Have you ever worked for a “bulldozer” boss? Someone so focused on results that they leave a path of anxiety and intimidation in their wake? Or how about a “micro-manager” who leaves their imprint on every office matter while still complaining they have too much work to do?

If you can relate, you have probably seen a leader who is running off the rails. We all know pressure can sometimes bring out the worst in people, but when leaders of organisations lack the self-awareness to manage their negative tendencies the consequences can be profound.

“90 per cent of my job is to fail.”

Speaking at an event recently, that’s how the head of a digital company’s Australian division described her job. She was tasked with taking risks on an ongoing basis, with the understanding that only a handful of her initiatives would work, and that this was acceptable. Only this way could her company stay on the leading edge of innovation.

Imagine the head of an Australian Big Four bank telling shareholders the same thing. It would never happen, and neither should it.

When I think about the recent spate of leadership changes in some high profile cases, it makes me wonder: how effectively are organisations mapping their leadership strategies to the contextual environment that we are experiencing in Australia and New Zealand right now?

By that I mean share prices going up and down, trading environments changing rapidly and economic factors weighing heavily, not to mention the changing demographics and digital transformation of the work environment.

Your brain contains some 100 billion neurons and its blood vessels and transport systems stretch some 100,000 miles. Yet when it comes to the brain as a decision-making tool, one Nobel Prize winner argues there are only two sides of the brain that matter.

Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a culmination of two decades of research. His 2011 book defines two areas of the brain..

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” So said Henry Ford on why he used his own initiative to develop the mass produced automobile – and the same logic can be applied to the issue of gender equity across organisations today.

The reason Mr Ford didn’t ask the American people what they wanted was because he knew it was the wrong question.