This past week while I was working in Los Angeles I had the opportunity to spend time with the CEO of my current company and over the course of these conversations the question of leadership came up.
This topic was discussed over the course of a number of conversations…
My belief is that it’s a combination of things that enables someone to lead.
However, in many situations over the course of my career I’ve seen individuals who are awesome at their jobs being promoted into leadership roles without the necessary skills, capabilities nor emotional intelligence to support their success.
Not surprisingly, in time (often relatively short) this becomes a challenge for both them and their supervisors when they realize that being good at your job doesn’t necessarily translate into being a good leader…
So why is this so common?
I personally believe that we have a leadership vacuum.
And in many cases the current leaders struggle with identifying and supporting future potential leaders.
Identifying this type of talent takes time, effort, and patience.
Leadership is not something you can make happen without the right environment, including coaching, mentoring and support systems in place to be successful.
Not surprisingly leadership spans all facets of your life…
How do you lead? How do you identify and support potential leaders around you?
Take a moment to reflect on this important question…
Creating an environment that allows them to actively demonstrate their raw leadership abilities is just one aspect of this process.
These opportunities, whether it’s a project or activity can help both you and them identify ways to develop and grow.
I believe there are five key aspects that are fundamental to leadership:
- Self-Awareness: Understanding and leading yourself is crucial for effective leadership. Particularly the ability to reflect on your inherent abilities, strengths, weaknesses, values, biases, and perspectives provides context and understanding. It’s important to be able to set your ego aside and be open to new concepts and ideas.
- Communication: Effective communication is a basic yet critical leadership skill. Your ability to write clearly, speak in a coherent and structured manner, combined with active listening are fundamental. As you progress in your career, communication expands by encouraging discussion, building trust, conveying your vision, and bringing others along on the journey with you. Developing this level of buy-in encourages others to bring their creativity and energy to support your direction.
- Influence: Leaders need to influence others positively. This skill includes motivating and inspiring team members, making decisions collaboratively, and driving change. Let’s face it, change is the underlying currency of business today. Without the abiltiy to adapt and flex you and your teams can easily be left behind. This goes hand in hand with innovation and the ability to look at business issues from all angles to determine the best ways to resolve, grow and challenge current ways of thinking.
- Learning Agility: Adaptability and continuous learning are essential. Leaders must stay open to new ideas, embrace change, and learn from both successes and failures. One of the best ways I’ve personally found to learn is to make mistakes and at times fail if you take the time to reflect and identify things that you’d do differently next time around. Another aspect is that you can learn from anyone, in any situation, so staying mentally open to this is very important. We must be a sponge when it comes to our ongoing growth and development.
- Emotional Intelligence: Is a combination of self-awareness, empathy, motivation, and your social skills all wrapped into a single term. However, it doesn’t matter which way slice this it’s the underlying foundation to leadership success. Without the ability to really understand the emotional state of others and be open and empathetic you will never be able to put yourself in someone’s else’s shoes. The other important factor that this enables you to be able to “read the room” in terms of the emotional state and underly tensions within when working with others. Listening more and talking less helps leaders manage more effectively.
Ultimately I believe that these five areas are fundamental to the way we think about leadership. However, as we all know everyone has their own take on topics like this.
As you read my list you might be thinking to yourself of other dimensions that are more important to you when you think of leadership and ways to develop and grow it.
This is what makes these types of conversations so meaningful in that it provokes others to think about the way they look at and interpret a topic like this through the lens of their own life and experience.
Indeed, there are not truly definitive or exact ways that will always guarantee discovering or nurturing the leaders of tomorrow.
It’s all well and good to have some basics in place but without the support, coaching and mentorship of those around these potential leaders they may never reach their full potential.
Like with many things in life, time and experience also has a way of giving you the perspective that is essential in helping identify and grow the leaders of tomorrow.
Providing ways to support this growth whether directly or indirectly will be up to you, but know this – you make a difference when you help others develop…
Until next time
Ciao!
0 Comments on "Leadership…"