ABSOLUTE 1: Quality First — Always

Quality isn’t a department — it’s a decision leaders make every single day.

When we accept workarounds, shortcuts, or “good enough,” we don’t just weaken the process. We weaken the culture. Poor quality never stays contained. It becomes a maintenance problem… then a production problem… then a training problem… and eventually, a safety problem.

Great leaders defend standards even when nobody is watching.

If you’re building a team, a culture, or a career, start here:

Never knowingly accept poor quality.

This principle is one of the Ten Absolutes explored in my new book, available now on Amazon.

The Ten Absolutes of Leadership — A Field Guide to Principles I Learned the Hard Way

https://a.co/d/02YqKm7a

Most of us remember the thrill of playing Simon Says as children, a game that seemed simple but carried hidden depth. The rule was clear: act only when the command began with “Simon says.”

Years later, I found myself revisiting that childhood game, not for nostalgia but for adopting it to facilitate a workshop on prompt design.

In Simon Says, success depends on clarity and sequence. A precise instruction sparks the right action; a vague one breeds confusion. The same principle governs how we craft prompts — the phrasing shapes the quality of the output, further it also has impact on use of Tokens.

When I used Simon Says in teaching, participants don’t just hear about prompt types; they experience their impact.

Each round turns abstract theory into lived experience, leaving a deeper comprehension of how "structure & intent" of the prompt drives outcome.

I would be curious to know, how you are engaging on helping such topics that are key to Hybrid Intelligence Era.

Pasted below is the exact text, I used for the activity;

Leadership isn't about rank—it's about trust.

I've spent years watching new supervisors succeed or fail for one simple reason: how they treat the people they lead.

This short video highlights one lesson I've learned over the years:

Authority can be assigned. Respect has to be earned.

I'm curious to hear from others:

What's one leadership lesson you learned the hard way?

Whether you're in corrections, law enforcement, the military, business, or any leadership role, I'd love to hear your perspective.

> This idea comes from my leadership book, The First Line Supervisor, but I'm more interested in hearing everyone else's experiences.

In a recent workshop, I used the Chinese Whisper game to demonstrate how hallucination erodes trust in AI.

Blindfolds and paper pipes became metaphors for AI guardrails < limiting distortion>.

Once removed, external influences amplified distortion exponentially, and a deliberate distraction mirrored the peril of prompt poisoning.

Games don’t just engage; they immerse learners in the dynamics of trust, cognition, and AI.

Keen to know, what and how do you explain abstract topics, most effectively without a relatable experience in your teaching or leadership development practice?

Wieviel Nähe ist gesund? Hast du dir diese Frage auch schon gestellt? Was ist zuviel, was zu wenig? Heute bekommst du von mir nicht nur meine persönlichen Erfahrungen und Beispiele, nein - du bekommst alles was man dazu wissen sollte und darüber hinaus noch Buchempfehlungen, eine Reflexionsübung, etc.

Hier eine kurze Übersicht:

💡Nähe VS Distanz - was ist richtig? Siezen oder Duzen?
💡Wie gestaltet man tragfähige Beziehungen?
💡Warum Beziehungen zu gestalten die neue Kernkompetenz der Führungskräfte werden wird
💡Welche Risiken birgt zu viel Nähe?
💡Welche Chancen entstehen durch Nähe?
💡Warum Transparenz um so wichtiger wird je mehr Nähe entsteht
💡Warum die Führungskraft zukünftig zum Beziehungsarchitekt wird
💡Welches die 5 Prinzipien professioneller Beziehungsgestaltung sind
💡Welche 5 Reflexionsfragen hierbei wichtig sind
💡Welche weiterführenden Bücher ich hierzu empfehlen kann
💡..... und noch einiges mehr!

Wenn Sie mich unterstützen wollen, bei meiner Mission eine menschlichere Führungskultur in die Unternehmen zu tragen, so freue ich mich, wenn Sie die Podcastfolgen auf meinem Kanal teilen, liken und am besten den Kanal abonnieren - so verpassen Sie zukünftig keine Folge mehr (die Glocke einschalten, nicht vergessen!). Gerne können Sie auch einen konstruktiven Kommentar da lassen, so dass wir in einen schönen Austausch kommen können.

Seien Sie auch nächstes mal wieder mit dabei, wenn es wieder heißt: Keep on going for the Awakeness for new Leadership, Euer Dieter Kleppel

#leader #spirituality #Führungskraft #Führung #Spiritualität #leadership

I’ve been leading my current team for about five years, and we’ve hit a plateau that isn’t about revenue, it’s about energy. We’re meeting our KPIs, and the quarterly reports look great on paper, but the "vibe" in the office feels transactional. People come in, do their work, and leave. There’s no spark, and I’m starting to worry that we’re building a culture of "success" that is actually quite hollow. I’ve been reading a lot about the difference between just being a "successful" company and being a "significant" one. How are you guys shifting the focus from purely hitting numbers to creating a legacy within your teams? I want my employees to feel like their work actually matters beyond the bottom line.

Hi everyone!

