An olympic team psychologist explains how leaders can cultivate an adaptive mindset
Trying to predict how you or your team might think and act in response to volatile and uncertain events isn’t easy, which makes it harder to prepare. However, performance psychology research and practice tell us that it starts with an adaptive mindset. You know if your team has an adaptive mindset because they are proactive ...
^ADJ: Love this insight: “‘What is most important to enable success for the organization?’ it is not the deep technical skills she singles out but mindset. ‘Success often comes down to shifting mindsets from protective and defensive into seeing the opportunities in change.’”
We Say We Want Change, But The Status Quo Almost Always Wins Out. Here’s Why:
In 1984, Michael Dell launched his eponymous company in a college dorm room with a simple idea: Bypass the dealer channel and sell customized computers directly to customers. It not only gave Dell a cost advantage by eliminating reseller’s markups, but also allowed him to receive payment before paying suppliers, achieving negative working capital.
^ADJ: My favourite quote from General Stanley McChrystal “It takes a network to defeat a network.” We can’t simply think of strategy as a game of chess, but must weave networks by widening and deepening connections in order to influence the sources of power that support the status quo.
Rid Your Organization of Obstacles That Infuriate Everyone
The authors of this piece, both professors at Stanford University, devoted eight years to learning about how leaders serve as trustees of others’ time—how they prevent and remove the organizational obstacles that undermine the zeal, damage the health, and throttle the creativity and productivity of good people. Along the way, they learned that there is both bad and good organizational “friction.” In this article they focus on addition sickness: the unnecessary rules, procedures, communications, tools, and roles that seem to inexorably grow, stifling productivity and creativity. They show why companies are prone to this affliction and describe how leaders can treat it. The first step is to conduct a good-riddance review to identify obstacles that can and should be removed. The next is to employ subtraction tools—they list several—to eliminate those obstacles or make it difficult for people to add them in the first place. The authors show how people and organizations have used these steps to ....