Welcome to Leadership Lab with Wendy Hultmark!
This will be a monthly, newsletter-format email where I share light-bite content on a variety of topics related to leadership in today’s world and times. Whether in the sciences or creative spaces, the word lab has come to be associated with a space for experimentation, innovation, and collaboration.
In this new space, I will share tips worth passing on, words I have found worthy of reflection, and the occasional funny story to keep it all in perspective.
Drop a line and let me know what you think!
Let’s begin!
There is no protocol for this.
There is no protocol for this
Across industries and professions, there is a common word for what leaders are experiencing today—“unprecedented”. Another would be “extreme”.
What to do when, as a leader, you are presented with something totally new, and let’s face it, threatening?
To help answer this question, I turned today to Thomas A. Kolditz’ book, In Extremis Leadership. Kolditz is a U.S. Army Colonel, professor, and researcher at West Point, and consults with business leaders on the topic of leading through extreme circumstances.
Here’s some of what Kolditz offers are the most important qualities in leadership through extreme conditions:
Authenticity: knowing your values, being self-aware, and rolling up your sleeves with a willingness to do what you ask of others.
Purpose: help your people understand why their work is important, even when it is under scrutiny or attack.
Optimism: Keep looking for the path forward.
There may be a lot that is not in your control right now, but you can reflect on these qualities and look for ways to exhibit them more in your leadership.
Work with me here.
The Five Behaviors comes to the North Shore (of Massachusetts)!
I’m excited to share that I will be facilitating my Five Behaviors Personal Development workshop on April 10th, at the North Shore Chamber of Commerce in Beverly! This content is invaluable for anyone who wants their team to build more trust, have productive conflict, gain all-in commitment, maintain accountability, and get results. (Spoiler alert: these are the five behaviors, and they’re awesome!). The workshop is appropriate for leaders and individual contributors alike. It’s time to unleash the power of teamwork, gang!
For more information and to register, click here.
Beyond The Bench: A Peer-Mentorship and Coaching Group for early- to mid-career scientists.
Are you leading a lab and looking to grow professionally while building meaningful connections with fellow scientists? Join us at the ground floor as we build and shape this community together. Our peer mentoring group provides a supportive environment for researchers at all career stages to learn from each other’s experiences and expertise.
Visit my website for more information and to join the waitlist.
I just don’t trust them.
In both my teaching and my coaching work, I’ve lately noticed a recurring theme around trust, or lack thereof. What do you do when you must work with someone, or count on them for your own success, but you just don’t trust them?
Dina Denham Smith wrote an article in Harvard Business Review about this as a management issue, but I think her advice applies to peer relationships as well. Denham Smith advises to first pin down what it is that you don’t trust, with three likely possible choices: their competency, their consistency, or their character.
From there, you can start to identify how best to address the challenge through communication, boundary-setting, and being highly thoughtful about what kinds of tasks you trust them with, or don’t.
Whatever the source of the distrust, you must address the issue. Lack of trust, unaddressed, sucks productivity and tends to have cascading effects throughout a team.
