As the author notes at the outset the number of books written about the concept of leadership increases at a staggering rate, and yet we seem to never get closer to a generally agreed definition of what leadership is. This book serves a vital purpose in scanning the broad horizon of these different perspectives, and drawing the multitude of threads together to present a woven cloth of the field of leadership.
Leadership is a peculiar beast as a topic, most people implicitly acknowledge that leaders are necessary, and that good leadership makes a critical difference to outcomes,...
The role of supervisors in enabling or preventing employee misconduct is greater than the role of executives or the impact of other factors related to the firm.
A new paper explodes the concept of the craft organization of work as musty history, presenting different configurations of craft that can offer solutions to challenges faced in the 21st-century workplace.
The world of organisations is littered with failed endeavour, CEOs ending their careers with their prized legacy in tatters and executive trajectories that have never quite lit up the sky in the way they had hoped. The progress of careers is often derailed just when they should be achieving their glittering pinnacle. The old adage that 'what got you here, wont get you there' is often the source of this derailment, more particularly it is the misbelief that previous success was all down to their own genius, rather than a complex mix of talent, circumstance and luck, as well as over-looking...
Why Being a Middle Manager Is So Exhausting. Eric M. Anicich, Jacob B. Hirsh. Harvard Business Review (March 22, 2017). Through a series of empirical studies exploring the concept of charisma outside of an organizational leadership context, a team of researchers identify the two core dimensions of personal charisma and show that charisma is an informal personality trait observable in any context.
Caught between low-power employees and high-power executives, the ‘middle power’ of middle managers keeps them hopping between the roles of subordinate and superior. A new Theory of Power framework helps middle managers, their bosses and their organizations identify the challenges and psychological consequences of their caught-in-the-middle position.
In their efforts to persuade and influence others, leaders pay close attention to the words they choose. Listeners, however, often doubt the sincerity of those trying hard to persuade them. Research into how leaders modulate their voices — by adjusting the volume of their speech, for example — reveals that such ‘paralinguistic cues’ can enhance their persuasiveness, and even increase their perceived sincerity.
Applied neuroscientist, Prof Paul Brown, explains how emotions underpin everything we do - and the importance of understanding this for managers who have to deal with people every day. Referencing some of the latest thinking from the world of neuroscience and explaining it in a very accessible and applicable manner, Prof Brown's insights are a 'must see' for everyone in organisations looking to understand how they can improve performance and engagement in their teams.
Eighteen months ago, there may have been a question about why we need a book on leading remotely. While globalisation and dispersed teams are nothing new, they were a subset of how the majority of people worked - today, as the COVID-19 pandemic rolls into its 15th month, great swathes of the working world has come to understand and live with remote working - and it has certainly brought a broad array of new challenges. What COVID-19 has also done is highlight many existing leadership challenges that were frequently being overlooked and the author uses the current virtual world to lever...
