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A reprint of the article "How to Be a Good Leader in a Bad Economy" by Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg, which was published on HBR.org on November 29, 2022, is presented. The author suggests thee key leadership balance approaches focusing on the topics of team management, time management, and workload management.

The article describes different kinds of psychological distance including social, temporal, spatial, and experiential that can hinder one's job performance, and discusses a pair of strategies for dealing with them. One may choose to either close or widen the distance depending on the context, with closing more appropriate in negotiations and widening sometimes suitable in a managerial situation. Instead of altering the distance, a second approach would be to substitute one type of distance for another.

Even in an age of relentless self-promotion, some extremely capable professionals prefer to avoid the spotlight. "Invisibles" work in fields ranging from engineering to interpreting to perfumery, but they have three things in common: They are ambivalent about recognition, seeing any time spent courting fame as time taken away from the work at hand. They are meticulous. And they savor responsibility, viewing even high pressure as an honor and a source of fascination. Something else unites Invisibles: They represent a management challenge. The usual carrots don't motivate them; however, managers can take several steps to ensure their satisfaction. Leaders should recognize who their Invisibles are; decide if they want more Invisibles on the team; reward them fairly, soliciting reports on their accomplishments; make the work more intrinisically interesting; and talk to the Invisibles about what works best for them. These actions are well worth taking, as Invisibles not only bring exceptional levels of achievement to an organization but quietly improve the work of those around them, elevating performance and tone across the board. INSETS: Could There Be an Invisible Brand?;Invisibles Abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past five years, there's been an explosion of interest in purpose-driven leadership. Academics, business experts, and even doctors make the case that purpose is a key to exceptional leadership and the pathway to greater well-being. Despite this growing understanding, however, a big challenge remains. Few leaders have a strong sense of their own individual purpose, the authors' research and experience show, and even fewer can distill their purpose into a concrete statement or have a clear plan for translating purpose into action. As a result, they limit their aspirations and often fail to achieve their most ambitious professional and personal goals. In this article, the authors present a step-by-step framework that leaders can use to identify their purpose and develop an impact plan to achieve concrete results. Effective purpose-to-impact plans use language that is uniquely meaningful to the individual, rather than business jargon. They focus on future, big-picture aspirations and work backward with increasing specificity. And they emphasize the individual's strengths and encourage a holistic view on work and family. INSET: A Purpose-to-Impact Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's one thing to set goals--and entirely another to get the people in your organization to actually accomplish them. To make the leap from vision to execution, you can't just define what needs doing; you also need to spell out the details of getting it done. One motivational tool that enables this is "if-then planning," which helps people express and carry out their intentions. If-then plans work because contingencies are built into our neurological wiring, says social psychologist Halvorson. Humans are very good at encoding information in "If X, then y" terms and using such connections to guide their behavior, often unconsciously. When people decide exactly when, where, and how they'll fulfill a goal, they create a link in their brains between the situation or cue (If or when x happens) and the behavior that should follow (then I will do y). This creates powerful triggers for action. To date, most of the research on if-then plans has focused on individuals, but new studies show that they're very effective with groups, improving performance by sharpening focus and prompting members to execute key activities in a timely manner. If-then planning helps organizations avoid poorly expressed goals, groupthink, the tendency to cling to lost causes, and other problems. It pinpoints conditions for success, increases everyone's sense of responsibility, and helps close the troublesome gap between knowing and doing. INSETS: REACHING YOUR PERSONAL GOALS;PLAN FOR THE UNEXPECTED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills--emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence. And never has it been under greater assault. If leaders are to direct the attention of their employees toward strategy and innovation, they must first learn to focus their own attention, in three broad ways: on themselves, on others, and on the wider world. Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves one rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders one clueless, and a failure to focus outward may cause one to be blindsided. The good news is that practically every form of focus can be strengthened. The author of Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, and many other books on the power of cultivating awareness explains why focus is crucial to great leadership. Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, and they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions. INSETS: Are You Skimming This Sidebar?;Expand Your Awareness;Learning Self-Restraint;When Empathy Needs to Be Learned [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaders find transitions into new roles the most challenging times in their professional lives, when they either build credibility and create momentum or stumble and sow doubts about their effectiveness. Much attention has therefore been given to how they should take charge in their early days-but far too little to how the organization should set them up for success from the start. Failure to announce appointments in the right way can undo all the work that went into the selection and hobble even the strongest leader from the start. When someone unexpected is chosen, the transition can set off an emotional storm. To avoid a bad start, the leader who made the selection, his or her HR partner, and the communications, investor relations, and legal professionals who advise them must provide good answers to four fundamental questions: (1) What message is this appointment meant to convey? (2) Why is this person the right one for the job? (3) Which members of the organization need to be informed? (4) What should they be told and when? INSETS: Advice for New Leaders;Recovering From Disaster;Recovering From Disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms in an industry typically cluster around a few strategic positions, and the intense competition on those occupied "mountaintops" makes it hard for firms to gain attractive returns. Superior opportunities lie on unoccupied mountaintops. Yet because those opportunities are "cognitively distant"-far from the status quo- strategists have trouble recognizing and acting on them. Competition, therefore, is weak. Most managers are trained to analyze economic forces when they want to identify new opportunities. But that approach usually won't uncover the kinds of ideas that overturn the status quo. Recent research on human cognition suggests that leaders would do better to use associative thinking to spot, act on, and legitimize distant opportunities. They should learn to make analogies with businesses in other industries, for example. For example, Charles Merrill launched an extraordinarily successful business when he reimagined banking as a "financial supermarket." This article explores ways to jump-start associational thinking- and to bring stakeholders along on the journey. INSETS: Ideas in Brief;What Is Associative Thinking?;How to Teach Associate Thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media entrepreneur Kramer looks at three French companies that use low-tech ways to better connect with customers.Luxury-goods maker Boucheron hosts intimate dinners with a small number of key customers; Nespresso's French subsidiary is making big investments in telephone call centers-despite the fact that most orders come through other channels-and training staff members to spend more time talking to customers; and Vente- Privee treats its key suppliers like customers,forging personal connections with them. Kramer argues that even in an era when so many companies are obsessed with social networking and trying to amass millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook, the deepest relationships between businesses and customers continue to be formed offline, where they are better able to engage in true dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to gaining buy-in for a new idea, we've been taught to focus on getting the idea right instead of on making sure people understand and support it. That, explains Kotter, has left us unprepared to deal with the attacks that can kill off even the most carefully developed concepts. In this edited interview, the leadership expert discusses various idea-killing attacks and offers some rules for responding to them. Whether you're working on a small deal with just a few players or a large-scale change effort in an organization of thousands, you're in the "murky land of human nature and group dynamics," Kotter says. People's anxieties and opinions color the way they react to new ideas. Kotter and Lorne Whitehead have identified four common ways that people shoot down ideas: fear-mongering, death by delay, confusion, and ridicule. Marginalizing the troublemakers might seem like the obvious response, but Kotter and Whitehead have found that people who were effective support for their ideas invited naysayers to critique their ideas and treated them with respect. They also communicated clearly and simply, never let the disagreement become personal, attended to the entire group instead of just to the most vocal critics, and prepared responses to a variety of potential attacks. Learning how to win buy-in for an idea is a basic life skill, Kotter says-one that is as relevant to a student working on a group project as it is to an executive in a business setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We all admire leaders. In trying to understand how leadership works, however, we often lose sight of the fact that followers are a crucial part of the equation. Regrettably, they get short shrift in the management literature, where they are described as merely responding to their leaders' charisma or caring attitudes. What most analyses seem to ignore is that followers have their own motivations and are as powerfully driven to follow as leaders are to lead. In this article, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and management consultant Michael Maccoby delves into the unconscious recesses of followers' minds. He looks closely at the often irrational tendency to relate to a leader as some important person from the past--a