December: Learning to be grateful makes you a better leader

While it is important as a leader to drive performance by aspirational goals, without feeling and sharing gratitude to the efforts, support and the persons around you, you are not going to reach magical performance. Why?

Because all journeys towards magical performance both at individual, team and community level will have moments of doubt and hardship. During those moments it is vital that you have had also moments where you have felt grateful for the value other people bring to you and you have been also recognized for the value you bring to other people around you.

The main three types of people to be grateful for in terms of being a leader for magical performance are: 1. Your mentors and coaches, 2. Your team and close community supporting and working towards the ambition, and 3. Your family and friends that give you the second life all leaders need to have.

1. Your mentors and coaches. Mentors and coaches are an invaluable support to any leader throughout their career. They provide means to check the status of your capability portfolio and next steps to develop it. They also give a safe space to check your assumptions and thinking biases to improve your deep leadership skills. I am eternally grateful for so many great mentors and coaches I have been lucky to have in my life, such as professor Martti M Kaila, Markku Markkula , Veikko Sipola ; Jukka Viinanen ; Pertti Korhonen ; Kamran Kashani ; Esa Saarinen ; Markku Silen ; John A. Quelch , just to name a few from my, not so recent, past

2. Your team and close community. Being grateful and showing your gratefulness for the effort and support your team and close community delivers every day, week and month is a powerful team and community cohesion builder. Moreover, it builds resilience in the team and community to face and deal with the unavoidable hurdles and missteps that are bound to happen. Very critical for magical performance. Every success story is paved by misjudgments, wrong assumptions and mistakes that were turned into learning points.

3. Your family and friends. The higher you move in the leadership ladder, the more important this becomes. Why? Because the higher executive your are, the more you receive opportunities, temptations and self-imposed requirements to spend time with company and important external stakeholder events. If your are not careful, your leadership role becomes your only life. Your leadership role is, however, with you only for a brief moment, while we all have also life afterwards. How you take care of this second life of yours matters not only in terms of not living a shell of a life afterwards, but having the resilience to face any leadership situation trough the support from your truly closed ones, friends and family. We need that support and second (or first!) life throughout our career.

These were my thoughts on the importance of being grateful and showing it. What are YOUR thoughts and experiences?

#resilience, #leadership #teams