The Key to Effective Leadership: Seeing the World with ‘Fresh Eyes’

BEING a smart leader does not necessarily mean you are a wise leader.

In their book From Smart to Wise, successful US business leaders Prasad Kaipa and Navi Radjou state that wise leadership succeeds where smart leadership cannot.

Kaipa and Radjou argue that it is only by gaining a broader perspective that we can become good leaders.

Of course, our leadership perspective is based on the sum total of our knowledge, experiences, and choices up until now.

But if we limit ourselves to this perspective we will never be wise leaders.

The only way to become ‘wise’ is to see the world through ‘fresh eyes’.

Indeed, by removing these ‘lenses of limitation’, today’s leaders can gain a much broader perspective, while laying the foundations for a wise leadership style that is also much more effective.

Thus, according to Kaipa and Radjou, becoming a more influential leader boils down to cultivating a more flexible and resilient mindset that enables you to act and lead with wisdom.

Fortunately, almost any leader can do this if they address some or all of the following points:

1. Move outside of your comfort zone

By looking at things differently and removing the ‘lenses of limitation’, you can soon experience leadership from a new perspective. This can be best achieved by moving outside of your old mindset and adopting ‘fresh eyes’ to grasp hold of new opportunities

2. Learn to ‘let go’

As a leader, it is important to see things in perspective and streamline the many and varied areas of your leadership. This may mean increasing your focus in some areas and ‘letting go’ of others

3. Use crisis to your advantage

The next time you hit a leadership crisis, allow it to provide you with a different perspective. In some cases, this can even lead to an epiphany. By facing the fear and doing it anyway, you will be amazed at how much you can achieve

4. Allow talks and books to inspire you

By reading and absorbing the right material, you can shift your leadership perspective from passive, or even stagnant, to uplifted and inspired. Just try it and the results will soon speak for themselves.

Further to the above point, leadership expert and founder of Fast Company Bill Taylor outlines in a recent Harvard Business Review article the advantages of using art to help leaders see the world through fresh eyes.

Taylor explains how the best leaders see things others do not see - and how by summoning the spirit of famous novelists such as Marcel Proust, for example - a leader can move from ‘tunnel vision’ into a whole new world of creative thinking skills.

Of course, it is how you look at something that shapes what you see, and using some of the world’s best artists and writers as inspiration is a great way to increase your positivity, creativity and ingenuity.

This is reinforced in a recent article on the innovation and entrepreneurial start-up website Tek Mountain, which stresses the importance of being able to adapt in today’s disruptive and turbulent business world.

It quotes a recent white paper “Leading Now: Critical Capabilities for a Complex World,” published by Harvard Business Publishing.

The paper cites personal adaptability as one of eight “critical capabilities” of successful business leaders.

Lastly, this notion of looking at the world through ‘fresh eyes’ is further explored by author Jennifer Garvey Berger in Fast Company’s “Four Steps to Becoming More Adaptable to Change”.

To see the world more clearly, Berger encourages leaders to:

·    Ask different questions

·    Accept multiple perspectives

·    Consider the bigger picture

·    Experiment and learn.