Top-down organizations make it difficult for information to flow from the bottom up. Here’s Peter, in Iceland, with more. Look at these sensational waterfalls here in Gullfoss, in Iceland. It’s just absolutely amazing and a stunning amount of water, which is cascading down just day in and day out. Of course, your organization’s information can...
Leaders must work against natural human tendencies to build more empowering organizations. Here’s David at, Clava Cairns, with more. I’m here at a place called Clava Cairns. It’s an ancient 4000 year-old burial site near Inverness (Scotland). And by the way, over here, this is the Highlander stone (Oops! He means Outlander stone), if you’ve...
ClarityDavid MarquetImproveLeadership NudgePower GradientPresenterPsychological SafetySay This Not That
Leadership Nudge® 375 – Stop saying “I’m just . . .”
March 31, 2023by
When we use self-deprecating language, we negate the words that follow. Stop saying things like “I’m just . . . a receptionist . . .” or “I’ve been here just two years . . .” Instead, remove the word “just” and say what you think and what you see. Your voice matters! Hey, here’s a...
Getting your team together for a weekly meeting allows them to share projects and intent with each other, get and give feedback about how certain actions affect other projects, and work together as a team toward organizational goals. Hey, David Marquet here. So I recently started working with a senior executive at a FINTECH company. And...
Leadership Nudge®365 – Personality Based Leadership
March 31, 2023by
Leaders encourage people to follow the organization’s values and principles rather than a particular person. This mitigates favoritism and helps create an organization aligned to its principles and values rather than personalities. How is it in your organization? Hey, I’m here at Heidelberg Castle, which is mostly a ruin, but this one building was reconstructed....
From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...
Q: What are some ways for people to tell if they have some invisible hierarchy? In terms of language, too. What are some of the cues, like if you were to go back and read somebody’s email, what are the phrases you look for? A: It’s in the ways that we enforce hierarchy. There...
Q: What is a major barrier that keeps people from speaking up? A: We call it the power gradient, it’s how much more important your boss is than you. It affects you like this – you don’t speak up against the boss. Information flows inversely proportional to the power gradient, so the steeper...
The power gradient is the amount of social distance there is between one person and another. The power gradient is the feeling of “how much more important are people in the next tier in the hierarchy than we are” and “how much more important are we then people below us.” In Industrial Age organizations (where...
From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...