About Me

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Throughout my 20+ year career as leader in the enterprise software business, I have always had a unique style and approach. Over the years, I have accumulated a number of "Slickisms" (after my last name "Sliwkowski) which are a set of one-liners, stories, and ways of thinking that can help people improve their leadership, decision making, and ultimately keeping everyone's egos in check. I am also an avid fisherman so fishing stories and photos will incorporated into the blog.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Grab Their Hearts and Their Heads Will Follow

Many times when there is a lot of uncertainty or significant amount of change needed within an organization, leaders especially from an engineering background try to drive change by providing people a vast amount of analytical and intellectually factual data. I describe it as leaders are trying to “grab the head” of their employees. Think about the anatomy of humans, the head on represents approximately 5% of one’s body weight. If you are trying to “move someone” physically, and you grab them by their head, 95% of their body weight will be resisting where you are taking them. Now think about moving someone by grabbing them physically where there “heart is”, which is the upper torso area. You have much more leverage to overall body mass of an individual, and more importantly, if the person heart moves, his head will have to follow. The important concept here is that when there is a significant amount of change, it is critical to capture your people first emotionally, give them confidence not in the destination but the approach and the path to success. After that, you can then provide then them all of the intellectual context behind the strategy..

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