Leaders Feel The True Value Of Their Leadership Only After Their Leadership Tenure.
Edition #136
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Why Leadership Teams Fail.
In the recent edition of Harvard Business Review, there is a phenomenal article by Thomas Keil and Marianna Zangrillo with some great insights from their multi-year research on why leadership teams fail.
Here are some interesting takeaways from the research that you might find valuable:
Dysfunctional leadership teams can severely hinder strategy execution and deplete morale within a company's various teams, departments, or functions.
The categorisation of these types of leadership teams is quite fascinating:
Shark Tanks: These leadership teams are characterised by infighting and political manoeuvring.
Petting Zoos: These leadership teams are characterised by conflict avoidance and have an overemphasis on collaboration.
Mediocracies: These leadership teams are characterised by complacency, a lack of competence, and an unhealthy focus on past success.
The importance of having alignment, behavioural norms, and outlining responsibilities is vital to building successful high-performance leadership teams.
Read the entire article here. (Please note this will be behind a paywall)
From Crystal Pepsi To Cool Ranch Doritos: Lessons From David Novak.
Leadership is a challenging game. When you look at leaders, you often don’t see their failures but read or remember much more about their successes. Therefore, when you become a leader, more than handling success, how you handle failure is vital. What’s more, how you learn and adapt your future behaviour from failures differentiates the best leaders from the rest.
It is worth remembering Rahul Dravid, an international cricketing legend, who said: “Across formats, I batted 604 times for India. I didn't cross 50 runs 410 times out of those innings. I failed a lot more times than I succeeded. I'm more a failure than a success, So I'm quite qualified to talk about failure."
In this podcast on Masters of Scale, David Novak, co-founder and former CEO of Yum! Brands joins host Jeff Berman to share lessons from scaling one of the world’s largest restaurant companies. It has insights into what it takes to be a leader and why it is crucial to be mentally tough if you want to succeed as a leader.
David Novak also powerfully points out that how you handle yourself after your leadership days is as essential as when you are a leader. Specifically, the section on his recent loss of his wife and how it is changing him personally is genuinely moving.
You can also listen to this podcast on:
Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube
Sleep Is Your Superpower.
Prof. Matt Walker has an incredible background and is a worldwide authority on sleep. He is currently a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. We are now facing a sleep loss epidemic, and it is one of the biggest health challenges facing the world.
In this TED Talk, he shares the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep—and the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't—for your brain and body.
Prof Matt Walker highlights some significant findings from his research in this talk. He mentions two cohorts of people in the study—one with sleep deprivation and the other belonging to the sleep group. Here are some of the findings they observed:
The ones with a good night's sleep saw a lot of healthy learning-related activity in the brain.
The ones with sleep deprivation had fewer learning signals. One primary reason was that their memory inbox - the hippocampus was shut. It was almost like any new incoming files were bounced.
A good, deep sleep enhances your memory and learning abilities.
Prof. Matt’s studies show that during daylight savings in the US when people lose about an hour of sleep, there is a 24% increase in heart attacks the following day. When the clock again gets reset, there is a 21% reduction in heart attacks.
There is a strong correlation between lack of sleep and cancer.
The shorter you sleep, the shorter your life.
You can click on the above link to watch the talk.
Leaders Feel The True Value Of Their Leadership Only After Their Leadership Tenure!
Listening to the last few moments of David Novak’s conversation in the Masters of Scale Podcast threw up an interesting perspective that rarely gets anybody’s attention: ‘ Do leaders get a real feel of their true value and contribution only after their leadership tenure?’
If you are a leader, your leadership tenure will almost always see the following endings:
Scenario #1: Your leadership ends in a company - You leave and join another.
Scenario #2: You are a leader in one function or department and move to a new one.
Scenario #3: You are a leader in one geography or country and move to another.
Scenario #4: You come to the end of your work life and hold no leadership position.
Let’s take scenario #1 - When leaders leave one company and join another, those who reported to them are not obligated to listen or do what that person wants. People now know that this leader cannot influence their promotion, growth, or appraisal in that company. This is when the leader begins to realise the ‘true respect or value’, the people they had worked with, have about them. They begin to see behaviours where they are no longer a priority for these people. They rarely connect for a personal conversation or advice. Many leaders find this hard to reconcile as nobody talks truth to power. However, there are some leaders with whom the same people still seek out unsolicited advice and inputs. This is the time for leaders to ruthlessly self-reflect and take corrective actions about their leadership approach and style.
If you look at scenarios #2 and #3, they are not significantly different. But they are a little harsher for leaders than scenario #1. The reason is that the same team within the company does not collaborate, pay scant attention, or listen to this leader because they know this leader does not control their destiny anymore within the company. This hits the leader very hard personally, and this is when a dysfunctional leadership agenda starts to set in as the leader’s egos get bruised. However, this is an excellent time for the leader to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses and attempt to fix them rather than take positions and alienate people further.
The final scenario #4 is where a leader’s career ends after several decades. This is a phase where they hold no leadership position or role anymore. The leader’s colleagues and the team that worked with this leader now know there is nothing to gain from this leader other than wisdom or experience. Hence, they move on to adjust to the new leaders they have to work with. This is the most emotionally draining phase of a leader’s journey. Hence, most of them vanish into oblivion, but only a few genuinely exceptional leaders continue to thrive in this phase longer than others. People and other stakeholders continue to reach out to them to seek their inputs, ideas, mentorship and advice. These leaders are open to learning and unlearning even at this stage. They take strategic advisory roles, either guide and mentor companies or leaders in other companies, experiment with new business ideas, etc. They are the ones who exhibit true leadership attributes as they have a deep understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, have the humility to adapt, learn, stay relevant, and continue to be in demand long after their leadership days.
Truly great leaders continue to be leaders long after their leadership tenure.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
A dysfunctional leadership team is the primary driver of a company’s decline, not lost market opportunities or disruptions.
How you handle yourself after your leadership days is as essential as when you are a leader.
A good, deep sleep enhances your memory and learning abilities.