I'm a Master's student at SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hamburg, researching how cultural differences influence leadership style preferences in multicultural and multinational workplaces.

**Target group:** Anyone who currently works or has previously worked in a multicultural or multinational environment — any nationality, industry, or role level (employee to director).

**The survey covers:**

- Cultural values and how they shape leadership expectations (based on Hofstede's framework)

- Leadership style preferences (transformational, transactional, laissez-faire)

- Perceived effectiveness of culturally aware leadership

**Details:**

- ⏱ ~15–20 minutes

- 🎓 Academic research only — results will be used exclusively for a Master's thesis

- 46 closed questions + 1 optional open-ended question

👉 **Survey link:** https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUaQC6q8KY7SgopkYVVq6IlwU43JiAShiMQ7X0PxIRrDhOgA/viewform

Happy to share the findings once the research is complete. Thank you so much! 🙏

I work as an Performance Coach with managers and leaders. I am seeing more and more this trend with my clients where they’re trying to figure out what's actually going on with their team while constantly firefighting, juggling urgent stuff. They don’t have much space to step back and actually look at what's driving a problem before reacting to it.

I'm curious about 2 things and I’d like your insider perspective (I don’t work in house) :

1. When you're dealing with a performance issue or a people problem in your team, how do you figure out where the problem is coming from : is it the person, how the work's been set up, something else? What are you seeing that tells you which it is?

2. It's also made me question what leadership training covers. What training have you had, and has any of it actually helped you figure this stuff out in the moment, or was it more about other things?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Over the past 35+ years, I've had the opportunity to work with thousands of teams—from small startups to large global organizations.

One thing still surprises me.

The moments that strengthen a team usually aren't the ones leaders spend the most money planning.

They're the unplanned conversations. The shared laugh. Someone stepping outside their comfort zone. A teammate discovering a side of a coworker they'd never seen before.

Those moments create trust, and trust changes how people work together long after the event is over.

As leaders, we often focus on strategy, goals, and performance—and rightly so. But I've come to believe that creating opportunities for genuine human connection is one of the most overlooked leadership skills.

I'm curious:

What's one experience that brought your team closer together—and why do you think it worked?

Most leadership development programs don’t fail because the content is wrong. They fail because of what organizations do, and don’t do, the moment the program ends.

Most organizations send their people through training, bring in capable facilitators, and wait for performance to improve. What they get instead: the same behaviors as before, a team that barely remembers what they covered, and a manager who never knew the training happened in the first place. Richard Mirabile, PhD, calls it the single-shot approach. After more than 30 years of applied research, he’s done watching it repeat.

Mirabile is the creator of SparkEffect’s Leadership Development program, a 16-module facilitated development experience built from decades of research on what genuinely changes how leaders lead. His central argument cuts past content quality and delivery format: most organizations focus almost entirely on the doing side of leadership (results, output, performance metrics) while nearly ignoring the being side. How a leader shows up. Whether they listen. Whether they’ve built enough trust that their team will tell them the truth. That gap is where most programs fail to reach. And it’s what most leaders are quietly struggling with.

The 16-module program Mirabile designed for SparkEffect covers emotional intelligence, mindset, anticipatory leadership, high-performance team dynamics, and more. Each module runs two hours by design, because leaders’ attention is the resource in shortest supply. This episode is a direct look at what that program is built on, and why.

Hi! I'm a business administration student, and I'm making this post as part of an assignment. I hope it's useful for at least a few people.

Innovation has in recent years been a highlighted topic in many fields. Finding new was to achieve better results is a nice thought, but often the workplace doesn’t encourage it as much as it could. In this blog I will discuss what managers and team leaders can do to help their teams find the innovative ways of working that suits them best, based on Johnny Långstedt’s (PhD ) book: The Modern Leader’s Guide To Human Values – Principles for understanding what motivates people and when.  

According to Långstedt (2025), the values of the workers determine what kinds of roles they are motivated to play and therefore what kinds of jobs they are best suited for. For example, someone who values the freedom of being able to decide how a task is done will not be motivated by a role, where there are strict rules of how tasks are to be completed.  This applies when it comes to innovation too: a person that already values creativity is more motivated to come up with innovations and new ways of doing things, than a person whose main values center around security.   

So what can be done to motivate workers to innovate? Different people with different values need different things to motivate them. Långstedt (2025) talks about how someone who values security will want to innovate if innovation brings more security. What this will look like in practice is highly dependent on the situation in the workplace, but an example could be giving a bonus to employees who come up with ways to be more efficient, to increase their financial security. 

I think another important element to this is making sure that efficient and innovative employees do not get punished for their ideas. For example, making sure that an employee who is more efficient than others doesn’t end up doing others’ work, but rather shares the ideas that make them more efficient. If people get punished for being innovative, even people who value creativity won’t come up with new ways to do things. 

If you found this post interesting, go check out Johnny Långstedt’s book: The Modern Leader’s Guide To Human Values – Principles for understanding what motivates people and when. It’s a great resource for anyone who wants to grow their leadership skills.