5 Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership – November 8, 2024

The longtime Stanford GSB professor has written three books about power that argue how, particularly in the world of management and work, leaders should act on things as they are rather than as they naively wish they were. In 7 Rules of Power: Surprising – But True –  Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career (2022) he outlines what he sees as the behavioral realities of effective leadership: 1) Get out of your own way, 2) Break the rules, 3) Appear powerful, 4) Build a powerful brand, 5) Network relentlessly, 6) Use your power, and 7) Success excuses almost everything you may have done to acquire power. Pfeffer believes that the rules help to explain the contemporary leadership landscape, in business and politics, and people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Donald Trump. 

Alison Fragale, business professor at the University of North Carolina, recently published, Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve (2024). In this pod, she addresses the conflict at the heart of the book, that women can either be seen as competent or as likable, but not as both. That is, women can either demonstrate expertise, give tough feedback, or claim authority, or they can be likable, validate other people’s feelings, be personable, and make others feel seen. Fragale argues this is a false trade-off and offers helpful advice using examples from negotiations, communication of one’s status and priorities, and decision-making in work contexts. Immediately helpful to listeners is the closing exercise: collecting 10 no’s from different persons to whom you’ve made requests and learning from your reflections about how you made the request and how the persons responded.  

Sensemaking is a key leadership capability that helps leaders to process ambiguity, construct stability, and make meaning in an ever-changing environment. Telling stories is among the most common means to derive that meaning and, typically, researchers view storytelling as a conscious way of understanding the environment. Here, scholars from Brock University and Coastal Carolina University (USA) argue for a dual systems model of sensemaking that includes unconscious means, as well. To do so, they specifically explore cognitive schemas, defined as “learned, internalized patterns of thought-feeling that mediate both the interpretation of ongoing experience and the reconstruction of memories.” The upshot for leaders is that they can potentially improve their performance by becoming more aware of the unconscious patterns and processes that shape and can potentially impede or improve their sensemaking.

In the seemingly endless expanse of leadership commentators, bloggers, and social media voices, Stowe Boyd is a rarity: genuinely, consistently insightful and drawing on a wide range perspectives to enrich the field of ideas and practices. This piece delivers with characteristic incisiveness on the pointed promise of the title: “In my experience, the shiny appeal of abstract models lies in making decisions through deduction. But deduction relies on starting with facts we know to be true, and in complex systems like businesses, we must work with incomplete information of unknown accuracy and reliability. If the inputs to our models aren’t very good, we must instead rely on something else. I believe we should rely on deeply internalized principles to guide us.”  (It also contains an all-time favorite cartoon applicable to management thinking.) This is an essential read for those leaders – and leadership development facilitators – who rely automatically on frameworks, models, and canvases to do much of their work for them. 

Though I’m increasingly wary of grand narratives that describe where leadership or creative work or business are today or speculate about where they’re headed, or that share magical tools to give us foresight into the future, Karthik Ramanna’s account of today’s challenges and potential approaches to leading through them is shaped by focus, resolve, and humility. It’s also based in a leadership course taught over years at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. After identifying 1) fear or despair about the future, including technological uncertainty, 2) a sense of past injustice or exclusion, and 3) a belief that some hostile or alien ‘other’ is to blame for our plight as core drivers of outrage and polarization in business and society today, Ramanna offers sound recommendations for leading individuals, organizations, and institutions forward.