Tall men have a greater chance of becoming leaders. As unfair as this may seem, and despite the obvious exceptions from Napoleon to CEO superstar Jack Welch, decades of research have consistently borne out the fact that men in leadership positions — from U.S. presidents to CEO’s — are likely taller than average. Additional research […]
Read More… from Potential Leaders: Height Helps But So Does Being Smart
Research in academic laboratory settings — that is, within controlled experiments with voluntary participants — has shown that individuals with deeper voices are perceived as having more leadership capabilities. Different research points to specific qualities attributed to individuals with deeper voices, including competence, persuasiveness, confidence and trustworthiness. What happens, however, in the real world? Are […]
Read More… from A Lower Voice Can Take You Higher Up the Leadership Ladder
In most hierarchies, power is malleable, which means that it can change. A leader at the top can lose his or her power, and be replaced by subordinates who have, usually through their superior skills and accomplishments, managed to rise through the hierarchy. One of the characteristics of highly skilled subordinates is their ability to […]
Employees just joining the workforce will have different experiences in their first jobs, depending on the economic situation of the firm in which they land. This economic situation makes a major difference in the skills, habits and routines that these first-time employees develop. For example, new workers who arrive during good economic times will have […]
Read More… from How Early Work Experience Shapes Later Leadership Outlook
A number of academic studies have shown that because many of us form impressions about potential leaders from their facial characteristics, certain facial characteristics (for example, a ‘competent’ look) can help people achieve leadership positions. At least six different studies show that CEOs who share certain facial characteristics command higher salaries or are hired by […]
Read More… from Facial Cues: Can We Judge Who Looks Like a Leader?
As the younger generation of employees move into their first leadership positions, they will naturally be anxious, as any new leader would be, about the responsibilities, pressures, and risks that come with leadership. They will wonder, as the earlier generations of leaders did before them, about whether they are up to the task. And as […]
Read More… from Younger Generations Determined but Concerned about Leadership
The SCARF® model, developed by neuroscientist David Rock, enables ‘change agents’ to exhibit more adaptive behaviours based on how mental experiences occur over time, thus offering to improve people’s capacity to understand and modify their own behaviour and that of others within a corporate leadership context. SCARF holds that the organizing principle of the brain […]
Read More… from How Neuroscience Can Aid Collaborative Leadership
Richard Barrett’s Seven Levels of Consciousness model, founded on the principles of values-based leadership, is a guide to achieving exceptional performance in organizations. Barrett’s framework based on his extensive research across organizations and increasingly whole countries is an extension of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a well-explored, but frequently misrepresented, theory […]
Read More… from Using Values-Based Leadership to Drive Performance
Online communities can be the source of staggering feats of pooled knowledge creation, with volunteers from around the world combining their expertise. Think of Wikipedia, or of Linux, or even the online community helping NASA to map craters on Mars. “Open-source software development creates products that are as good (some say, even better) as those […]
CEOs tend to be strong in decision-making and the financial elements of their jobs, but weak when it comes to managing their people and developing talent, according to a survey of 160 North American boards of directors and CEOs. Specifically, ‘mentoring skills’ was tied with ‘board engagement’ for first place in CEO weaknesses, followed closely […]
