Nuggets On
influencing
Leaders reflect on what it takes to get the ideas in your head to a wider set of people and drive buy-in. Its often a function of being tactful about listening to what the various stakeholders want, getting a sense of when the timing is right and driving the change you want by influencing the various constituents.
Generating options amidst political constraints
Jay talks about how he has grown as a politician in all these years. He also talks about Track II dialogues where he is active. These are informal back-channels which can be tremendously helpful in improving the communication and improving one’s understanding of the others’ point of view.
Influencing an ecosystem
Jay discusses he thinks about picking ideas to champion and talks about how you could get a pulse of the acceptance of the idea. He goes on to talk about the criticality of setting up feedback loops for you to get a pulse of the real public sentiment.
Steering by listening
Arun discusses his definition of a leader – “she or he who takes the first steps towards something that she or he deeply cares about and in ways that others wish to follow”. He talks about the criticality of listening to what other people care about as a key element of building engagement and followership.
Influencing without authority
Ambi talks about his key insight around what it takes to influence clients. Given Advertising is a domain where there is arguably a lot of possible subjectivity, it is an interesting canvas to see how advisors influence clients. Ambi shares that it is often more about the intent and then followed by the content.
Managing stakeholder expectations
Stew speaks about the criticality of unearthing what the stakeholders really want and solving for it. He suggests that we should go past what they state as positions and unearth their real expectations while having these conversations. He also speaks about the criticality of caring for self before caring for others. He compares this to a change management initiative and suggests that one needs to be artfully political while driving changes through the system.
Vivekananda versus Napoleon
Rajat speaks about the kind of leadership style that is required at the helm of a firm like McKinsey. He speaks about how one has to think about influencing and nudging rather than commanding and directing while leading a team of highly capable and self-driven people.
Machines - Decision Makers or Enablers?
Kartik speaks about how we should think about using algorithms for decision making versus decisions support. He urges to think about machines as augmenting and not substituting human capability. He speaks about how we should consider the extent of consequences and social implications to think about how we leverage the power of the machines.
More from Kartik Hosanagar EP2
Warrior to diplomat
Michael speaks about the criticality of leaders transitioning from a competitive mindset to a collaborative mindset where they focus on building alliances and identify opportunities for cross-company collaboration, often even reaching out to rivals to co-create opportunities for the organization.
Mapping the influence landscape
Michael speaks about the criticality of navigating the influence landscape especially when one gets into a Corporate Diplomacy challenge where things get done more through influence than through authority. To get things done, one needs to work through the network of allies that one has in the system. Michael speaks about some of the elements of transition involved here and talks about why engineers often struggle with this.
Trap 4 - Controlling instead of influencing
Jennifer speaks about how the desire for control is an essential part of human-ness but unfortunately in complex situations, going after control often leads us on a wild-goose chase of chasing superficial metrics while missing out on the bigger picture. She suggests that we focusing more on direction than outcomes and mentions that outcomes are an emergent property of a complex system and it is hard for us to control them given the number of variables that are outside our purview.
More from Jennifer Garvey Berger
Leveraging relationships to move forward
Sally speaks about how it is critical not just to build relationships but to leverage them in a non-transactional way. She goes on to say that a quid pro quo approach to asking for favours from others often doesn’t work and suggests a more nuanced approach here.
Managing work and life
Sukhinder speaks about how she has built her self-awareness along the way. She goes on to say that she spends time figuring out “who she is” because what she wants often evolves along the way. She also speaks about the criticality of negotiating and having conversations with people around us to solve for the future that we want to go after.
Life Design vs Product Design
Ayse reflects on the distinction between Life Design and Product Design. She speaks about the fact that in the case of Life Design, there is no “3rd party consumer” which makes it a pure process. We connect the dots with what Stew Friedman says about getting other people into our world.
Jahanara and her political savviness
Pradeep speaks about Jahanara Begum who was Shah Jahan’s daughter. Pradeep speaks about how, despite not holding an official title, she had significant influence in the Mughal Kingdom.
More from Pradeep Chakravarthy
Parenting and Psychological reactance
Ayelet speaks about the notion of Psychological reactance – the tendency to “not do” what you are told to do. She speaks specifically about how this shows up in the context of parenting and what we can do to avoid it.
Focusing on the underlying
Thomas says that designers distinguish between features and benefits, negotiators distinguish between positions and interests and policy experts between outputs and outcomes. He expands on the nuance here around focusing on the underlying and not getting swept away by surface level considerations.
More from Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
