Leaderwhys with Thomas Bothe | Communication Essentials In Leadership

Bad communication kills good intention

A summer evening in a Paris pub I chatted with a friend over a glass of wine. We met for a few hours because we happened to be in the same city. His assertive voice was softer than usual, his conversational responses slower. Something occupied his mind so I shut up and created silence.... Read more »

Selling the value of values

Sometimes the “invisible” value of a product or service, created by values and culture, is not properly appreciated by the customer. This happens especially with buyers who do not understand the difference between lowest price and lowest total cost. We need to make the invisible visible. But to achieve visibility, words are not enough. In... Read more »

real teams consist of …

Real teams consist of individuals that have chosen to participate in achieving a goal. There is a change in perception and focus when a human being consciously choses to contribute to the aim of a project. The commitment creates an increased readiness to focus on influencing that which can be influenced at any given moment. That readiness... Read more »

training and choices

Our ability as leaders to make choices at crossroads is limited by our ability to execute such choices. Some of them do not even appear as choices because they are outside our comfort zone and virtually invisible. That is where training comes in: Compared to “any old solution” sustainable solutions are often more challenging to... Read more »

how to be a useless conversationist

If we hurry to hunt down errors before we understand the point, we are not even useful to have a conversation with.

never change your mind if …

If we don’t rejoice at changing our minds now and then we don’t really deserve to be called intelligent.

opinion versus hypothesis

It is best to not believe everything we think. Opinions tend to become dogmatic. We learn and unlearn productively if we make it a habit to turn our opinions into hypotheses. Opinions make us stop looking. Hypotheses make us look and the looking makes us learn continuously.

How smart do we fail ?

There is IQ. There is EQ. There is SQ. And now there is TryQ 😉 For now it has three plateaus: Low TryQ: Try -> fail -> blame. Medium TryQ: Try -> fail -> try -> fail -> try -> fail -> try -> fail -> try -> succeed or quit. High TryQ: Try ->... Read more »

Habits

We are more likely to change (habits) when we go through a major life event – when we know new circumstances require more than habitual action.

do we need to be bigger than our jobs?

… are you bigger than your job? Because if you are not bigger than your job, you get trapped by the pressures of events and by processes to go along with actions that you know you shouldn’t. (General Wesley Clark, Democracy Now! Interview 2007)

Thomas Bothe

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