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For the past 16 years, we've studied the background of incoming CEOs at the world's largest 2,500 public companies as part of the annual Strategy& CEO Success study. Take this quiz to assess your immediate chances, based on the data we've collected, of becoming a chief executive in your chosen industry.
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What makes a great leader? Although the core ingredients of leadership are universal (good judgment, integrity, and people skills), the full recipe for successful leadership requires culture-specific condiments. The main reason for this is that cultures differ in their implicit theories of leadership, the lay beliefs about the qualities that individuals need to display to be considered leaders. Depending on the cultural context, your typical style and behavioral tendencies may be an asset or a weakness. In other words, good leadership is largely personality in the right place. Research has shown that leaders’ decision making, communication style, and dark-side tendencies are influenced by the geographical region in which they operate. Below we review six major leadership types that illustrate some of these findings.
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Tributes to the work of Prince continue to appear, more than a week after the legendary songwriter and performer passed away at age 57. A recent story showcased Prince's strengths in the realms of creativity and talent development--and revealed how his passion for music was the key to his prolific career. Here are five highlights: 1. Prince had a work ethic born of passion. Even after he was a famous and rich superstar, Prince's work ethic never waned. "He'd come to rehearsal, work us, go work his band, then he'd go to his studio all night and record," is what James "Jimmy Jam" Harris, Prince's high school classmate and producer, tells EW. "Then the next night he'd come to rehearsal with a tape in his hand and he'd say, 'This is what I did last night.' And it'd be something like '1999,' and you're just like, 'Who does this?'" 2. Prince was a molder of young talent--a superboss. His proteges included Scottish singer Sheena Easton, dancer Carmen Electra, and his former drummer, Sheila E. "He loved working with women and helping them and encouraging them and saying, 'Hey, I think this would be a good song for you,'" Sheila E. tells EW. Like Miles Davis and other "superboss" artists, Prince prided himself on being the foundation of a talent tree, and watching his branches find their own paths.
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Not so long ago, the idea that an employee could connect anytime, anywhere, was seen as a revolution in work–life balance. You could get home in time for dinner or go on vacation even when a project was at a critical point. Your smartphone could turn wherever you were into your mobile office. But now many believe this unlimited connectivity has gone too far. Studies have concluded that late-night smartphone use has an adverse effect on employee productivity and engagement. A growing number of companies, such as Volkswagen and Atos, have enacted email policies intended to mandate unplugging. An agreement in April 2014 between French employers and unions created an “obligation to disconnect” for contract workers to ensure that they don’t burn out, and Germany is currently considering legislation that would ban communication from employers to their workers after hours.
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When we think of great leaders, certain characteristics come to mind: They have confidence in their abilities and conviction in their beliefs. They “trust their gut,” “stay the course,” and “prove others wrong.” They aren’t “pushovers,” and they certainly don’t “flip-flop.” But this archetype is terribly outdated. Having spent three years studying many of the world’s most successful leaders for my new book, Persuadable, I’ve learned one surprising thing they have in common: a willingness to be persuaded. Alan Mulally, the vaunted CEO who saved Ford Motor Company, is, for example, exceptionally skeptical of his own opinions. Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers, insists that his team ruthlessly second-guess his thinking. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, seeks out information that might disprove her beliefs about the world and herself. In our increasingly complex world, these leaders have realized that the ability to consider emerging evidence and change their minds accordingly provides extraordinary advantages.
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Many years ago, I applied for a promotion I desperately wanted. At the time, I was the highest performer in the department and so everyone, including me, unwisely expected the big fancy job to be mine. It wasn't. Despite going for three interviews and enduring one of those excruciating psychometric tests, I was duly informed my application had been unsuccessful. What was most intriguing, however, was the reason the executive gave for rejecting me: "James," she said, "you need to realise that sometimes it's not how well you perform a job that matters; it's how well you understand office politics." She then proceeded to write down the name of a book on the topic, which I was required to obediently read before applying again in the future.
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When you're a boss, you sometimes talk a lot. The problem might be, though, that you talk a lot of gibberish. This can annoy your staff to the point at which they think you're not worth listening to. Which might just affect your ambitions. Here, then, is a new survey in which British employees declared their 50 most annoying phrases that come out of bosses' mouths. It was commissioned by SPANA, an organization that offers free veterinary care for animals in developing countries. As we first run down the list of the worst 10, please spend your day monitoring how many of these phrases you use. Then repent.
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We’ve all come to work exhausted, or under the weather, or while experiencing some sort of physical pain. We power through it as best we can, unaware that our brains are redirecting critical resources to manage these issues. It’s a process that enables us to cope. But as Mike Christian, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, has found, these efforts take a toll on our performance. When our mental energy is depleted, we are less able to exhibit control over our emotions and behaviors — and are more likely to be disengaged, break rules, take part in deception, or even act unethically. Christian’s research delves into the internal and external factors that chip away at our ability to self-regulate, as well as so-called moderator effects that help us regain our footing. In one study, for example, he found that coffee really does help restore mental resources drained by lack of sleep in the short term. Christian has also studied mindfulness — a hot feature of many corporate wellness programs — as a means of preventing workplace retaliation. It turns out that being in the moment can help mitigate the effects of unfairness on our fight-or-flight response.
