Are You a Tiger, a Cat or a Dinosaur?

This note provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and developing the core interpersonal processes essential for effective leadership. It identifies and explores seven key processes: Communication, Visioning, Alliance Building, Persuasion, Exercising Power, Negotiation and Conflict Management. Each process is examined in detail, along with its supporting skills and practical applications. The note emphasizes how these processes interconnect and build upon each other to create a robust leadership framework. Communication establishes a foundation of trust and clarity, which enables visioning to align teams toward common goals. Alliance building creates strategic partnerships that support the vision, while persuasion deepens these alliances. Power leverages these relationships to direct resources and maintain momentum, negotiation harmonizes diverse interests, and conflict management ensures disagreements don't disrupt progress. The note also identifies five core supporting capabilities that enable effective engagement in these processes: Mindful Presence, Emotional Intelligence, Communication Mastery, Strategic Thinking and Adaptability. These capabilities form a progressive framework that allows leaders to navigate complex situations, connect meaningfully with others and make informed strategic decisions. Comprehensive and practical, this note serves as both a theoretical framework and an actionable toolkit for leaders seeking to enhance their interpersonal effectiveness. It includes an extensive reading list organized by process, providing resources for deeper exploration of each area.

Use our AI Trust Checklist to avoid bias, hallucinations, and deepfakes. Practical tips to build trust in your AI systems.

This note presents a comprehensive framework for improving decision-making capabilities in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. It introduces six evidence-based strategies that help leaders maintain clarity, focus and effectiveness when facing complex decisions under stress. The note explores each strategy in detail: managing emotional responses, strengthening situational awareness, training for cognitive agility, using structured decision-making models, enhancing decision speed and practicing under pressure. For each strategy, it provides specific tools and practical applications, illustrated through the case study of AcuWave, a mid-sized consumer electronics firm navigating challenging product launch decisions. Key tools examined include emotional self-regulation techniques, the OODA loop for situational awareness, pre-mortem analysis for cognitive agility, weighted decision matrices for structured decision-making, the 40-70 rule for balancing speed and accuracy, and crisis simulations for practical application. The note emphasizes that effective decision making under pressure integrates emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and structured processes. This practical guide serves as a valuable resource for leaders seeking to develop more robust decision-making capabilities in fast-paced business environments. By implementing these strategies, leaders can improve their ability to assess high-stakes situations quickly, make sound judgments with confidence, and maintain team effectiveness even under volatile and uncertain conditions.

Management speak leads to uninspired and disengaged teams. Here's how to sharpen your language skills to become a more effective leader.

Beyond survival: Necessity entrepreneurs show how resilience and creativity in tough times can guide business leaders through today’s uncertain global economy.

A high-performing executive struggles with confidence and decision-making. She turns to executive coaching to regain control, boost leadership skills, and build career growth.

Mindfulness expert Christoph Glaser shares insights from Breathe, his best-selling book on how simple, breath-based techniques can reduce stress, sharpen focus, and help leaders stay centred under pressure.

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Raiffeisen Bank International's Sabine Abfalter explores how finance leaders can drive banking digital transformation with bold vision as architects of change.

This paper presents a compact and intuitive framework that consolidates, simplifies, and extends results on the links between technology, trade, and labour market outcomes. It makes three main contributions. First, it presents closed-form solution...