parent, a sibling, a close friend, or even a nanny. Sigmund Freud discovered this dynamic when working with his patients and called it "transference." But as important as it is, the concept remains little understood outside the realm of clinical psychoanalysis. This is unfortunate, because a solid understanding of transference can yield great insight into organizational behavior and endow you with the wisdom and compassion to be a tremendous leader. The author explains the most common types of transference--paternal, maternal, and sibling--and shows how they play out in the workplace. He notes that they have evolved as our family structures have changed. Whether followers perceive a leader as an all-knowing father figure, as an authoritative yet unconditionally loving mother figure, or as a brother or sister who isn't necessarily a model of good behavior, the leader can manage transferential ties by bringing unconscious projections to light. Then debilitating resentment and animosity can give way to mutual understanding and productivity--and a limping organization can start to thrive. INSETS: The Different Faces of Transference;Managing Transference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the business literature on leadership starts with the assumption that leaders are rational beings. But irrationality is integral to human nature, and inner conflict often contributes to the drive to succeed. Although a number of business scholars have explored the psychology of executives, Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries has made the analysis of CEOs his life's work. In this article, Kets de Vries, a psychoanalyst, author, and Insead professor, draws on three decades of study to describe the psychological profile of successful CEOs. He explores senior executives' vulnerabilities, which are often intensified by followers' attempts to manipulate their leaders. Leaders, he says, have an uncanny ability to awaken transferential processes--in which people transfer the dynamics of past relationships onto present interactions--among their employees and even in themselves. These processes can present themselves in a number of ways, sometimes negatively. What's more, many top executives, being middle-aged, suffer from depression. Mid- life prompts a reappraisal of career identity, and by the time a leader is a CEO, an existential crisis is often imminent. This can happen with anyone, but the probability is higher with CEOs and senior executives because so many have devoted themselves exclusively to work. Not all CEOs are psychologically unhealthy, of course. Healthy leaders are talented in self-observation and self-analysis, Kets de Vries says. The best are highly motivated to spend time on self-reflection. Their lives are in balance, they can play, they are creative and inventive, and they have the capacity to be nonconformist. "Those who accept the madness in themselves may be the healthiest leaders of all," he concludes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Answer true or false: "I am an ethical manager." If you answered "true," here's an uncomfortable fact: You're probably wrong. Most of us believe we can objectively size up a job candidate or a venture deal and reach a fair and rational conclusion that's in our, and our organization's, best interests. But more than two decades of psychological research indicates that most of us harbor unconscious biases that are often at odds with our consciously held beliefs. The flawed judgments arising from these biases are ethically problematic and undermine managers' fundamental work--to recruit and retain superior talent, boost individual and team performance, and collaborate effectively with partners. This article explores four related sources of unintentional unethical decision making. If you're surprised that a female colleague has poor people skills, you are displaying implicit bias--judging according to unconscious stereotypes rather than merit. Companies that give bonuses to employees who recommend their friends for open positions are encouraging in-group bias-favoring people in their own circles. If you think you're better than the average worker in your company (and who doesn't?), you may be displaying the common tendency to overclaim credit. And although many conflicts of interest are overt, many more are subtle. Who knows, for instance, whether the promise of quick and certain payment figures into an attorney's recommendation to settle a winnable case rather than go to trial? How can you counter these biases if they're unconscious? Traditional ethics training is not enough. But by gathering better data, ridding the work environment of stereotypical cues, and broadening your mind-set when you make decisions, you can go a long way toward bringing your unconscious biases to light and submitting them to your conscious will. INSET: Are You Biased?