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In my work as a leadership trainer and a career success coach for women over 11 years, it’s become abundantly clear that the quality of one’s decision-making is not only a critical factor in her professional success and impact, but also reflects a wide range of influences that we’re typically unaware of, including core values, internal preferences, societal influences, social abilities, cultural training, neurobiology, comfort with authority and power, and much more. To learn more about decision-making in general, and key differences between the way men and women make decisions in particular, I asked Dr. Therese Huston to share her insights. Therese was the founding director of what is now the Center for Faculty Development at Seattle University and has spent the past fifteen years helping smart people make better decisions. She has written for the New York Times and Harvard Business Review, and her first book, Teaching What You Don't Know, was published by Harvard University Press. Her current book How Women Decide: What's True, What's Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices “pries open” stereotypes about women’s decision-making and serves as an authoritative guide to help women navigate the workplace and their everyday life with greater success and impact.
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Large-scale organizational change has always been difficult, and there’s no shortage of research showing that a majority of transformations continue to fail. Today’s dynamic environment adds an extra level of urgency and complexity. Companies must increasingly react to sudden shifts in the marketplace, to other external shocks, and to the imperatives of new business models. The stakes are higher than ever. So what’s to be done? In both research and practice, we find that transformations stand the best chance of success when they focus on four key actions to change mind-sets and behavior: fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing changes through formal mechanisms, developing talent and skills, and role modeling. Collectively labeled the “influence model,” these ideas were introduced more than a dozen years ago in a McKinsey Quarterly article, “The psychology of change management.” They were based on academic research and practical experience—what we saw worked and what didn’t. Digital technologies and the changing nature of the workforce have created new opportunities and challenges for the influence model (for more on the relationship between those trends and the model, see this article’s companion, “Winning hearts and minds in the 21st century”). But it still works overall, a decade and a half later (exhibit). In a recent McKinsey Global Survey, we examined successful transformations and found that they were nearly eight times more likely to use all four actions as opposed to just one.1 Building both on classic and new academic research, the present article supplies a primer on the model and its four building blocks: what they are, how they work, and why they matter.
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They said computers would make us all a lot more productive, and free up our personal lives. Is it just me, or was that all a big, fat porkie? The technology that was supposed to bring us this gift of freedom has entrapped us, eroding valuable time, energy and attention. Don't get me wrong, I love new technology. But let's take a reality check and go back to using it to help us do our jobs, not to dictate and distract every waking moment. Here are seven key productivity traps to be mindful of:
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Imagine you want to design a robot that can get through a maze by itself. How might you go about it? First, you would probably define the robot’s objective: Find the exit of the maze. Then you would create a mechanism to reward the robot for moving toward that goal and to punish it for moving farther away, so that over time it finds its way out. But what if the robot comes to a dead end right next to the exit? It’s geographically as close as possible to its objective but it can’t get there. And it won’t want to turn around because that would mean moving away from the goal and getting punished. Your robot would be stuck. Kenneth Stanley is a professor in artificial intelligence who has studied this problem, the stagnation that can result from dogged pursuit of a prescribed goal. Eventually he and his colleagues arrived at a simple solution. What if instead of rewarding the robot for getting closer to the maze exit, they rewarded it for trying new and interesting directions? They found that this shift in programming significantly improved the robots’ ability to solve mazes — a successful result in 39 out of 40 trials, versus 3 out of 40. Testing objective-less challenges in many other AI contexts, Stanley got similar results. When made to seek novelty, his robots developed surprising and creative solutions to problems they could not previously solve.
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There are a ton of qualities that can help you succeed, and the more carefully a quality has been studied, the more you know it's worth your time and energy. Angela Lee Duckworth was teaching seventh grade when she noticed that the material wasn't too advanced for any of her students. They all had the ability to grasp the material if they put in the time and effort. Her highest-performing students weren't those who had the most natural talent; they were the students who had that extra something that motivated them to work harder than everyone else. Angela grew fascinated by this "extra something" in her students and, since she had a fair amount of it herself, she quit her teaching job so that she could study the concept while obtaining a graduate degree in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her study, which is ongoing, has already yielded some interesting findings. She's analyzed a bevy of people to whom success is important: students, military personnel, salespeople, and spelling bee contestants, to name a few. Over time, she has come to the conclusion that the majority of successful people all share one critical thing--grit. Grit is that "extra something" that separates the most successful people from the rest. It's the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel to stick with our dreams until they become a reality.
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Consider a delinquent taxpayer who receives one of the following two letters in the mail: Letter 1: We are writing to inform you that we have still not received your tax payment of $5,000. It is imperative that you contact us. Letter 2: We are writing to inform you that we have still not received your tax payment of $5,000. By now, 9 out of 10 people in your town have paid their taxes. It is imperative that you contact us.
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Are you a successful leader? This is a difficult question to answer: No matter how good you think you are, the only evidence of leadership is whether people follow you. Self-serving bias distorts your perception of your own successes and failures. Even if you’re incredibly self-aware, you may have trouble with an objective assessment because your direct reports may only appear to be following — they don’t get an option to be physically present — and not every company conducts rigorous engagement surveys or 360-degree reviews. So how can you gain a reasonably accurate understanding of your success as a leader? Try integrating three distinctive views.
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Track your chances of becoming a chief executive at one of the world’s largest companies, based on a study of incoming leaders.