BLACKPOOL HEALTH LIBRARY: At the Heart of Quality Information on the Fylde Coast! Management Update from your Library: a collection of interesting articles focusing on leadership and management.
How to Challenge the Status Quo Successfully!
It can be daunting to speak up; to go against the grain. Even when we know something should be different, we don’t always have the courage to take action. And when we do, we risk our ideas falling on deaf ears, or being overruled or ignored.
But fortune favors the brave! Let’s look at some approaches that can increase your chances of success when you’re considering a challenge to the status quo.
Dealing With an Over-Eager Leader
Over the course of our careers, we’ll experience many different types of leadership.
A good boss is likely to respect your opinions, motivate you, and be a joy to work with. A bad boss might undermine you, fail to deliver on promises, and cause undue stress.
An over-eager boss, however, will behave a little like both: they may be respectful, but might also hold unrealistic expectations or give you an unmanageable workload. And when you’re not living up to expectations, it can have a detrimental effect on your work and self-esteem.
Over-eager leaders can come in different flavors, too. Some may have unreasonably high expectations – they think you can handle an insurmountable workload or aren’t aware of how much you’re actually doing.
And then there is the over-eager leader who never seems to sleep. They can do a hundred things at once and never tire or lose enthusiasm – the Thomas Edisons of this world. It can be hard to keep up with such an energetic co-worker, and if that person happens to be your boss, they might expect a subordinate to keep up with them.
Both of these situations could lead to you feeling unworthy, anxious, forever rushed off your feet, or even bad at your job, so what can you do?
How to Build Your People’s Resilience
Stress management is one of the foundations for building employee resilience.
Stress reduces employees’ resilience. Organizations need to take steps to ensure that their people are not forced to cope with unnecessary stress, whether it’s from excessive workloads or poor management styles.
So, what are the main workplace stressors, and how can organizations prevent them from arising in the first place?
5 Myths About Strategy: Why we believe them and why we’re wrong
There are lies, there are big lies, and then there are myths. And myths are the worst of the three.
Unless you have sealed yourself off in a social media echo chamber, lies are easy to spot. Except, that is, when the lie is a big one. People hearing or reading big lies start to doubt themselves and think ‘maybe I have got things completely wrong’. That’s why politicians and propagandists tell big lies. They’re not trying to assert a truth so much as sow doubt and confusion about what is true. That’s bad, but a smart person can resist a big lie by looking at the evidence at hand.
Myths present a different, subtler trap, which is what makes even smart people fall for them. They are usually based on a plausible half-truth, and they do not immediately lead you astray if you start to act on them. It’s only with the passage of time that you realize that you’ve made a mistake, but by then your wrong choices can’t be unmade and the damage is done.
We encounter myths in most realms of human endeavour, and the discipline of strategic thinking is no exception. Here are five of the most pernicious ones I’ve encountered in a long career studying strategy and advising companies about it…
Great Leaders Are Thoughtful and Deliberate, Not Impulsive and Reactive
Observing your responses is the first step to improving… find out more in this insightful article!
Sydney Finkelstein, professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, says that being the most knowledgeable and experienced person on your team isn’t always a good thing. Expertise can steer you wrong in two important ways. It can stop you from being curious about new developments in your field. And it can make you overconfident about your ability to solve problems in different areas. He says that, to be effective leaders, we need to be more aware of these traps and seek out ways to become more humble and open-minded…
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