Lead the People #BONUS: Finding Strength through Leadership Challenges with Dr. Douglas Scherer
Douglas Scherer is a dedicated father, speaker, author, professor, and researcher. His personal journey through the challenges of overcoming chronic pain from surgery complications and managing a global outage team led him to discover the transformative power of combining mindfulness with strategic decision-making. He speaks to leaders on ways to improve their mental well-being to tackle high-stakes decisions with clarity and purpose. His engaging talks and workshops help leaders embrace flexibility and agency through interactive practices and heartfelt stories. He is the author of the bestselling book, F.O.R.G.E.D.: Six Practices of Great Leaders in Volatile Times, which distills wisdom from leaders across various sectors into actionable practices. As a professor he teaches courses on strategic advocacy and leadership.
Top 3 Takeaways
- Think fast. In so many ways, our world of work is spinning faster than ever. Whenever you feel pressed to make decisions despite not having all the information you’d like, you’re in The Forge.
- Fight the fear. It can be tempting to embrace incrementalism and to protect short term results. This turns out to be more risky than having the courage to be flexible and invite growth and uncertainty.
- Go with your gut. Despite the rise of data and analytics, human intuition continues to play an important role in our leadership. Use the tools and the evidence, but don’t hesitate to complement these with what simply feels most natural.
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From the Source
“The Forge is really anywhere where you have to make a high stakes decision where there is not enough information to make that decision.”
“What's unique about this time is that things are now moving more and more rapidly and there's an exponential growth in the velocity of how these things happen.”
“Unfortunately, I have a long history of dealing with illnesses that have been either mistreated or couldn't be diagnosed, and some of them are very painful for long periods of time. I see that as very similar to the leadership experience when they're trying to do something like strategic thinking, but the board and the stakeholders are like, ‘Come on, make it happen, make it happen. And by the way, just do what you did last time, because that worked and we don't want to take any chances.’”
“People, once they reach a state that they clamor for, they do not want to leave it. Why? Because it's cushy there. It's nice there. We're happy there. That stable state is what really kills you because you don't move, you don't change, but you're happy there.”
“The ownership piece is extremely important. You have to own the failures and own the successes as a leader. You have to not micromanage and allow those people to own the unexpected, own the successes on the failures.”
“The flexibility piece, I relate a lot to overcoming perfection—this desire for perfection.”
“One of the biggest questions I get when I'm talking about intuition is ‘What about data?’ We're in a predictive, analytic world at this point.”
Connect with Douglas
Website: http://www.douglasscherer.com