Yasim's Blog

“When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.” Leading today is what prepares a leader for more and greater responsibility tomorrow. Humanness . Nobody wants to work with a perfect leader. Build collaboration and solidarity by revealing your weaknesses. Intuition . To be most effective, you need to know what’s going on without others spelling it out for you. Collect unspoken data from body language and looks given across rooms to help you intuit the underlying messages. Tough empathy . Care deeply about your employees, but accept nothing less than their very best. Uniqueness . Demonstrate that you are a singular leader by showing your unique qualities to those around you. 1. Great leaders recognize strengths in us that we don't always yet fully see in ourselves. The leader should trust his judgment more than the subordinates. It's the Pygmalion effect: expectations become self-fulfilling. Both positive and negative emotions feed on themselves. Your ...

The power of first impressions is so powerful and so lasting that it is imperative for you to think through your first encounters when entering a new job, a new role, or making new contacts. I was reminded of this by Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer in his HBR.org blog post, Shape Perceptions of Your Work, Early and Often. His general message is that other people can spread your praises better than you can, so be active in making that happen. But he also reminds us that you only have one chance to make a first impression, and the stakes are incredibly high. Perceptions are also self-sustaining because, once people have formed an impression of another, they stop actively gathering new information. Once I know you are smart, I won’t attend as much to every little thing you do which means you can more easily get away with being not so brilliant and I won’t notice. This says to me that it is critical to think through our initial encounters with people. Here are three things...

Beliefs of remarkable people Pan for the nuggets.   I saw how Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell, did this. Sitting down with a business unit leader presenting him with information about a $300 million dollar technical investment opportunity, Bossidy divided a sheet of paper about three-quarters across. On the larger left side of the paper, he scribbled detailed notes; on the smaller right side, he occasionally jotted down two or three words, capturing what he perceived to be the key insights and issues being brought to his attention. It was a simple technique that disciplined him to listen intently for the important content and focus follow-up questions on points that really mattered. Whether or not this is your method, you should train yourself to   sift for the nuggets   in a conversation. Then let the other person know that they were understood by probing, clarifying, or further shaping those thoughts. The benefits of this go beyond ensuring that you he...