Lees-top 10: Leiderschap in ‘wicked times’

1. The emerging resilients: Achieving ‘escape velocity’
The experience of the fast movers out of the last recession teaches leaders emerging from this one to take thoughtful actions to balance growth, margins, and optionality.

2. The Great Covid-Driven Teamwork Divide
What makes a team more than the sum of its parts? Its cohesion or connectedness, which allows for pooling of individual members’ strengths and compensates for their weaknesses. Accordingly, Google’s landmark Project Aristotle study found that the single most important driver of team performance was not the skills, intelligence or personality of a team’s members, but rather the quality of the team’s interactions and whether members felt psychologically safe.

3. Recurring Revenue Makes Forecasting the Recovery Easier
The systemic shocks caused by the current crisis have destabilized traditional macroeconomic assumptions and scenarios to forecast market demand and long-term revenue. Will stock markets remain resilient? Will the historic fall in global trade rebound? Will embattled business sectors revive? Will unemployment ease?

4. Leadership in Wicked Times
This extraordinary year has brought to the fore an unprecedented number of wicked problems – like Covid-19 or systemic racism. Global warming, developing over decades, arguably is the biggest one. Unlike tame problems which have known solutions, wicked problems generate a fountain of unknowns, involve complex social dynamics that are difficult to comprehend, and are seemingly impossible to solve effectively.

5. Derisking corporate business launches: Five steps to overcome the most common pitfalls
Launching new businesses is inherently risky. Successful launches are marked by how well companies connect with their customers.

6. Common Causes of Bad Decisions That You Don't Think About Enough
No one gets up in the morning and says, "Today I am going to make a ton of bad decisions." All of us strive to avoid dumb calls and unforced errors. We police ourselves for stupidity, laziness, and arrogance. If we're smart, we even keep an eye out for the many biases that afflict the human brain. Yet we still all sometimes make bad decisions. Why? 

7. 7 ways finance leaders can improve their emotional intelligence
Leadership and lifestyle coaches suggest that the best way to increase a person’s ability to manage a crisis is to improve his or her emotional intelligence. “Emotional intelligence is being able to understand our own emotions, know how to manage them, and then use that understanding to help others,” said Maureen Chiana, a UK leadership coach and resilience consultant.

8. 8 tactics that will boost your chances of getting a green light on your next big idea
This is it! This is the project you’ve been waiting for. The one that’s going to define your career and challenge you and totally transform “the way things are done around here.” The project your team will point to five years from now as the inflection point that ushered in a new era of awesome. If, that is, you can get the project approved, prioritized, and properly resourced.

9. Europe’s start-up ecosystem: Heating up, but still facing challenges
More ventures are achieving unicorn status, and at a faster pace, but many more still aren’t realizing their full potential. What’s holding them back, and what can change that?

10. Zurich CFO reimagines finance
George Quinn, finance leader of the Swiss insurer, believes coronavirus may be a catalyst for rethinking how finance can help drive corporate performance.