Why Great Leadership Matters

How wonderful to see the incredible Australian of the Year Winners and also the Australians who made the list. They are great leaders and Australian icons who are making a difference to our nation and to the world.

Whether it's on the home front, in our schools, at the office or even on the sports field, most of us are constantly bombarded with messages about the growing need for great leadership. As is often the case with words that are used so frequently, it's likely that few of us have ever stopped to ask ourselves just what this term truly means. Exactly why is leadership so important in so many areas of our lives? 

At its heart, leadership is important because it gives us the ability to inspire action, and to spark and direct change. When leadership is absent from any area of our life, or even in our society as a whole, it is rather obvious. Just as it's impossible to steer a ship without a compass or rudder, leadership is the tool which allows us to set and direct our course and achieve our goals.

In the corporate world, leadership is important because it is what enables great leaders to make great companies. Through their values, great leaders are able to set and shape a company's culture, which is the engine for so many things, including motivation and morale, co-operation, creativity, integrity, excellence, innovation, determination and perseverance as well as engagement and satisfaction. When you are a leader, you not only inspire action and change, you set the course, and the tone, for your company. While the words that you speak are important, they mean little if they don't match up with your actions. Literally every action that you take, everything that you do, matters.

Great leaders are able to build great companies because they understand and are able to communicate the true reason that their business exists. As the well-known management theorist Simon Sinek so eloquently said in a past TED talk on how great leaders inspire others, leadership means understanding the "why" - why your company exists, why you do business, and then finding ways to do business with others who share your core values.

Great leaders gain insight and sharpen their other leadership skills by learning from their experiences. They learn early on that in order to experience success, they need to strive for constant improvement, to strive for excellence, by focusing on their strengths. Great leaders are also those individuals that have learned that when they fail, they should embrace their failures quickly and then use them as opportunities to learn and help them to sharpen their focus. They have learned how to use their emotional intelligence to make certain that they attract the right people to their team, people that share their values, people that can help them to achieve their goals.

Great leaders have learned to take the time to build relationships, to establish bonds of mutual trust and respect. They have learned to use the information that they gather in the course of these relationships to help them assign the right individuals to specific roles, so that each is best able to use their specific talents and abilities. They work with their team, serving them by coaching them and providing them meaningful work that gives them opportunities to grow in their personal and professional life. The growth and success that their company then experiences is simply the natural result of the core values that underlie their business. It is the inevitable result of understanding the "why," and applying the lessons that their experience has taught them, over and over in their service to others.

So when you ask why does leadership matter, think about all that. Consider the beautiful balance great leaders achieve as they manage people and processes. Think about where we would be without our inspirational leaders and what that might mean to our lifestyles, and to the prosperity of our country.

As Peter Birtles said in his podcast with Arete Executive; Do you want to be a CEO or a Great CEO? Think about it. Great leadership matters. You can also read about further about this in our latest magazine. 

Great leaders do build great companies and they build great nations, societies, communities, they build our world.

If you would like to be a great leader, pop over to our website and take a look at the programs we use to help leaders become the best they can be.