Which Way To Go With Leadership?

Whenever we think of leadership

Some questions always spring up...!!!

o  What do you believe are the qualities of leadership?

o  What experiences were vital to your development?

o  What were the turning points in your life?

o  What role has failure played in your life?

o  How do you learn?

o  Are there people in your life, or in general, whom you particularly admire?

o  What can organizations do to encourage or stifle leaders?

In his book “On Becoming a Leader,” Warren Bennis, says, “The basic reasons why leaders are important. They are responsible for the effectiveness of organizations. The success or failure of all organizations rests on the quality of the leader who is responsible for the organization’s goals, aspirations of people, working conditions, who has authority over whom, morale, allocation of resources, transparency, and ethical standards.

He goes on to add, “ The first basic ingredient of leadership is a guiding vision.

The leader has a clear idea of what he or she wants to do — professionally and personally — and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures.

The second basic ingredient of leadership is passion — the underlying passion for the promises of life, combined with a very particular passion for a vocation, a profession, a course of action. The leader loves what he or she does and loves doing it. The leader who communicates passion gives hope and inspiration to other people.

The next basic ingredient of leadership is integrity, and the three essential parts of integrity are: self-knowledge, candor, and maturity.”

He ends emphasizing that there are two more basic ingredients of leadership are curiosity and daring. Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things.

He compresses all of it as follows :

01.  Mastering the Context

02.  Understanding the Basics

03.  Knowing Yourself

04.  Knowing the World

05.  Operating on Instinct

06.  Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything

07.  Moving Through Chaos

08.  Getting People on Your Side

09.  Organizations Can Help - or Hinder

10.  Forging the Future

The leaders of today’s digital age, whose world is never still or quite in focus, must depend on compasses like this for navigating. Maps, by definition, can help only in known worlds—worlds that have been charted before. Compasses are helpful when you are not sure where you are and can get only a general sense of direction.

Today’s leaders know that speed is of the essence, and that they must often act before all the data are in. They must assess the results of their actions, correct their course, and quickly act again.

Leaders should see the long view

1. Leadership is to manage the dream.

2. Leadership means embrace error.

3. Leadership is to encourage dissent and  reflective backtalk.

4. Leadership means to possess optimism, faith, and hope.

6. Leadership is to understand stakeholder symmetry.

7. Leadership means create strategic alliances and partnerships

Rosabeth Moss Kanter described some of the attitudes mandated by the current chaotic environment in When Giants Learn to Dance: Mastering the Challenge of Strategy, Management, and Careers in the 1990s:

o  Think strategically and invest in the future—but keep the numbers up.

o  Be entrepreneurial and take risks—but don’t cost the business anything by failing.

o  Continue to do everything you’re currently doing even better—and spend more time communicating with employees, serving on teams, and launching new projects.

o  Know every detail of your business—but delegate more responsibility to others.

o  Become passionately dedicated to “visions” and fanatically committed to carrying them out—but be flexible, responsive, and able to change direction quickly.

o  Speak up, be a leader, set the direction—but be participative, listen well, cooperate.

o  Throw yourself wholeheartedly into the entrepreneurial game and the long hours it takes—and stay fit.

o  Succeed, succeed, succeed—and raise terrific children

Leadership therefore matters a great deal. One does not have to be born with the characteristics or traits of a leader. You do not have to wait for a tap on your shoulder. You do not have to be at the top of your organization. You can step up to lead at any point in your life: You’re never too young—or too old. Leadership is a choice, not a title.

Leadership for our society, organizations and institutions to function effectively, we need authentic leaders who can encourage people to perform at their best and step up and lead themselves authentically.

Becoming an authentic leader is hard work. The process is not much different from becoming a world-class musician or a successful athlete. To become great at anything, you must leverage the unique strengths you were born with, while acknowledging and learning from your shortcomings.

If you want to be effective as a leader today, then one must be authentic. If one is not authentic, the best people won’t want to work with you, and they won’t give you their best work.

What do authentic and effective leaders do?

They engage others by creating shared meaning. They readily align people around a common purpose that inspires them to peak performance.

All authentic leaders have a distinctive voice. They are in constant dialogue with all constituencies; as leaders, they bear the responsibility of engaging not only shareholders, but customers, employees, and communities as well. They unite people around a common set of values so that everyone knows precisely what is expected.

All true leaders have is integrity. One component of integrity is a strong moral compass. They empower others to step up and lead so that people throughout the organization are highly motivated and give their best.

But the one competence that now most realize is absolutely essential for leaders — the key competence — and that is adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is what allows leaders to respond quickly and intelligently to relentless change. Adaptive capacity allows today’s leaders to act, and then to evaluate the results of their actions, instead of relying on the traditional decision-making model, which calls for collecting and analysing the data, then acting.

This is not easy. It is the hard side of leadership. The easy side of leadership is getting the short-term numbers right. Many smart people can figure out how to do that. It is much more difficult to get people aligned, empowered, and committed to serve a broad set of constituencies.

The world needs more and more - Authentic leaders, because they………

Lead with self-awareness

Lead through values

Lead from others’ sweet spot

Lead with wisdom from others

Leading in all parts of your life and encourages you to define what it really means to live an integrated life.