Lead from the Hip

Tag: Leadership

This Is Your Brain On Leadership — September 10, 2021

This Is Your Brain On Leadership

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How your brain works:

Your brain resides in complete darkness. It has no direct contact with the outside world. It uses your five sensory organs to collect information on the outcomes of events happening around you. The five senses can only collect data on the outcome of an event. They cannot determine the cause of the outcome. In order to determine the cause, your brain uses past experience to make an educated guess about the most likely causes. The more similar a current event is to past experience, the better the guess. Brand new or unfamiliar stuff, your brain will still make a guess, but it may be a poor fit that doesn’t feel right, or you may just be plain wrong.

How it impacts they way you lead:

No matter how smart you are, or how much experience you may have, you’re still going throughout your day making guesses. Given what you’ve achieved so far in life, I’m guessing you will be right more times than not. But you will be wrong, sometimes. Be humble and accept it when it happens. Seek out evidence that you are wrong. Give the people you lead the authority to correct you when you are wrong. Finally, learn from your mistakes. That is the beauty of how your brain works. Today’s mistake is tomorrow’s past experience to draw from.

Randall Stutman on What Leaders Do — August 29, 2021

Randall Stutman on What Leaders Do

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In early August, I signed up to take a nine week leadership challenge hosted by Ryan Holiday from Daily Stoic. During week one, Ryan interviewed Randall Stutman, a Leadership Scientist from the Admired Leadership Institute. The Admired Leadership Institute’s mission is to understand what makes great leaders and to teach the uncommon behavioral routines of the world’s best leaders.

I pulled so much content from that interview that I decided to break it up into several posts separated by topic. In this post, I will share Randall’s thoughts on what makes a good leader. In later posts, I will share his thoughts on Coaching and Feedback, Talent Management, and Change Management.

What is Leadership?

A leader is a person who wants to work with others to solve problems that he or she can’t do alone. A person’s desire to lead should be based more on solving problems and helping others and not about the desire for power, control, and influence. The end game should always be about working with others to solve problems and improve situations.

During the interview, Ryan asked Randall who were on his G.O.A.T Leadership list. He replied with, “It is time to stop celebrating leaders and start celebrating their actions and behaviors.” He warned listeners not to put leaders on a pedestal or hero worship them because all leaders are people and all people are flawed in some way. Instead, we should focus on the things we can learn from leaders, from their actions and behaviors, and incorporate them into our daily lives.