Where a growing circle of business leaders comes to share, learn, and inspire organizations to put people first

Whirling Chief

How We Damage Our Workforce’s Path to Finding Meaning Everyday

On Monday, we introduced the concept of ‘meaning at work’ with a wonderfully engaging video from Emily Esfahani Smith, the author of the book ‘Power of Meaning’. Today, we want to share with you some of our analysis around how majority of us in leadership roles – consciously and unconsciously damage our workforce’s path to finding meaning at work everyday. If you walk into any traditional organization small or large scale and ask “What’s the number one purpose of business?”; you are most likely to hear “It is to make profit.” Whether that’s the number one purpose of business or…

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Whirling Chief

Organizational Development, Video

Nº 185

Meaning at Work

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In the United States alone, we spend on average 35-40 hours working every week. That’s some 80,000 hours during a given career—more time we will end up spending with our families?!! Beyond providing as a source of income, what does work give us? Naturally, we all have different sources of fulfillment in life and certainly different environments provide different experiences for us; but what does it mean for us to find fulfillment at work? Meaning at work is a real concept. Studies across a number of institutions (from Berkeley to MIT) show employees will provide increased motivation, loyalty, creativity and productivity to…

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Whirling Chief

Leadership 101: Path to Self-authentication

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As we start to analyze findings of our collaborative research with Stanford University’s CCARE, what we are seeing very clearly is enduring leaders truly emerge from their whole selves. Those leaders who drive vision, inspire and enable people of all diversities over long periods of time engage in constant soul-searching and are willing to test their uniqueness through their life experiences with a growing hunger to become a better version of themselves. Over the course of last week, through our social media accounts, we have been sharing tips around how to grow authenticity; today, we share the complete list. Kindly consider reading…

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Whirling Chief

Great Leadership… a Path to Authenticity…

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We have been thinking, talking, writing about leadership for centuries now. Collectively, there must have been over a 1000 studies conducted to determine the characteristics, competencies or ‘special gifts’ of enduring leaders over the years. Thank goodness, we have not singled this down to a one ‘perfect’ formula (just like parenthood) because I bet you we would all try to copy/ paste it into our realities, a recipe for a potential of disastrous experiences in our lives. Our research findings with Stanford University’s CCARE on leadership only concur what we have been gathering from our readings and discussions over the…

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Whirling Chief

HR Management, Video

Nº 182

Adjusting to a New Workplace… A Mutual Responsibility…

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Starting a new role can be both exciting and stressful at the same time. There is so much to take in… Recruiters, first-line people leads, and HR professionals often work harder during this time to support new joiners. A good on-boarding plan becomes super helpful and yet, the desire to get acclimated into a new environment, new colleagues, small and large cultures, new expectations, new goals can still be overwhelming… It is not uncommon for professionals to second-guess their decision nor to get adjusted in time. Either way, the initial 90 days is a critical time of  ‘mutual learning’ between an organization…

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Whirling Chief

“Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?”

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We have been getting a ton of questions from our executive clients on definition of values lately: “What does it mean to have a ‘value’?” “Where do they come from?” “How do we find our leadership values?” “What’s the best way to find my values?” Though it is hard to summarize it all in a single post, this is our attempt to answer a few questions at once. As human beings, we all have our own values, beliefs and attitudes we have developed throughout the course of our lives. Our upbringing, family environment, close role models (parents, teachers, friends), communities…

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Whirling Chief

Interested in a Life Experiment?

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“I have booked myself into a lovely apartment with a view for three days. This is my attempt to take myself off of autopilot and see what happens. Going in, I am aware that it is not going to be easy to stay clear of the “should“, the “need to“, the “must” and instead, focus on the “want.” I will be conscious of the way I think and react. Otherwise, the days would pass in a breeze, and I would leave the apartment none the wiser. I intend to be present, observe simple behaviours, and see the balance of automatic…

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Whirling Chief

A Human Way of Leadership

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We all know someone who was a strong individual contributor and once promoted to a role of people management, genuinely struggled to survive. We observed them to either cling onto ‘old’ ways of working, not having sufficient emotional agility built up, being unaware of presence impact or fail at gaining the respect of peers… Does it sound familiar? Marry the act of managing people the way one manages a task with demands of our modern day work environments and top it with day to day existential struggles of any human being and voila… You get a mess… It is no…

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Whirling Chief

Awakening Humanity at Work: A Leadership Model for 21st Century

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In our recent post, ‘The Birth of a Movement‘ summarizing our notes from Work Human Conference 2018, we shared news around forming of a wonderful community around ‘making work a more human experience‘. Today, Whirling Chief is excited to announce our collaboration with Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruistic Research and Education (CCARE) in building a new leadership framework that offers a unique and practical program focused on cultivating compassion, wisdom, and well-being. Awakening Humanity at Work: A Leadership Model Cultivating Compassion, Wisdom, and Well-Being in a New Age! It is no doubt humanity is undergoing a huge transformation, and our businesses…

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Whirling Chief

Video

Nº 177

Can Work Feel Like Not Work?

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A few months back, following WEF 2018, in attempt to provide organizations with some tangible ideas as to how they can map out job transition pathways and consider re-skilling opportunities, using the power of digital data to help guide workers, companies, and governments to prioritise their actions, time and investments, we posted a guiding report in collaboration with other experts. While the conversation around robots taking over current jobs continue, we have a beautiful opportunity to consider how we can skill up and skill differently across our global workforce. The VP of Innovation and Strategy at UPS,  David Lee says…

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