The Power of the Pause – The Leadership That Works Newsletter

Don’t Forget to Celebrate Wins

“In the relentless pursuit of what’s next, many leaders overlook the importance of celebrating their wins,” writes Anna Perry in this CEO Magazine article. Perry says that, “celebration is often misunderstood in corporate environments,” because, “some leaders worry that acknowledging success may encourage complacency or reduce the urgency that drives performance.” However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. When organizations focus solely on what needs to be improved at the expense of highlighting what’s already going well, it can suck the energy out of the entire enterprise. Instead, leaders should remember that “recognition reinforces behavior.” The more leaders shine a light on successes, the more those wins compound. And each celebration creates an opportunity to analyze what led to the positive outcome, so the process can be replicated more easily in the future. Perry says, “In the same way that organizations conduct post-mortems when things go wrong, they should also conduct reflections when things go right.” Get the full story here.

**For more on this, learn how Doug Conant used handwritten thank-you notes to boost both morale and performance as CEO of Campbell Soup Company.

Why Leaders Should Think Like Philosophers

“Business leaders are increasingly called upon to make philosophical decisions. Yet few have the skills needed to navigate this new reality,” write the authors of this Harvard Business Review piece. The most obvious factor contributing to new philosophical debates is the advent of AI, but the authors say there are many other issues front-and-center, including “a lack of broadly shared and stable assumptions about society,” and a range of differing opinions “about the boundaries of acceptable speech, what counts as expertise, what companies owe their employees,” and more. The more complicated these foundational questions become, the more leaders must learn to engage with them. And they argue that a framework for engagement is sorely needed: “We believe that philosophical proficiency—the capacity to surface, question, and reason about the foundational assumptions that shape decisions—is becoming as essential to effective leadership as financial literacy.” To get leaders started, the authors provide a primer on “three key philosophical domains.”

1. Ontology.The study of being or existence. “Ontological questions ask what things really are. Most business leaders carry around a whole host of unexamined ontological assumptions; for example, about what a company is, what constitutes a free market, or what defines an employee.”
2. Epistemology.The study of knowledge. “Epistemology asks what counts as knowledge, how beliefs are justified, and how disagreements about what is true should be navigated. Leaders make epistemic judgments constantly—deciding what evidence is sufficient for action, which sources to trust, whose expertise to defer to, and what level of uncertainty is acceptable.”
3. Ethics.The study of morals or principles of behavior. “Ethics asks what is right and how competing obligations should be weighed. Ethical proficiency in the sense meant here is not corporate social responsibility . . . it is the capacity to examine what constitutes the good.”

Get the full story here.