Please enjoy our leadership favorites — an eclectic collection of material that engaged our interest this past week. Enjoy! Share! Lead BIG!

Beware The Self-Righteous Fool (Bret L. Simmons on Positive Organizational Behavior)

There’s one in most every workplace: the guy or gal who has all the answers, and pity the poor fool who doesn’t view the world the same as they do. Bret offers a unique approach for addressing these folks and the wake they leave in office morale.

Personal Transformation – A Leadership Trait (Jenny Ditzler on Simon Teague’s The Leadership Expert)

If you or someone on your team perpetually points the finger of blame in all directions except at yourself, you’ll find some great thought-provoking questions and insights here that prompt you to take personal responsibility.

Don’t Throw The Bear In The Road (Lolly Daskal, Lead from Within)

For success in life, love and leadership, we have to get the exquisite balance between confidence and humility right. Playing off a Dutch quote, Lolly offers tips for not selling yourself short.

Overthrow Yourself (Umair Haque, Harvard Business Review blog)

Wow, talk about disruptive reinvention! For a team committed to helping people and companies get their big on, we loved the challenge Umair throws out to individuals and organizations. “Sure, you can argue that the right, true, and best purpose of enterprise is selling more stuff, at a greater profit, to benefit the already privileged more, through pure financial gain — and the human consequences are merely an incidental, almost irrelevant afterthought; nice-to-have, but as disposable as a plastic razor. But it’s a weak argument — and it’s getting weaker by the second.”

Power corrupts, but it corrupts only those who think they deserve it (The Economist)

Power gets a bad rap. It’s misunderstood or used improperly. Some say it corrupts. Others believe it to be evil and self-serving. Truth is, in and of itself, power is none of these things. It’s simply the neutral capacity to deploy resources to generate change and achieve results. It’s only in how one chooses to use, or not use, power that it becomes good or bad. But dang, the research results cited in this article are most disheartening: “the sense which some powerful people seem to have that different rules apply to them is not just a convenient smoke screen. They genuinely believe it.”

Sheryl Sandberg Leaves Work at 5:30. Why Can’t You? (Inc.)

The BIG team is on a quest to reweave the fabric of leadership. One of the really frayed portions is the high value placed on long hours which create yet another double bind for women leaders. Sometimes it just takes someone to drop that first pebble into the pond of change, and maybe Sheryl has done just that.

A reweaving leadership thought. “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.” ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

Make it a good week using your head to manage and your heart to lead!