What Leadership Really Means
In her talks and workshops Margaret Heffernan helps leaders and managers to build strong team cultures that allow for open and honest communication, innovation, collaboration, optimal employee engagement and employee retention and not least happy employees.
For decades, we’ve assumed that being a leader requires being the smartest guy – or gal – in the room. But the speed and complexity of business today means that no individual can know enough, be up to date enough and smart enough to know as much as is needed for smart choices and good decisions. That’s one reason why we work in groups. But teams have entirely different dynamics: they require skills and talents that have little (if anything) to do with IQ. They develop over time in ways that are counter-intuitive but so simple they’re routinely overlooked or underestimated. So why are some teams so much more effective than others? What does this mean for effective leadership?
Willful Blindness or the 20/20 Company
The biggest challenge we face is knowing what is happening in our companies and in our industry. Time after time, we either miss major opportunities, market shifts or warning signs. How does that happen? The disasters are often explained as ‘bad apples’ but the truth is that the hardest aspect of leadership is gaining true insight into the business and the environment in which it operates. If Microsoft could miss the Internet, Pepsi could miss water and Nokia could miss smart phones, insight isn’t just about hiring smart people. It’s about understanding the obstacles to transparency and putting the structures, process and culture in place to surface mission-critical information.
Margaret Heffernan draws on a century of psychological and organizational research, together with her own experience running companies, to investigate how business leaders can be better sighted, alert to the external and internal threats that challenge their very existence. In a provocative and entertaining presentation, she outlines the key social and neurological reasons why we can’t see what ought to be obvious, why we ignore what we most need to see and why most of those around us do likewise. With examples drawn from organizations worldwide, audiences will learn how better to manage internal intelligence and external networks to ensure that they don’t get blind-sided.
In this provocative presentation, Heffernan analyzes the major
causes of personal and institutional blindness:
- what leads to leaking and whistleblowing
- personal and structural strategies for building a sighted, informed organization
- processes for testing hypotheses and making sense of mission-critical information
Talent, Conformity, Culture: Getting the Best from People
To build the best, smartest workforce requires hiring a broad range of diverse, talented individuals. But if that’s all it takes, why is it so hard to increase productivity? Why has productivity fallen for the last 50 years? Why is creativity and innovation something employees seem good at when they’re on vacation, but not when they’re at work? If they’re leaving to become entrepreneurs, why couldn’t they be inventive where they are now?
It turns out that hiring diverse people is the easy part. Keeping them diverse, creative and engaged is the hard part. In this provocative presentation, Margaret Heffernan outlines the social, neurological and psychological reasons why we so rarely get the best out of the smart people we hire. And she proposes numerous strategies for hiring the best – and keeping them that way.
In this entertaining presentation, you will learn:
- why risk takers lose their creativity in large organization
- how to get a better ROA from the people you hire
- how to keep the entrepreneurs inside
Money and Motivation
Does money motivate people or not? Psychology experiments prove that it does – and it doesn’t. Not much help if you’re trying to incentivize your workforce. So how does money work in organizations? What are the unintended consequences of over-pay and under-pay? What role does money play in getting the most from your people?
In this presentation, Margaret Heffernan examines the complex psychological and neurological attitudes we display towards money and proposes ways in which it can be used more effectively to galvanize and focus the talent in your team. She argues that money is the most powerful tool that companies regularly misuse, and proposes ways to get it to work for you instead of against you.
In this illuminating presentation you will learn
- the unintended consequences of pay
- the fundamental needs of your workforce
- better, cheaper ways to motivate smart people
