too!

This edition features insights on authentic leadership, change, rationality and transformation.

Quote Via Neil Walker

Consistently investigate what gives other people energy. Be the fan that fuels it. – Darren Rowse

Isn’t this the essence of being a good leader and hence a good human being in all spheres of our life?

You Can Only Get There From Here – The Art of Intentional Leadership by Scott Mabry

The hardest part of any change, personal or organizational is, of course, starting. We wonder if we’re ready. If the time is right. If we have what it takes. The answers will always be uncertain.  What is certain is that if we don’t act, nothing will change.

The key to leading in an uncertain times is not to aim for a perfect start, but starting – and then iterating, understanding, aligning to create a change.

Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future – MIT Sloan

Conversely, cultural mindsets that relate closely to digitally maturing companies value experimentation and speed, embrace risk, and create distributed leadership structures. They also foster collaboration and are more likely to use data in decision making.

Responding to an uncertain future of work dominated by bots, AI and automation is really all about mindset change. This article provides a very detailed view on the mindset change within organizations to survive, thrive and grow in a digital world.

Ambiguity and Emergence – Sahana Chattopadhyay

A top down, hierarchical organization where information is filtered through the chain of command is especially ill-equipped to thrive in ambiguity. Only when the unspoken and tacit patters are seen, sense making happens, and emergence takes place. And emergence leads to those seemingly small but powerful innovations and practices that disrupt the established  order of things.

Sahana is one of my favorite bloggers and in this post, she throws the light on dealing with ambiguity in a way that leads to emergence, ideas and innovation.

Pure rationality is a myth we should not aspire to – Dionne Lew

The ability to think and act autonomously is at the heart of rationality, yet mind wandering suggests that much (not all) of what we think is involuntary.

I love it when I read strong argumentation that alters my own belief system and offers a contrarian perspective on things I already believed in. Dionne Lew did just that with this post!

– – – – –

Special thanks to Jane Hart for including my post/sketch in her selection of posts from August 2016.

– – – – –

Image Source: Someone I so admire – Hugh McLeod

Also Check Out: All Posts at QAspire with Visual Notes