Leading@Google: Robert Steven Kaplan - What to Ask the Person in the Mirror

Robert S. Kaplan is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard University. He is the author of What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential (2011), which is the topic of his talk at Google that same year.

About the book:

Successful leaders know that leadership is less often about having all the answers—and more often about asking the right questions. The challenge lies in being able to step back, reflect, and ask the key questions that are critical to your performance and your organization’s effectiveness.

In What to Ask the Person in the Mirror, HBS professor and business leader Robert Kaplan presents a process for asking the big questions that will enable you to diagnose problems, change course if necessary, and advance your career. He lays out areas of inquiry, including questions such as:

•Do I clearly articulate my vision and top priorities to my employees and key constituencies?
•Does the way I spend my time enable me to achieve my top priorities?
•Do I give subordinates timely and direct feedback they can act on? Do I actively seek feedback myself?
•Have I developed a succession roadmap?
•Is my organization’s design aligned with the achievement of its objectives?
•Is my leadership style still effective, and does it reflect who I truly am?

Packed with real-life situations, this highly readable and practical guide helps you learn to ask the right questions—and work through the answers in ways that are right for you. By asking these questions, you can tackle the inevitable challenges of leadership as you craft new strategies for staying on top of your game.

 All of us who act as leaders in any capacity can learn from this approach to leadership.

Leading@Google: Robert Steven Kaplan

Uploaded on Oct 20, 2011

Robert Steven Kaplan | What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential


In What to Ask the Person in the Mirror, Kaplan offers a concise and engaging guide to help executives improve their effectiveness as leaders. At the core of the book is a series of critical questions to help you lead your organization more successfully and take ownership of your career. Based on his extensive experience as a senior business executive, professor at Harvard Business School, and an advisor to leaders worldwide, Kaplan provides a simple, powerful framework that includes seven key areas for inquiry that will resonate with business leaders in both the commercial and the nonprofit sectors.

Daily Om - Importance Of Looking Deeper

Never too old to work under the hood

As the weekend winds down, here is little food for thought, the Daily Om from March 4, 2011. We all could benefit and be better people with a little more self-awareness and introspection. It is only when we can take our lives and our selves as objects of awareness that we generate sufficient distance to see the places we are wounded, and to see how we act out those wounds in our lives.

Under The Hood
Importance Of Looking Deeper

If we aren’t engaging in the deep, inner work of self-examination, we may not be aware of the real substance of our lives.
It’s easy to get caught up in examining our actions instead of really deeply examining ourselves. This can be deceiving because our actions may be very spiritual—we meditate, are nice to people, take care of ourselves and others—and yet, we may not be penetrating to the issues below the surface. It’s as if we’ve washed and shined the surface of our car without taking the time to check under the hood. We may appear to be in great shape, but if we aren’t engaging in the deep, inner work of self-examination, the chances are good that we are not deeply aware of the real substance of our lives.

We live in a very appearance-oriented, externally focused world, so it makes sense that we place a lot of value on how our lives look, sometimes to the detriment of noticing how our lives really feel. When we get too caught up in what we are doing and lose track of our core, we sometimes begin to feel dissociated, as if we are not fully awake, alive, and grounded. This is a sure sign that it’s time to engage in the hard work of going deep within to rediscover the foundation of our lives. Without the substance that comes from looking at ourselves deeply, and working through the difficult things we find, our spiritual lives can start to feel hollow or shallow, as if there’s nothing at the center holding it all together.

Of course, the peace that comes with meditation and spiritual practice is an essential part of the whole picture of our development, but it serves us best in conjunction with the less settling, more chaotic work of digging around below the surface to see what needs to be healed, owned, or released. Then our actions are more than just an attempt to keep everything in control, looking pretty and nice. Fueled by the energy of a life in transformation, they become powerful expressions of courage and faith, further inspiring our own inner work and that of those around us.

Tags: psychology, personal growth, introspection, self awareness, Daily Om, Under The Hood, Importance Of Looking Deeper, actions, behaviors, surfaces, appearances