Leadership

Great leadership is a good combination of mindsets, attitudes, expertise, insight, and behaviors.

Far too often the term "leadership" is thrown around loosely and without any regard to the true meaning. The substances of leadership are about vision, influence, and progression. 

With unprecedented uncertainty and frequent disruptions, it is imperative that "leadership" needs to be re-imagined, explored, and understood thoroughly to make a significant impact.

 

Leadership is first as a mindset: Leadership is more about the future but starts at today. Leadership mindset is open to change, deep to make profound influence; inclusive to embrace diverse viewpoints; empathetic to understanding others, and innovative to do things differently. Great leaders are visionaries who can envision the future with clarity; inspire commitment, and persuade others to follow insightfully. They build trust, bridge gaps, drive transformative changes in pursuit of collective human progress.

In essence, leadership is an influence, starting at the mindset; great leaders have a compelling story to tell, share their vision and philosophy to bridge differences. Their gap-minding leadership must begin with the inner-self-moving into distinctive attitudes and behaviors around the norms. They are very open to knowledge, desire for insight, and hunt for wisdom.

Leadership is really a character, and personal development: Leadership isn't a job title only; or the hour-setting work, you must continue to learn, practice, and improve upon the leadership capabilities and skill sets. Leaders are both natural and nurtured. Look for the character with the right attitude, with the right dose of confidence and humility - be confident to envision and lead the team in the right direction; be humble to keep learning and develop unique leadership competency.

Leadership is a sophisticated discipline. On one hand, leadership becomes more open and omnipresent in the digital era; on the other hand, leadership becomes more complex due to exponential information growth, complexity of business new normal, and the variety of workforce, etc. Leadership is a continuous journey of professional development. Effective leaders have a very high comfort level with change and understand standing still is not an option in today's world with rapid change. So leading, and embracing change has put leaders more at ease because of its consistency.

Great leaders operate with the core principles: Authenticity, Courage, Creativity: Being authentic is the state of self-consciousness, self-discovery, and self-improvement. It means being true to that in every aspect: thinking, saying, and doing to enhance accountability. When you are authentic, release the positive energy, out of this comes a beautiful thing, the freedom of choice, the power of courage, and the plenty seeds of creativity.

In fact, courage is required at every step on the journey toward authenticity and creativity. As it takes courage to break through barriers and difficulties; it takes courage to be egoless or have thick skin in order to lead fearlessly; it takes courage to make effective decisions which may impact many people’s life; it also takes courage to know your authentic self, be creative to think out of the box and explore better ways to do thing. Creative leadership is great when you think, act and enable others with a creative spirit to discover, explore, improve, and achieve great results.

Great leadership is a good combination of mindsets, attitudes, expertise, insight, and behaviors. Great leaders are authentic, their vision broadens leadership impact, their insight deepens leadership influence, and their competency amplifies leadership effect. The future is in our hands. We have to reinvent what leadership is with new normal and new approaches, develop the best and next practice to accelerate its maturity.

Posted in: Leadership Master