TODAY’S NEWS. TOMORROW’S INSIGHTS.A daily newsletter from McKinsey & Company
Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
Self-aware. Want to have better relationships? Start with the self. People who are self-aware understand their strengths and weaknesses. They also recognize how their behavior affects others—a part of emotional intelligence. To become more self-aware, experts advise people to slow down: moving quickly from one thing to the next makes it difficult to reflect on behavior. Paying attention to social interactions, whether with friends, acquaintances, or strangers, can also help people learn to measure their words and actions. [WaPo]
Read like a leader. The greatest advice for leaders may lie within the realm of fiction, says a business school professor who teaches a graduate class on moral leadership. Studying novels and short stories can help people better understand how power and compassion reveal themselves at work. One way to read like a leader and build critical leadership skills, such as awareness of interpersonal dynamics and empathy, is to figure out what motivates the main characters in fiction and which forces act upon them. [CNBC]
Act with intentionality. It’s a challenging time for corporate resilience; in fact, many leaders consider this to be the most difficult operating environment they have ever seen. Yet people who maintain dual awareness can act with intentionality and perform at their best no matter what else might be happening. Dual awareness is the integrated understanding of our external and internal environments, as McKinsey’s director of research science, Jacqueline Brassey, and coauthors explain in their new book, Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World.
Five awareness levels. Leaders can experience five levels of awareness on their way to developing dual awareness. At the first level—unaware—people function mostly on autopilot, assuming that what they see is the objective reality. Managers who genuinely want to help their teams solve problems, for example, might not realize that the way they express frustration may be hurting morale. Learn to uncover the mindsets and beliefs that keep people from getting the results they want.
— Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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