The Best of Bill's Brain from May and June
Leadership, Conflict, Teamwork, and Surviving Social Isolation
It’s been a crazy couple of months!
We flattened the curve, only to see it rise again. We marched for justice, only to see injustice rear its ugly head again. In the midst of this craziness, I’ve sought to equip leaders for greater service, because I believe that better leaders bring better outcomes in every area of life.
Here are three articles you liked the most over the last two months:
Warning: Don’t Let Escalation Destroy Your Leadership
Escalation occurs in our personal and professional relationships when one part of our brain declares a dire emergency and recruits the rest of our brain to fulfill its urgent demands. These emotions, then, hijack our airplane, crashing the cockpit of reason and compelling us to say things and do things that sabotage our leadership.
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Is Your Team Just a Committee? Five Fatal Flaws
Failures, like the one that occurred with Challenger flight 51-L, are due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to be a team. We slap that label on groups of people randomly assigned to work together and assume the label magically transforms a collection of individuals into a fully functioning band of brothers and sisters. Then we put critical decisions into their hands and are shocked when those decisions turn into fatal disasters.
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How I Survived Our Social Isolation as an Extrovert
I’m an extrovert, as anyone who knows me would tell you, and three extraordinary events conspired against my extroverted existence. First, there was the outbreak of COVID-19. Then came the business shutdowns that happened in its wake. The final straw came when my wife’s mother passed away. I don’t recall a time in my life where I had been left alone for such a long period. Here’s what I learned.