Today’s Guest:

Sue Ashford is a professor in management and organization at the University of Michigan.  Her research interests include leader effectiveness and development, issue selling, self-management and feedback processes in organizations.  

Are you keen to step up to a leadership role but worried you aren’t quite ready?  Sue suggests that everyone has leadership potential, and you learn leadership mostly from experience.  But if you’re racing through your experiences mindlessly, you could be missing out on a lot of learning.  By mindfully engaging in your experiences, and being open to growing, developing your skills and getting feedback you can be more effective at learning leadership skills.

Connect with Sue Ashford:

Sue’s Website

You’ll Learn:

• [01:42] – Sue will be presenting at the upcoming Positive Business Conference on ‘Control Your Own Destiny: Leadership Development through Mindful Engagement.’
• [03:41] – Sue discusses the leadership is part skill, part mindset, and in part risk.
• [05:32] – Sue defines ‘mindful engagement’ as a set of practices that allow you to learn more from the experiences you’re in.
• [07:53] – Sue explains that it’s not possible to be mindful every moment of every day, but she says that you can be mindful in certain experiences.
• [12:45] – Sue says that experimentation with different approaches allows you to find what works and doesn’t work.
• [14:08] – Both anxiety and too much positivity can prevent learning. Emotion regulation can keep your emotions in a middle ground.
• [15:48] –Referring to yourself in the third person has been found to help regulate emotions.
• [17:14] – Sue talks about feedback-seeking and explains two strategies for gaining this information.
• [20:20] – Sue explains why managers struggle with reflection.
• [23:15] – The Lightning Round with Sue Ashford.

Your Resources:

• The Positive Business Conference
• A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Being a Better Leader – Ari Weinzweig
• Betwixt and between identities: Liminal experience in contemporary careers – Herminia Ibarra

Thanks for listening!

Thanks so much for joining me again this week.  If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this post.  

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Special thanks to Sue for joining me this week. Until next time, take care!