Leadership Reframed
Stay Curious About the Leader You’re Becoming Leadership development often focuses on becoming better at something: communicating more clearly, making stronger decisions, building trust, managing conflict, or navigating change. We learn models, develop skills, gain experience, and gradually form ideas about what good
leadership looks like. Along the way, however, we can also become increasingly certain about who
we are as leaders.
Experience gives us good reason for some of that confidence. We learn what works. We recognize
situations we have encountered before. We develop instincts that allow us to respond without
having to reconsider every decision from the beginning. But experience can also make it easier to
stop being curious about ourselves. What began as a deliberate leadership choice can eventually
become simply “the way I lead.”
For more than 100 years, managers have relied on four basic duties: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. These ideas were created in a time when businesses were stable and predictable, so managers could assume that markets, company structures, and performance systems would be mostly the same. Today’s workplaces are totally different. They face constant change, uncertainty, and complexity. As Esenyel states, modern leaders cannot keep up with fast digital advances and diverse teams. The old management functions are still useful, but the old ways of viewing them no longer fit the reality of today’s organizations.
Read the Scene Before You Solve the Crime What detective work can teach us about understanding before deciding
By Dr. Paul Dannar
A detective arrives at a crime scene after the story has already begun. Something happened there.
People acted, decisions were made, and events unfolded in a particular order. Some things may
have been moved while others were left untouched. Someone may be telling the truth, someone
may be lying, and someone else may be completely sincere and still be wrong about what they
saw. The detective wasn’t there, yet the detective is expected to determine what happened. That
requires more than finding evidence. It requires developing an understanding of the scene.
The temptation, of course, is to begin solving the crime immediately. A broken window suggests an
entry point.
Leading Insights for a Changing World
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