Thought Leadership

How To Build And Lead Mission-Driven Teams

By Genevieve Michaels | Published on September 02, 2021 | 7 min read

If the last couple years have proven anything, it’s that the world around us is changing faster than ever before. There’s so many parts of our daily lives, from iPhones to climate change to the phrase “digital natives,” that our great-grandparents would be confused (and maybe even frightened) by.

The future is now. But many businesses are still being run like it’s the 1950s, when really, we’re way out of the industrial age. This is the digital economy, baby, and businesses need to be as fast and flexible as a cyborg yoga teacher if they want to keep up.

One way to make sure your team stays ahead of the game is to be mission-driven. This is an autonomous, data-driven, and multidisciplinary style of working that explodes everything you thought you knew about business management. Mission-driven teams are agile, results-focused, and give team members the power to rely on their own expertise. Not only is this a super-efficient way of working, it’s good for us as employees, too.

6 Leadership Paradoxes for the Post-Pandemic Era

by Paul Leinwand, Mahadeva Matt Mani, and Blair Sheppard, April 23, 2021

The pandemic has accelerated a trend that has been unfolding over the last decade. As the world has grown more digital and complex, the range of decisions that leaders need to make has broadened, spanning from big picture strategic thinking to careful execution, to advancing technology roadmaps and upskilling and engaging employees. And decision-making criteria too have expanded, increasingly focusing on ESG considerations in addition to narrowly defined profit expectations. The past year has been particularly intense, pushing leaders to make decisions for which they had no previous experience — and do so quickly.

To succeed in this new era of value creation, leaders need new skills and capabilities. Our in-depth research of more than a dozen companies that have transformed and positioned themselves for success in this new world — including Microsoft, the Cleveland Clinic, and Philips — shows that leaders at these companies sought to be proficient across a wide set of characteristics rather than relying solely on their areas of strengths. They learned how to work together with others who have different backgrounds and different ways of thinking, and they emphasized collaborating together to lead their business despite all their differences. (If you’re interested in participating in a survey about leadership, you can find more details at the end of this article.)

6 Ways Companies Can Help Their Employees Overcome Burnout In A Distributed World

By Genevieve Michaels | Published on October 14, 2021 | 8 min read

Burnout. If you haven’t experienced it yet, there’s a good chance that you’ve gotten close. Workplace stress is tough to deal with at the best of times, and on top of everything, the last couple years have been some of the most stressful in recent memory!

A global pandemic, economic turmoil, and an en-masse shift towards remote work—could the world throw any more massive changes at us? For most of us, it’s been a big adjustment (understatement, much?) so it’s really not surprising that burnout is on the rise.

Burnout’s nothing new, but as we all attempt to bounce back from this period of intense change, dealing with burnout on a large scale is going to be more important than ever. In this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about burnout in a distributed world—what it is, why it’s rising, and how we can deal with it.

If, like us, some part of you is still dwelling back in early March 2020, these might be just the strategies you need to bring your team into a brave new distributed world. Come with us—you might find that it’s friendlier out there than it looks.