Wednesday, July 6, 2016

"Leadership Master" Book Tuning V: Three Powers in the Niche-Based Leadership

11:43 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

Leadership niche is based on three powers: will power, brain power, and knowledge power.
 
Leadership is all about future and change. Digital breaks down the overly rigid organizational hierarchy and blurs the geographic territories. Therefore, command and control leadership style is no longer effective to drive sustainable changes and leapfrog transformation. Digital also breaks down the silo and blurs the functional border, business border, and industry border. Leadership now becomes more open and trans-disciplinary, influential and innovative. The digital leadership effectiveness is not based on how loud you can speak, but how profound you can influence. Digital makes everything so transparent, and dynamic, it raises the leadership bar as well because leadership is no longer just about a few spotlight moments, but a continuous delivery. Every digital leader must ask: What’s your leadership niche in order to lead effortlessly?

Will Power: Leadership is complex, and although it has many facets, at its core, the foundation of leadership is based on AUTHENICITY. Ask the big “WHY” question to discover your intention to lead -The leadership authenticity and will power. And then you can dig through your innate strength and discover your leadership niche, to enforce your leadership influence. Top leaders are change agents, they are quite eager and enthusiastic to drive challenging digital transformation initiatives. Therefore, the strong leadership will can differentiate a real transformational leader from many transactional managers; a world class global leader from many multinational managers; an innovator from tactical managers. Not every top leaders are CIOs, but all top leaders acting as "Chief Initiative Officer" has become necessary to orchestrate strategy management from concept to post-implementation of all initiatives. Historically Top leaders have been front-runners in business transformation initiatives and it is anticipated that they'll bring their learning, best practices and working knowledge of past transformations into newer initiatives.


Brain Power: Leadership is complex and situational and there are numerous variables need to be leveraged in assessing leadership effectiveness. Even High IQ + High EQ are not sufficient to make a great digital leader. Today’s digital leaders must have multidimensional intelligence, to practice brain power for boosting creativity, dealing with paradox, overcoming silos, cultivating culture intelligence, and embracing holism. Because today’s top leaders need to deal with constant ambiguity, they naturally gravitate to a leadership role when things are unknown, things will change, technology is involved, a tough problem has to be solved, etc. The authentic leaders with multidimensional high intelligence have adaptability, consistency, profundity, and empathy to master business dynamic and cultural differences. Because the top leaders with high brain power and energy can clarify a clearer vision, shape advanced mindsets, and build a portfolio of leadership capabilities in lifting leadership effectiveness and deepening leadership influence.
Knowledge Power: Digital leadership needs to be highly intelligent and highly influential. Coaching and mentoring are going to be increasingly important now, and that’s why expert power is perhaps more powerful than other types of powers in the age of digitization and globalization. What keeps leaders successful is their intellectual curiosity and ability to continuously be open to learning and applying these learning as they move forward. A top leader needs to have both broad business acumen and digital fluency and deep expertise in the specific field as well. Transdisciplinary knowledge, cross-functional experience, recombinant capabilities and leadership skills - a balance of hard skills and soft skills, thought leadership and strategy execution capability required for professionals in any organization must be built on the foundation of the moral competencies –wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, and progression.
Leadership niche or strength is different from leadership style, the style is often at the skin level, but strength is built underneath. The leadership niche is based on leadership substance + leadership strength + leadership style + Leadership brand. The power of effective leader depends on a number of factors, the purpose to lead, leadership intelligence, the mix of knowledge and experience, the quality of information they receive and their collective leadership ability to operate as a team. And leadership is a journey!


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