Weekly Reflections W3: Openness defining Leadership 2.0

I had a week in Stockholm, full days, a lot done.

I realized I haven’t been able to share my latest weekly reflections (they have been posted in my company’s internal blog), as they wouldn’t add much value here in the outside world.

Among a few other meetings and workshops, I took part in a leadership training course and this post is about the course’s Aha! moment.

Training off-site, a bit outside Stockholm for three days. Tools, methods, how to lead yourself, how to lead others…and so on..…Now, the biggest highlight of these days was to hear our invited speaker, this really made most impression on me in that off-site. And I was not alone. In the course closing session, we all had the chance to share our thoughts and 90-95% of us mentioned his talk.

So what did our speaker talk about? Leadership!

The talk made me remember of the straight talk tone, I once read about, set by Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan. The Economist wrote an article on Why some banks did much better than others and in short this is what Jamie did/does:

• Discouraged PowerPoint presentations
• Encouraged informal discussions of what is wrong, or could go wrong

Our guest talked about openness and how he is substantially changing the way they work in his unit. He went on talking about the need for us all to challenge each other. And ultimately he mentioned the importance to hire based on professional values as opposed to competence (Yes, Jack Welch), since smart people will always be able to learn the job at hand but they won’t be changing their values.

Have a great week!

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