You 2.0
feeling confident about your leadIF YOU OPENED THIS MAGAZINE ership skills, consider this: According to Mckinsey’s study of 80,000 leaders, 77 per cent believe they do a good job of engaging their people and fostering productivity; yet 82 per cent of employees disagree. Worse yet, more than one third of employees — 35 per cent (!) — would gladly forgo a pay raise to see their boss fired.
Clearly, leaders can do better. What if you could raise your level of self-awareness exponentially? Learn to ask better questions and form better problem statements? Help the people around you build up their resilience? And banish bias from your organization? In this issue of Rotman Management, we examine a variety of ways to take yourself to the next level as a leader and colleague — and make the most of your potential.
We kick the issue off on page 6 with Big Data: From Bias to Better Decisions, where Rotman Professor of Strategic Management Kristina Mcelheran and co-author Megan Macgarvie provide useful advice for getting the most out of your organization’s data.
Are you where you want to be, professionally? If not, is it possible that your personality has been slowing you down? On page 18, Kellogg School of Management Professor Carter Cast looks at How Brilliant Careers are Made — And Unmade.
What problem are you trying to solve? According to MIT’S Nelson Repenning and co-authors, for leaders, there are few questions more powerful. They describe how to develop The Most Underrated Skill in Management on page 62.
Elsewhere in this issue, we feature best-selling author Daniel Pink in our Thought Leader Interview on page 12. On page 80, we introduce you to some of Canada’s Most Powerful Women — all of whom have a connection to the Rotman School. And in our Idea Exchange, UC Berkeley Professor Morten Hansen explains what it takes to be great at work; the Executive Director of the Rotman Self- Development Laboratory, Maja Djikic, describes the path to self-awareness on page 94; University of Pennsylvania Psychiatrist Jody Foster shows how to deal with the ‘schmuck’ in your office on page 94; Silicon Valley executive coach Ron Warren discusses the importance of 360-degree reviews on page 113; and Rotman faculty Dilip Soman, Roger Martin, Anita Mcgahan, Mark Leung and Ingo Rauth discuss their latest findings.
In a world that is under the sway of unseen forces — from demographic shifts to climate change and geopolitical tensions — increasingly, the only thing we can control is our own behaviour. In the end, each of us must decide which professional and personal virtues we want to stand for and then make sure that every action or decision — big or small — is based upon them.
Few would argue that AI, machine learning and other new technologies are fundamentally changing every industry. But as indicated in this issue, for an organization to thrive, its leaders must focus just as much on the human elements.