Leadership starts here

The role models for today's leaders are creative people who are disrupting the economy with innovative solutions. The core competence of the leader is changing- from ensuring order and preserving the business to creating the future. The new leader is expected to push the limits of what is possible and organize efforts to make the impossible into opportunity, Leaders need the courage to destroy the existing and build the next. Fear is useful in decision making but hesitation is fatal. As new technologies and innovations march on, there is no place to hide for the timid leader.

Given that each generation struggles to appreciate the other, the leader has to enable the young and the old to appreciate and complement each other's strengths. Experience and freshness both have to be respected, and rewards have to be linked to what a person puts on to the table. For the leaders, it's another challenge and a learning to lead a multi-generation team. Even the leaders today found in medium to large organizations range from baby boomers to Gen-Z. While old fashioned leaders are tempted to play safe and practically kill initiatives with excessive checks, contemporary leaders prefer to create a culture of trust and verification. Leadership has to change as businesses change and, in the age of disruption, only the fastest learner survives.

Effective and ethical leaders are the need of the hour today. Part of the leadership crises is also because many still use the term management and leadership interchangeably. John Kotter in Harvard Business Review says about Management being a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing, measuring problem and problem solving, which aids the organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing change. Leadership is not about attributers, it's about behavior. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.

Leadership and Organizational Performance

One second is the difference between making a rushed decision leading to failure. It is the difference between acting out anger instead of applying due patience when under pressure. In our low-latency world, speed is a factor in any competition- sports, politics, and especially business. As the speed of business approaches the speed of light, one second is the difference between performance and high performance.

Leadership starts with the mind. And the birthplace of good results is the mind. Performing the right actions come down to making the right choices about what actions to perform. And making the right choices requires the ability to pay attention to the right things, at the right time, in the right way. Work-life has changed radically over the past few years. We are now experiencing distractions and information overload all the times. According to the former director of the 埃森哲 Institute of Strategic change, Tom Davenport, "Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success." Researchers calculated that while working, 53.1% of the time our mind is on task whereas the remaining 46.9% wanders of the time. Attention can be trained and strengthened. It is much like a muscle. We can enhance our attentiveness to the task at hand or people we are leading. Mindfulness is the key and rigorous practice of enhancing focus and clarity of mind. It's a practice of high-performance.

Are you a good leader or a great leader?

Great leaders are the culture builders as they play a seminal role in shaping and reinforcing organizational culture. Leaders commonly change strategy and structure but how it affects the culture reflects the leadership. Those who are leaders, always look for improvements. Complacency is the enemy. When one gets stuck, he/she goes outside the organization to look for the answers. There is no shame in seeking answers from outside the organization. The quest to be a good leader and to improve organizational results, culture and morale is a journey. When an organization employs people from diverse backgrounds, the way it creates a culture which is appreciated and adhered by everyone is the reflection of the leadership traits of that organization.

Employee brand engagement is about aligning and engaging employees with the organization's brand identity. Middle managers play a vital role because they wield the most influence on an employee's daily experience of the culture. Employees will only deliver to customers what they themselves experience, so you should explicitly integrate your employee experience(EX) with your customer experience(CX) and directly connect employees to customers whenever possible. An organization/company can benefit from all the ways if they have a healthy culture grounded in clear, differentiated, and active core values and the culture is integrated and aligned with the brand identity, it can grow more quickly & successfully. When customers experience CX excellence from a company, they do the company's marketing by generating positive brand perceptions.