Human-Centered Leadership: The Path to Performance

Human-Centered Leadership: The Path to Performance The most widely used activity in the history of leadership training has to be the one where the facilitator asks those in attendance to “Think about the best boss you have ever had!” If you have ever been the one in the front of the room making that request, you can attest to the fact that you can literally see people going to their “happy place” as they conjure up those memories. It’s akin to asking them to reflect upon everything they learned about life from their favorite relative. You can usually both feel and sense the reflective gratitude. To transition to the content of whatever program is being taught after those emotions have been brought to the forefront, most facilitators invite learners to consider how (in particular) the boss they are thinking about distinguished themselves: “What did that memorable leader ‘say or do’ that made them stand out?” Questions To Ask Yourself About Your Best Boss For the purposes of this blog, I’d ask you to consider two, closely related, ”best boss” questions:   When did the relationship with your “best boss” first initiate? In other words, what were the circumstances that brought you together in the first place? Why did that relationship become memorable? You have probably worked for a number of people throughout your career, but this boss stands out … because …?   The Situational Leadership® Model At the same time, I would also ask you to think about the Situational Leadership® approach. The Situational Leadership® Model has been helping people effectively influence others within organizations for over 55 years. At a minimum, it helps leaders frame their attempts to influence by getting answers to three practical but critical questions:   What is the task? In specific terms, and at the atomic level, what needs to be accomplished? What is the Performance Readiness® of the person performing the task? Are they currently performing at a sustained and acceptable level? Do they exhibit confidence and commitment when they engage? Given the answers to the first two questions, what style of leadership has the highest probability of success? Direction? Empowerment? Collaboration? What Makes Your Best Boss The Best? In that regard, it stands to reason that your relationship with your “best boss” started out with something to do. There was a task that needed to be accomplished, and you and your boss were responsible for accomplishing it. In that context, consider that “best bosses” are frequently Situational Leaders! Somehow and someway they consistently provide what is needed regardless of the circumstances: When you lack confidence and don’t know what to do, they give you the benefit of their experience When you know exactly what to do and love doing it, they get out of your way and trust you to get it done When you have demonstrated you know what to do but still feel a little unsure about doing it (for whatever reason), they talk with you and help you work through your apprehension   But, a “best boss” doesn’t become a “best boss” because they helped you work your way through a learning curve on a task! They become a “best boss” because they pushed you when you needed pushing (even if you didn’t particularly enjoy it at the time!). They helped you work your way through a difficult problem and make a decision that you owned (instead of “grasping the reins” and telling you what they thought you should do). They listened to, and took action upon, suggestions you offered up that were grounded in your performance track record and expertise (without trying to take credit for something that was clearly your idea). In essence, “best bosses” employ Situational Leadership® practices as the human-centric approach it has always been. They distinguish themselves in our memories as leaders who formed meaningful relationships with us over time around the work that needed to be done. Eventually, it became apparent. They didn’t just care about performing tasks and delivering results. They also truly cared about us, our development and our well-being. At DOOR International SEA and The Center for Leadership Studies, we help you balance ownership and flexibility in your team through the Situational Leadership® framework. Explore more or book a Discovery Call: https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=57uTSo9j30yUeel5I69QpXIdPPprqrdGmIzoYHTValFUMThPU0RCWjdCSTNHMjRHV1JSQTlGOElTQi4u&route=shorturl

