Tag: Lean In

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Adam Grant: Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

Adam Grant wrote Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers.


I’ve often witnessed an amazing power in collaboration around brainstorming and great ideas. It is amazing when it happens and has led to some of the best work in which I’ve participated.  At times, though, managers will need to nudge their teams along when it comes to brainstorming. We’ve all avoided sharing the dumb idea or suggesting something tried before.

This talk by Adam Grant about the Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers and the accompanying discussion guide may help you to appreciate how your team may process their ideas, come up with creative ideas, and communicate about those ideas.

In global health, we strive to be innovative and come up with creative approaches to solving complex health issues.  It is a task with significant weight–truly lives are on the line.

Might you be up for leading your team in a discussion about creativity and original thinking?  Hopefully we can help to support the creativity of our teams and help to grow comfort in thinking about the same old problems in new sorts of ways.

PS: The Lean In website has lots of great resources that you can use. I am a fan of the discussion guides that can be used to guide our teams through difficult conversations or to help set team norms.

PPS: I used some of Grant’s ideas as inspiration for the training I did for CDC Haiti. I can do the same for you!

Here’s more info about Grant

Furthermore, Adam Grant has been Wharton’s top-rated professor for 7 straight years. In addition, as an organizational psychologist, he is a leading expert on how we can find motivation and meaning, rethink assumptions, and live more generous and creative lives. He has been recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and Fortune’s 40 under 40. 
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Authentic Leadership

I keep a running list of topics that I want to write about and reflect about for this blog. According to my plan, I was going to write about the book Lean In today.  But, I didn’t want to. In light of the controversy circling about Facebook and Sheryl Sandburg, the author of Lean In, her advice rings inauthentic.  I have been thinking a lot about authenticity in the workplace and so, perhaps, my schedule was the best prompt to put some of my thoughts into words.

Authentic leadership is still being researched and formulated into a practice base–which to me seems, well, inauthentic. Authentic leadership is about building relationships based on honesty and ethics.  Are we still in a place in our humanity that we need to build an evidence base around the benefits of honesty and ethics at work? Apparently so.

authentic leadership
What is “authentic leadership”?

I have always been drawn to work at mission-focused and -driven organizations.  Perhaps such organizations cultivate natural, authentic leaders. Perhaps that shows my bias, too, towards thinking that achieving a lofty mission while doing right by people is more important than the bottom line, profit, or reputation.

Why do we have to pit profit or self-interest against doing right by people, ethics, and authenticity?  I have had the good fortune of working with and for truly authentic leaders and certainly hope that I emulate and model that style. My question today is how we can teach it and cultivate future leaders who put ethics first? Any ideas?

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What it Takes to be a Good Leader

I’d like to share some  ideas about what it takes to be a good leader. Leadership.

Image of a blackboard with a hand holding orange chalk drawing a series of arrows on it
What it takes to be a good leader

Take a listen to this talk by Roselinde Torres and find her LeanIn questions here.

She distills the best qualities of leaders into three elements:
1. The ability to see changes that may be on the horizon and prepare for them
2. Networking skills that bring various perspectives to the work
3. The willingness to take some risks and abandon practices that may have been successful in the past but no longer serve the team

The reflection questions below may give you insight into your own practices and habits (and maybe encourage a change or two!):

  • What are your skill levels as they pertain to those three qualities?
  • Take a moment to think about, as she suggests, how you spend your time–do you allow yourself the opportunities to develop in these three ways?
  • Are you cultivating your team to be leaders?

What do you think about her distillation of leadership qualities? I would add skills around trusting and transparent communication to her very valuable list. To me, trusting and transparent communication is critical to giving and receiving feedback and to ensuring that your team is helping you to see what is on the horizon.

Have you considered watching TED talks like this one with your own teams? I have always appreciated leaders and managers who ensure that I keep learning and developing. Plus, they are short enough to fit into team meetings or over a lunch break. How do you help to foster growth and development in your team and in yourself?

Continue your team discussion with prompts found in this post!

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Book Report: Feminist Fight Club

Not only did I read Feminist Fight Club, I was a founding member of a club! So, to say that I am a fan is an understatement.

Feminist Fight Club is deemed the “Lean In for the Buzzfeed Generation”.  The aspects of Lean In that didn’t resonate for me (the assumed wealth, position, and even ability to organized one’s own schedule) are all absent from this book. It is part guidebook for establishing ourselves professionally, helping to raise up women around us, and a troubleshooting resource for pay negotiation, office politics, and the like.

It is cheeky. It is irreverent. This book focuses on advice for those early in their careers. In that way, and many others, is so unlike so many other career management books.  It will likely not be the best advice for those of you who are even in your 30s.  I found the advice to be not-quite-fitting for me, but wished I read it when I was 22. For those of you who are well into your career, consider giving this as a gift to a younger woman. For those of you who are early in your career–get this book, talk about it with your friends, gift it to someone else, and in a few more years, read Lean In.