Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jun 15, 2012

Article of the Week
6 Exercises To Strengthen Compassionate Leadership (Fast Company)
Big Idea: Want loyal, dedicated, and passionate employees? Be a loyal, dedicated, and passionate boss. Here are some tools to develop well-being in your workplace through better communication.

Editor’s Choice Articles
Mission: Engage Talent (Fast Company)
Big Idea: Start by defining your company’s values and making them ones that your talent can lean against. Keep culture constant by capturing what yours is and by considering how new talent coming in and new business aims will fit or augment the culture of the company. State the company purpose so that it is clearly understood. If you don’t have one in place, or at least an articulation of it, then stop debating your mission statement and apply the mentorship Aristotle applied to vocation–”Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation”–or in this case, purpose.

Building Trust Through Skillful Self-Disclosure (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Skilled leaders disclose information in ways that are authentic in that they can reveal relevant information about the leader’s thinking process, creating a shared mental model that facilitates communication and improves task performance. Perhaps most important, skillful self-disclosure can humanize the leader, creating connections between the leader and followers that increase feelings of trust and intimacy, and, in an organizational context, a readiness to work together collaboratively to reach mutual task goals.

Conversation Starter: How Intimate Are You? (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Don’t let the word “intimacy” throw you. It’s just the first element of what we call organizational conversation and the first step toward making your approach to communication more conversational. Intimacy encompasses various ways that leaders work to close the gap between themselves and their employees.

If You Don’t Like Your Future, Rewrite Your Past (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Narratives are powerful leadership tools. People remember stories more readily than they remember numbers, and stories motivate action. Recent research showed that levels of charitable donations rise when donors are given statistical evidence of a problem, such as children living in poverty, but levels of giving rise even higher when donors read a story about one poor child. But leaders should tread carefully. Stories should be evidence-based, meeting a plausibility test.

10 Ways To Help Left Brainers Tap Into Creativity (Innovation Excellence)
Big Idea: If your job requires you to lead meetings, brainstorming sessions, or problem solving gatherings of any kind, chances are good that most of the people you come in contact with are left-brain dominant: analytical, logical, linear folks with a passion for results and a huge fear that the meeting you are about to lead will end with a rousing chorus of kumbaya.  Not exactly the kind of mindset conducive to breakthrough thinking.] 

Why Your Business Doesn’t Need the Latest Technology (Inc.)
Big Idea: The desire for human contact extends well beyond the hospitality industry. Customer service, the alter ego of ego scratching, is an important category in any sort of business.