Leadership for the Greater Good:
Global Thought Leaders Explore Today's Challenges
ILA’s blog launched in March 2020 amid a world struggling to make sense of the pandemic, racial inequality, and challenges to democracy. We charge our bloggers to apply their leadership knowledge and practical wisdom to inform and inspire us as we continued our work of advancing leadership knowledge and practice for a better world. Bloggers include authors from 12 countries spanning 5 continents.
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Repairing the Breach Through Public Kinship
Public Kinship is the willingness to publicly assume responsibility and to act out the phrase “love thy neighbor as thyself.” It is an acknowledgement that we are a family and we act accordingly. How can we develop a framework to make these values real and applicable to all?
Practice Gratitude for Your Team – and Develop a Culture of Appreciation in Your Workplace
It’s OK to recognize that we’re living in challenging circumstance, but you have the power to lift the clouds in your workplace by infusing a tone of gratitude into your company culture. In this latest blog, Peter Weng shares tips and strategies for individuals and leaders.
Leaders Who Lust in Our Midst
The leadership industry — leadership centers and institutes, leadership programs and courses, leadership teachers and trainers — sells moderation. In fact, sometimes leadership, including leadership that is exceptionally effective, is quite the opposite. Sometimes leaders are excessive.
Gendering Leadership in Times of COVID: The Case of the “Strong Man”
The striking image of a maskless Donald Trump standing defiantly on the White House balcony on his return from hospital exemplifies the so-called “strong leadership” associated with men and masculinity. Why is the notion of the male strong leader still so influential and persistent?
Post-COVID 2019 Academic Pointers: On Social Innovation, Engaged Scholarship, and Learning Leadership
Given a changed context, academic efforts must increasingly rely on evidence-based, scientific knowledge. To ensure its relevancy, we must also ask: What does it mean anyway? This question becomes even more important as wicked problems increase exponentially in nature, scope, and impact.
Why Crisis Leadership Can Be a Missed Opportunity for Change
A crisis is not a good time for change. Or is it? In times of crisis, leaders often aim to restore stability as quickly as possible. This is understandable. However, a crisis can also be used as a starting point to deeply explore new ideas and approaches that may be more effective and sustainable in the long run.
Leadership and a Positive Peace: Losing Battles but Winning the War
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare our vulnerabilities, divisions, falsehoods, and brutal inequalities. These deep divides and holes in the fabric of our societies weaken our resolve for peace and lead us to question what it is about our cultures that creates so much room for insecurity and what role better leadership might play.
Uncharted: How to Map the Future Together
“The only thing we know about the future is that we do not know the future.” What implications does that have for leadership and the structures of our organizations, particularly amid rapidly moving crisis? How does this change the relationship between leaders, followers, and the public at large?
Leadership and Leadership Appointment Are Not Necessarily Synonymous
Often citizens assume that leaders in positions of power have the essential leadership capabilities needed for the work. However, many leaders measure their effectiveness solely on the stock market index and do not understand that effective leadership requires an intricate balance between the economy and humanity.
The COVID-19 Crisis as a Test of Followership
Is it not time we stopped asking what leaders and science can do to fight COVID-19 and ask instead what followers should be doing? Accepting that we are facing a complex and unpredictable situation, how do we stop calling for simple solutions, learn to live with uncertainty, and take responsibility for our own actions?
False Positives: A Pandemic of Prozac Leadership
Being positive can facilitate transformational leadership but taken to extremes it can become insincere and manipulative. Excessive positivity constitutes a significant barrier to reflection and learning. By silencing critical voices, Prozac leadership has hindered our leaders’ response to the pandemic.
The Deep Structure Is Our Responsibility
The implicit rules for acceptance and success are encoded in the deep structure of organizations and social groups. Recent events have reminded us that the deep structure in America is pervasive, pernicious, and even deadly. What can whites and cis-straight people do to address such a horrible legacy?
ILA’s Leadership for the Greater Good blog is supported via a grant from the MetLife Foundation.