Browsing Category Leadership

Progress and speed in complex environments – The Leadership Backbone model

I developed this model to help teams and organisations leverage the research available about collaboration in complexity and collective intelligence. It has been of great help to fast growing scale-ups and senior management teams in transforming incumbents. I hope it might be useful for you as well. If you are managing a organisation in a stable market with no sign of disruption I would suggest…

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Influencing culture – A skills based approach

If you want to infuse Perspective-taking, or any other skill, into your organisation’s culture then your job is to help people connect the practice of Perspective-taking to successful outcomes. It is as simple as that. It will take time, and some work, but it is a straight forward process. Since the release of the Harvard Business School case study “Leading cultural change @ SEB” I have…

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Psychological Safety is not a safety factor!

A nice surprise to find my article “Psychological Safety is not a hygiene factor” (co-authored with Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson) together with my “3 levels of Psychological Safety”-scale in Data Driven HR’s list of best HR and People Analytics articles 2021. I’ll make sure to publish new thoughts and articles soon. Hopefully they will be useful enough for leaders around the world so that I make…

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Psychological Safety – How to make it happen in your team

In this HBR article me and Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson dive into the methods I use to build Psychological Safety in teams and organisations. My plan is to give even more practical advise in coming posts here on the Leadership Backbone blog, but in the meantime do check out this article. And if you want some more details you can download the Harvard Case Study…

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Perspective taking – The problems you are able to solve will decide your future and success.

Take any theory that aims to help you solve a complex problem and you will find Perspective taking at the core. As examples; all innovation theories starts with understanding the Perspective of an end-user and every negotiation theory I have seen revolves around understanding the perspective of the other party. Perspective taking is at the core of collaboration, teaming and Collective intelligence, and all dialogue models (regardless of if the aim is to solve a business opportunity or a marital problem) are…

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Psychological safety – your decisions will only be as good as the information they are based on.

  Do you feel safe right now? Safe enough to share a new idea?Safe enough to ask a question about something you don’t understand?Safe enough to admit a mistake?Safe enough to challenge someone above you in your organizational hierarchy? If your answers to these questions are yes, then congratulations, you are in a atmosphere of Psychological safety. Psychological safety is an essential ingredient in creating…

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Transformative frames – the key to motivation, progress and empowerment

If you want to engage people in any kind of change then decades of research suggest that your chance of success improves drastically if you first clarify the answers to the questions [1] where do we want to go?[2] why are we here?, and [3] how do we want to do things? You will find versions of this frame in the most renown literature on Empowerment, Transformational leadership and Motivation as well as personal development and teamwork. Sometimes the answers to the questions are labelled…

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