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many business thinkers believe it's the role of senior managers to scan the external environment to monitor contingencies and constraints, and to use that precise knowledge to modify the company's strategy and design. As these thinkers see it, managers need accurate and abundant information to carry out that role. According to that logic, it makes sense to invest heavily in systems for collecting and organizing competitive information. Another school of pundits contends that, since today's complex information often isn't precise anyway, it's not worth going overboard with such investments. In other words, it's not the accuracy and abundance of information that should matter most to top executives--rather, it's how that information is interpreted. After all, the role of senior managers isn't just to make decisions; it's to set direction and motivate others in the face of ambiguities and conflicting demands. Top executives must interpret information and communicate those interpretations--they must manage meaning more than they must manage information. So which of these competing views is the right one? Research conducted by academics Sutcliffe and Weber found that how accurate senior executives are about their competitive environments is indeed less important for strategy and corresponding organizational changes than the way in which they interpret information about their environments. Investments in shaping those interpretations, therefore, may create a more durable competitive advantage than investments in obtaining and organizing more information. And what kinds of interpretations are most closely linked with high performance? Their research suggests that high performers respond positively to opportunities, yet they aren't overconfident in their abilities to take advantage of those opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on management in the knowledge economy. According to the author, managerial and governance systems are stuck in the industrial era. The author states that the core assets of the modern business are the intelligence, understanding, skill and experience of its employees. According to the author, managers and business leaders continue to value financial capital over intellectual capital. The author presents a case study regarding the issue involving the leadership of ancient Athens. It is the author's view that the process of policy making should be simple and fair while retaining the passion and emotion of its participants.

The article presents the author's views how to best motivate problem employees. The author suggests that the majority of people who respond to motivational efforts are already up and running. It is the author's view that the only thing that can motivate disinterested parties are themselves. Various fictional case studies regarding the issue of problem employees are presented. The author states that the most common motivational tactics are based on the fallacy that all thought processes are alike. Details related to the author's new theories on motivation are reviewed. INSETS: Decentering: The Art at the Heart of Motivation;Seven Hazards in Handling Problem People.

The sheer enormity of last year's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave new meaning to the term "crisis management:' Suddenly, companies near Ground Zero, as well as those more than a thousand miles away, needed a plan. Because the disasters disrupted established channels not only between businesses and customers but between businesses and employees, internal crisis-communications strategies that could be quickly implemented became a key responsibility of top management. Without these strategies, employees' trauma and confusion might have immobilized their firms and set their customers adrift. In this article, executives from a range of industries talk about how their companies, including Morgan Stanley, Oppenheimer Funds, American Airlines, Verizon, the New York Times, Dell, and Starbucks, went about restoring operations and morale. From his interviews with these individuals, author and management professor Paul Argenti was able to distill a number of lessons, each of which, he says, may "serve as guideposts for any company facing a crisis that undermines its employees' composure, confidence, or concentration." His advice to senior executives includes: Maintain high levels of visibility, so that employees are certain of top management's command of the situation and concern; establish contingency communication channels and work sites; strive to keep employees focused on the business itself, because a sense of usefulness enhances morale and good morale enhances usefulness; and ensure that employees have absorbed the firm's values, which will guide them as they cope with the unpredictable. The most forward-thinking leaders realize that managing a crisis-communications program requires the same dedication and resources they give to other dimensions of their business. More important, they realize that their employees always come first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many top executives say they routinely make big decisions without relying on any logical analysis. Instead, they call upon their "intuition," "gut instinct," "hunches," or "inner voice"--but they can't describe the process much more than that. What exactly is gut instinct? In this article, author Alden Hayashi interviews top executives from companies such as America Online and Johnson and Johnson to find out how they make decisions. Hayashi also presents the research of leading scientists who suggest that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential. Specifically, one theory contends that our emotions help us filter various options quickly, even if we're not consciously aware of the screening. Other research suggests that professional judgment can often be reduced to patterns and rules; indeed, truly inspired decisions seem to require an ability to see similar patterns across disparate fields. A CEO who possesses that ability can craft a perfect strategy by detecting patterns that others either overlook or mistake for random noise. But various traits of human nature can easily cloud our intuitive decision making. One potential pitfall is our tendency to see patterns where none exist. Thus, continual self-checking and feedback are crucial, and some organizations have made these processes part of their corporate culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How can subordinates improve