Rewiring Your Brain for Better Leadership?

What if you discovered that there were very simple things you could do to increase your concentration, increase your thinking clarity, and make you feel calmer and more even-tempered?  Maria Gonzalez describes a few simple practices in “Mindfulness for People Who Are Too Busy to Meditate” that can do just that.  As the title indicates, these are things you can literally do in one minute or while you’re doing something else like sitting in a meeting. 

But what if the idea of mediating just feels too “soft” or isn’t for you?  If so, it’s important for you to know that repeating mindfulness practices -- which are different than traditional seated meditation -- has a cumulative effect on your brain that has been documented in neuroscience research, rewiring it for resilience and calm. Mindfulness practices change physical structures in your brain like the hippocampus and the amygdala in much the same way as working out changes your muscles and pulmonary system, and you don’t need to buy a gym membership or even appropriate clothing.  So set your calendar to remind you to do these two or three times a day and begin the rewiring process today.

Twitter Tips

Twitter.  You may love it, or hate it, or just be indifferent to it, but one thing is for sure:  It’s here to stay.  Many businesses and non-profits use Twitter, but a great many use it badly.   That occurs for many reasons, but one of them may be a misunderstanding what Twitter is and what the culture of Twitter entails.  This brief piece provides some simple Twitter tips (Twips?) to help you understand how to use it more effectively.  It is written for the non-profit world but almost all of the suggestions apply everywhere.  

Creating Gender-Inclusive Environments

Recent research indicates that both women and men are twice as likely to hire a man than a woman, even if the woman is more qualified.   This study pertains to business hiring, but research also exists demonstrating a similar hiring and pay bias for academic jobs in the STEM fields and the stories of women in those fields provide support for those conclusions. 

Both studies indicate that the biases exist in both men and women hiring authorities.  So how does a fair-minded leader remedy this?  Will Yakowicz offers three great suggestions:

1. Make gender bias a business issue, not a women’s issue:  An organization that is choosing less qualified men over more able women is going to lose in the long run, because their talent will go elsewhere or otherwise not be fully engaged. 
2. Educate yourself (regardless of your gender) instead of asking women to change:  Women tend to under-sell their abilities, while men tend to over-sell theirs.  When women are assertive about their abilities, they are perceived negatively and penalized.  So the burden is on the leader to understand this no-win dynamic for women and compensate for it rather than asking women to brag more about themselves.
3. Look for bias in hiring policies and systems:  Many hiring authorities believe that candidates who self-promote are the best, despite what’s noted above.  It’s important that they become aware of this erroneous bias and look for other ways to identify competence and ambition.

Samuel Bacharach offers some additional tips for leading in a way that includes everyone.

Do the stories of this kind of bias match with your experiences or observations?  If you work in a female-dominated field, do you see this playing out?  

The Difference Between Management and Leadership

How do you know when you have transitioned from managing to leading?  Do you ever actually transition or do you add leadership into existing management abilities and practices? 

If you Google the difference between management and leadership, you will likely find Warren Bennis’ semi-poetic piece that draws a pretty sharp line between the two.  “The manager administers; the leader innovates.  The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.”  He’s also often quoted as saying, "Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing."  In other words, leadership is the vision and management is the execution. 

Robert Sutton, however, says this distinction is misleading.  He rightly notes that leaders cannot simply sit in an office and come up with big ideas, without a detailed understanding of the industry in which the organization operates, the staff who actually implement the ideas, and the individuals served by the organization.  He proposes a better idea: "To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done." In other words, a leader must have a vision for what should happen next and a detailed understanding of how to make that vision come to reality within the current context.

So rather than conceiving leadership and management as separate concepts with a bright line between them, perhaps it would be better to think of the two as a Venn diagram, incorporating the overlapping execution and contextual knowledge of good management and good leadership.

What are the differences and similarities between good management and good leadership from your experience?  How should a leader cultivate both

domains?