Five Ideas: Leadership

Wielding power (and keeping employees engaged) during an economic downturn.

“In the current economic climate, power can swing towards the bosses, whereas the last decade it’s been much more a talent war. But even in the current economic cycle, it’s important that executives try to use power appropriately, because people will remember how you used your power at this time." —Andrew O'Keeffe, author of The Boss

“If you want to change the future you have to change the conversation... If you go out in the world with a genuinely inquisitive mind and you work hard at coming up with the right way to ask the right question, the answers that you’re going to get are going to be surprising and fresh and interesting. Asking good questions is really how you pop that bubble you’re living in. And how you open up your culture and your structure of your organization—and you own mind—to new answers and new experiences that are blocked from your line of site."—Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber

“We try to command and control; we impose rules and regulations. We align people with a common goal; we provide targets that we expect them to meet, instead of allowing them to be inventive and resourceful. As it is with managing a machine we set up systems of control, when in reality we should set up a system of encouragement, improvement and innovation. Hierarchical management structures works best in environments with low ambition and low uncertainty, but most of us are facing anything but certainty" —Frank Buytendijk, EVP of Oracle EPM

“When you’re making complex decisions — whether or not to buy another company, or what to invest in, a decision involving lots of variables — that’s when you should actually think about your emotions. You’ll tend to make a better decision when you go with your gut. When you make simple decisions, like what to order for dinner, that’s when you should use your rational brain to think it through. However, when a CEO makes complex decisions, those seem to benefit the most from what a scientist would call unconscious processing. That’s what the rest of us would call gut instinct, or visceral emotion." —Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide

“Day in and day out, executives must demonstrate to their employees that they are open to bad news, that they are listening to people who have important news, and that people are not going to be punished when they bring ideas or criticism—or even bad news—forward. It takes a tremendous amount of trust before people are really willing to speak up."—James O'Toole, the Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business