Monday, July 4, 2016

Holiday Celebration and "Leadership Maser" III Tuning: Contemplating Leadership Profundity at the “Independence Day”

11:32 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

The profundity of leadership is to enforce leadership effectiveness via connecting minds intellectually and touching hearts empathetically.


At the siloed industrial era, leadership effectiveness is perhaps dependent on the hierarchical level of authority and brute force style of command and control. It's about how loud you can speak or how hard you can push. However, with the digital nature of interdependence and interconnectivity, great leadership is not just situational, it is affected by context, culture, including capability and resources, and the means to the end, rather than just defined by the end result. 

And digital flow changes the landscape of communication, collaboration and connection, instead of being loud, digital leadership must go deeper, to touch the hearts and connect the minds, to practice the power of pull, and to lead via deep influence.
Filling cognitive gaps: The digital ecosystem is dynamic with velocity, the leadership effectiveness is dependent on how capable they can manage changes and keep the digital flow. Because workers now are more educated than what they used to be, they are at least more informed as to what is going on and the changes taking place around them. However, at the traditional business setting, people normally 'close' the boundaries of the system, so that less energy is transferred and, therefore, fewer changes happen in the system. Therefore, to keep digital flow, leadership profundity and wisdom have to be enforced via practicing multidimensional thinking, such as critical thinking and embracing holism and nonlinearity. And leadership is about learning to manage the 'system,' in an 'open' manner in Systems Thinking language. Leadership is often the team-work. In order to fill cognitive gaps and build a high-effective leadership team, foresightful organizations should always look for complementary mindsets, capabilities, and skills that they don’t have so that they can build a high-effective leadership team to lead through uncharted water and blurred digital territories and accelerate the speed of changes.

Capturing Insight: Insight is the ability to perceive clearly or deeply penetration and it's the best sight to improve leadership profundity. Insight is an understanding of cause and effect based on the identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario. The more complex the situation is, the more different approaches and role gaming is needed to reach for in-depth understanding, It’s not the acquisition of knowledge that will make the leader, it is the desire to acquire and apply that knowledge, transform into the insight that will make the leader. Leadership in itself is a constant learning process that requires the leader to build experience and to share insight. Furthermore, insight is being able to identify the root cause of a problem or the core issues of a situation which leads to understanding and resolution in a systematic way. The difference between digital leaders and laggards comes from altitude, attitude, and aptitude that drives continuous progress.

Improving Decision Effectiveness: Intellectual decision-making and problem-solving capabilities are more crucial for today’s leaders due to “VUCA” characteristics of digital. Being decisive, framing the problem, and coming out alternative solutions are all important leadership abilities, but very few can get them all right. Hence, profundity matter and it is one of the distinctive leadership traits to differentiate a great leader from average managers. With overloading information and shortened knowledge lifecycle, great leaders need to present the capability to manage complexity in high digital transparency and stressful digital dynamic, and make effective decisions based on interdisciplinary understanding and collective wisdom.

Digital leadership can be perceived with both broader scope of the open system and in-depth understanding of its interconnectivity and interdependence. It should be based on the future trend, based on varying situation; based on what the system requires for its long-term sustenance. The power of leadership profundity is based on acute observation and deduction, insightful understanding, questioning, connection, discernment, and penetration, to deepen leadership influence, improving leadership effectiveness, and leap leadership maturity.



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