Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code, through quick snapshots, for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done.
The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age
MIT Sloan Management Review published this interesting paper on what it takes to reimagine how to lead. It contains some insights for each of us to learn and practice. Here are some key takeaways:
The biggest challenge in leading is having the right mindset! Only 12% of the respondents believed their leaders had the right mindset to lead
One thing that comes out strongly is that leaders aren’t as prepared as they think
As much as leaders have deficient skill sets, they also have outdated mindsets and this too needs to be addressed!
Strategic blind spots exist as many leaders fail to grasp the revolutionary changes happening in the business models in their industries
While leaders need to embrace speed, they need to understand the downstream implications of strategic mistakes and cultural miscues that can happen if they are not deliberate and thoughtful during crucial moments of deploying their strategy in the company
Adopting four mindsets is essential in leaders: Producer Mindset, Investor Mindset, Connector Mindset, and Explorer Mindset.
Read more here
The Essentials of Leadership
In this brilliant conversation with Shane Parrish, Marshall Goldsmith distills down some of the essential ideas about how to spot an exceptional leader and become one yourself in your life and career.
Here’s a quick summary of some key learnings:
Why it is important to transition from being an achiever to a leader
Leaders must understand that their role is to make a positive difference, not to prove I am smart and not to prove am right
Leaders must believe they are more like facilitators rather than showing they are experts
Leaders need humility to accept that people don’t get better because of them and that people get better because of themselves
Leaders who don’t follow up and don’t talk to people don’t get better
If you can’t change your beliefs, it will be tough to change your behaviour as a leader
Leaders must know how to disagree without being disagreeable
Leaders must not value human beings based on the results they want to achieve
Most Important Skill Job Seekers Need Today
In this conversation, HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius talks to Accenture CEO Julie Sweet on The New World of Work, and some of the points she makes on what they look for as skills in people make it an enjoyable watch:
Here’s a summary of some of our key takeaways:
The most important skill that one needs to possess is the ability to learn - learning agility.
She makes a pertinent point that skills that were relevant a few years back are not relevant today, and the only thing needed is the ability to learn new things and get things done at work.
What you learn outside your school, college, or office is an important marker of your willingness to learn - it may be learning to cook, fixing your bike, learning a new sport, learning a new language, etc.
The importance of having deep-domain knowledge and technical skills. Just having technology skills alone is not enough.
The importance to understand that outcomes, not just having competencies, are good enough.
An apprenticeship program as a method to relook at people and skills and drop old mindsets around four-year degrees.
Leadership Skill Deficit and Transition
Being a leader is not about having a designation but a mindset.
Often, this is the confusion in most people's heads that makes them complacent once they get the title they are aspiring for.
What does leadership is a mindset mean?
This means that it is not about how senior you are in the organisation but the leadership skills needed to fulfil the role that you play today. You may be an entry-level executive or mid-level manager or a senior-level executive, and leadership skills are required at every level in every role in the organisation.
Going back to the MIT Sloan article on mindsets, you need to consider what weightage you would give to each mindset at any level or position in the organisation. Your role may require more of a ‘producer mindset’, which means that you ‘excel at executing’, which is a predominant leadership trait needed. To do that, you need to influence many people in different departments and functions to make things happen and not do what is being given to you but find solutions to bottlenecks that stop it.
Also, as you become a senior leader, what was stark in Marshall Goldsmith’s advice was that you as a leader need not show to others every time how smart you are! You are there because you have, in the past, displayed that you can do things. Many senior leaders cannot make this transition from being an achiever to a facilitator. Also, bias comes in when decisions are taken because of the ‘know-it-all’ syndrome.
It requires deep humility as a leader to discard old mindsets and adopt new perspectives.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Leaders need to address deficient skill sets along with purging old mindsets.
Great leaders transition from being achievers to becoming facilitators.
Learning agility is the single biggest skill needed at work today. As things at work change rapidly, ‘learnability’ is an important attribute to possess to remain relevant and in demand.