Malcolm X.

Viet Ha Tran – Dreams of Ophelia.

Change: miners.

A thought for leaders: Leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith’s famous book, “what got you here, won’t get you there”, is exactly how this unique mine thought. So, ask yourself, what will get you there? How can your organisation lean into this change? How can it embrace it holistically and not just the tech? What are the implications of AI across the structure of your business, the people in it and the tasks they do? And, as the winds of change blow, are you building walls to defend against it, or windmills to harness it?

Viet Ha Tran

Culture: kindness.

The power of kindness has largely been overlooked as a way to build culture. Maybe because kindness is often confused with weakness. But as the Governor of Illinois said in this widely circulated commencement speech at Northwestern University, the kindest person in the room is often the smartest (kindness is an evolved state). A rise in hybrid working, has meant a decrease in social connections, so focussing on kindness, recognition, compliments, praise, and simply saying thanks, are important ways to bring joy back to work. Which is declining. The Gallup 2023 State Of The Global Workplace Report, identified that stress is at a record high, over half of employees are job seeking, and the majority of workers are quiet-quitting.

A thought for leaders: Be kinder. Champion and promote a culture of kindness. Being kind improves culture, and good culture improves talent retention, absenteeism, productivity and work quality. So, being kind is smart. A culture of kindness though, needs to be top down. High status team members behaviours are contagious. So kindness then, becomes contagious. Kindness, starts with you.

Viet Ha Tran

Resilience: framing.

We know resilience is important. But, how do we know if we have it? It’s only when faced with challenge, that we know if we’ll succumb to it, or surmount it. And, can we learn it? Well, developmental psychologists have met thousands of children across decades of research, to determine how people learn to become resilient. They found that yes, we can learn it and two things are key. The first, is how we perceive events. Do we see an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? And, the second, is our internal sense (or locus) of control. Do we believe we are in control of our circumstances (internal), or do we believe our circumstances control us (external)? These were the two key factors in people who demonstrated resilience.

A thought for leaders: How does your organization frame challenges and issues? Do they sound like potential trauma and disasters? Or like an opportunity to learn and to grow? Do we identify specific external issues on projects outside of their control? Or do we allow them to blame themselves for everything? And do we allow our people to see problems as fixed and permanent, or fluid and impermanent? How we frame challenges and issues greatly influences how people process them, and how they build the resilience to deal with them. Remember to use the right frames.

Viet Ha Tran

Leadership Principle: Zoom Out Often

Now that school’s out and Summer’s in, spend more time on the balcony, and less on the dance-floor. Some of your greatest thinking is done when you are not thinking.

Dig a little deeper into this principle here.

You can follow Flow Group on Linkedin here.

P.S. Our featured artist this month is Viet Ha Tran, a Spanish-based photographer who specializes in emotionally charged and endlessly compelling images of women and landscapes. Her series “Dreams of Ophelia” speaks about broken dreams and how looking back on her life, the dreams she cherished and remembered the most are the broken dreams.