relations with their superiors? And how can superiors help their subordinates feel comfortable in what is often a tense relationship? These questions have usually been dealt with only indirectly in management circles. Yet the relationship is so threatening to many subordinates that they react in ways that are damaging to themselves and their organizations. Drawing heavily on the work of psychologists Erik Erikson, the authors present dilemmas that commonly confront the subordinate. They point out that being aware of these dilemmas can make them more manageable and then offer advice to superiors to aid subordinates in handling such situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are all familiar with and horrified by the stories that came out of Guyana about the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide that occurred at Jonestown. After the dust has settled, everyone wanted to know how so many people could have believed in one person so completely that they would commit suicide to please him. It is a horrid but fascinating story. Perhaps one of the reasons it fascinates is that each of us is aware of a small portion of himself or herself that can go a little crazy because of another person. Excessive dependency on another is a state one usually grows out of, but when the dependency is mutual and reality seems to support it, breaking away may be impossible. In some business organizations, the conditions for unhealthy dependency needs to be gratified also can occur with disastrous effects for the parties involved and for the organizations. The author of this article describes the phenomenon called folie à deux--and how what we often term eccentric behavior patterns of people in organizations might be better understood in that context. INSET: The paradox of dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's easy to see how it happens. A manager knows something is wrong in the relations between his supervisors and their clerical help. Because he knows "good human relations" are important, he assumes the supervisors need better interpersonal skills. After a training program the supervisors try their new skills, but nothing changes. The manager throws up his hands and concludes that behavioral science is all gobbledegook. The supervisors think so too because the real problem was that they were threatened by the clerical people's new skills and needed some support in dealing with the change, not skills in treating their subordinates better. Thus it is with universal theories. More often than not they do not fit the specific situation in which they are used. The author of this article makes a plea to both academics and managers to consider the price business pays for the simple cure and asks each to take a role in rectifying the situation. Academics need to develop more theories that managers can use, and managers need to recognize that the easy way doesn't work and to act as intelligent consumers in rejecting theories that aren't relevant, in being more diagnostic, and in keeping themselves and their staffs educated in the tools available. The author provides some sources for managers to investigate and compares a number of available theories as to their uses and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author refutes the underlying assumption of the book "The Peter Principle," the notion that individuals are promoted until they reach the level of their incompetence, and states his own theory of organizational errors in promotion. Managers are promoted, the author states, to a level where they are beset by anxiety and depression. According to the author, employees who suffer from these ailments when promoted have reached the point where inherent psychological problems overwhelm ambition and the desire to succeed.

Good managers, ones who get the best out of their subordinates and who thereby produce positive results for their organizations, are the keys to an organization's success. It is not surprising then that much research and thought has gone into trying to define just what motivates a good manager and how to describe him so that his characteristics can be objectively measured and identified. In this article, the authors describe a motivation pattern that empirical research has discovered most good managers share. Good managers are not motivated by a need for personal aggrandizement, or by a need to get along with subordinates, but rather by a need to influence others' behavior for the good of the whole organization. In other words, good managers want power. On its own, however, power can lead to authoritarianism, so it needs to be tempered by maturity and a high degree of self-control. The authors maintain that workshops can help a manager discover whether he has the correct motivation profile to be a good manager. If he does, or even if he does not have the correct profile, workshops can help him become a good or better manager. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a number of well-documented psychological traps that are particularly likely to undermine business decisions. In addition to reviewing the causes and manifestations of these traps, the authors offer some specific ways managers can guard against them. The authors state that a poorly framed problem can undermine even the best-considered decision. The authors state that at every stage of the decision-making process, misperceptions, biases, and other tricks of the mind can influence the choices we make. The traps reviewed in this article can work in isolation or in concert. The authors advise that the best protection against all psychological traps is awareness. They advise taking action to understand and avoid psychological traps.