AI as a Cost Cutter vs. a Growth Engine

AI as a Cost Cutter vs. a Growth Engine Executives are being sold two stories about AI right now.  One is that it will magically transform the business overnight. The other is that it is too disruptive, too risky, or too controversial to touch. Both stories can become expensive distractions.  On a recent episode of CEO Daily Brief, I spoke with Nicole Mangarella from SPS about how companies are actually using agentic AI today. The answer was far more practical than the hype cycle suggests. And it’s not that sexy.  They’re reducing operational drag. Think about the amount of time teams waste every week booking rooms, coordinating visitors, arranging catering, managing AV requests, and bouncing between disconnected systems to complete routine tasks. These issues rarely show up in strategy decks, but they pull talent away from higher-value work.  That is where agentic AI can drive immediate business value. When friction is removed, speed increases. Administrative costs decline. Employees can focus on customers, growth, innovation, and decisions that impact revenue. And yes, you probably need less administrative assistants. But that’s not the whole story.   AI can’t only be framed as a labor reduction tool. That narrow view creates fear internally and leaves money on the table externally. If your workforce believes innovation is simply code for cuts, you’re going to get resistance to adoption.  Nicole suggests shifting the focus to redeployment. She pointed to IKEA, a $52 billion (€44.6 billion) global home furnishings retailer, as a strong example. After driving efficiencies in customer service, IKEA redeployed that talent to build a new interior design offering — creating a new revenue stream worth $1.52 billion (€1.3 billion) from the same workforce.  As a leader, this is your permission to think bigger. You can use those productivity gains to expand capacity. Use freed-up talent to improve service. Use operational savings to fund growth. Use better systems to move faster than competitors.  Taking care of people and improving the bottom line aren’t competing priorities. They can reinforce each other when approached creatively. Many organizations haven’t figured this out yet, which makes it a competitive advantage. I’ll be speaking more about leadership, business performance, and workplace innovation at the SPS Connected Workplace Experience this June in New York alongside leaders including Nicole Mangarella. If you are focused on growing results in a changing market, I hope to see you there.  Elsewhere in Culture  Decisions vs. Choices This week on CEO Daily Brief, John Frehse and I attempted to untangle the difference between decisions and choices and may have confused ourselves in the process. But underneath the chaos was a useful point. Decisions are often transactional, selecting from the options in front of you. Choices are deeper. They are about defining what matters, what problems deserve attention, and what kind of leader you want to be. In a world drowning in data, dashboards, and endless optimization, the real work may be choosing what deserves your energy in the first place. Apple Podcast Spotify 

One Mistake in Six Million: What Mumbai’s Dabbawallas Know About the Line

One Mistake in Six Million: What Mumbai’s Dabbawallas Know About the Line Every working morning, around 5,000 men in white cotton caps move more than a lakh home-cooked lunches across Mumbai. No app, no GPS, no barcodes, just painted codes on tin boxes, local trains, and bicycles. Their accuracy is famously estimated at one error in six million deliveries. Harvard flew down to study them. Most companies with a thousand times their budget can’t match them. Now consider what Mumbai offers them every single day: a full menu of Below The Line® behaviour. The monsoon arrives, wait and see. The train is delayed; finger-pointing has never had a better alibi. The box changed three pairs of hands, not my job. A delivery goes wrong, ignore or deny, who would ever trace it? No supervisor is watching, so cover your tail, or simply wait for someone to tell you what to do. Every one of those six exits is open, every day, and every one of them is justified. That is the trap of Below The Line: it doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like a reasonable explanation. And nothing changes there. The dabbawallas take the staircase instead. See It®: the colour-coded system makes every gap instantly visible; a box in the wrong place cannot hide, and neither can the problem. Own It®: each dabbawala owns his boxes end to end, not his leg of the relay, but the lunch itself. Solve It®: a missed train doesn’t trigger a meeting; it triggers a reroute, on the spot, with whatever the moment offers. Do It®: and so, by lunchtime, through floods and festivals and 130 years of Mumbai, the dabba arrives. Four steps, climbed daily since 1890, without a single workshop on accountability. Here is the uncomfortable mirror: most organisations have more data, more dashboards, and more degrees than the dabbawallas will ever hold and longer explanations for why the result didn’t arrive. The difference was never resources. It is the side of the line a leader chooses when the excuse is genuinely available. That choice, repeated daily, is what a culture is actually made of. Leaders who make that climb instinctively are exactly who India’s Top 100 Accountable Leaders™ in the Age of AI is built to find and develop, over a six-month journey on these very frameworks: Stanford-validated, drawn from 7 published books, trusted by 1,700+ organisations worldwide. Take the first step. Nominate yourself before August 15 → Join