Innovatevialeadershipintegration

Leadership integration is about bridging gaps, building trust, practicing visionary and strategic thinking with enthusiasm, and demonstrating unique personal leadership styles.

Leadership comes in all ages, forms, and styles. It is a soft discipline with hard professional competency. With hypercomplexity and rapid change, leadership is to bridge, not to divide; to adapt, not too rigid; to move forward, not backward.

Leadership effectiveness is based on the breadth of expertise and depth of impact. Often, leadership is not one dimensional, but needs to integrate lots of great ingredients, with a “big picture” in mind for harnessing collaboration and enhancing unification.

Integrate hard and soft skills, interdisciplinary knowledge and multi-dialect fluency into leadership competency: The soft leadership discipline has hard components such as interdisciplinary knowledge expertise and multicore professional competency. The "hard-core" of leadership also has soft touch such as communication and reputation. The leadership maturity is based on the right mix of hard and soft elements, substance and style.

When cataloging the "hard" skills in the leadership discipline, there are groups of skills that might be considered, such as vision, strategic thinking, innovation, decision effectiveness, technical proficiency, business dialects fluency, or problem-solving competency. The soft factors of leadership include authenticity, character, vision, creativity, empathy, humility, psychological health & resilience, wisdom, etc. Only by integrating all those hard and soft elements seamlessly, modern leadership can reveal advanced mindset, clear vision, positive influence, and leapfrog progression.

Integrate diverse perspectives or multidimensional viewpoints into a holistic leadership perspective: Leadership is about direction and change. When jumping into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal, people often talk about change as though it is unidimensional, or a universal commodity. Contemporary leaders need to be open-minded, leverage multidimensional viewpoints and integrate diverse perspectives into a holistic perspective that can close blind-spots and lead to effective decision-making and structural problem-solving.

Business leaders today shouldn’t reactively look through and respond to the business ecosystem only; they should proactively seek to create a “living” environment in which people can grow, and businesses focus on dynamic resource management, harmonized relationships, the long-term perspective, and scalable organizational performance.

Integrate leadership and management into successful business transformation formula: Many organizations that get stuck at the lower level of maturity are divided by so many gaps across leadership, management, and innovation, etc, losing their collaborative advantage as they are being over-managed and under-led. Leadership and management, in fact, are two sides of the same coin; you can't get an organization to perform by using one side.

Leaders inspire people to think about and reach for what can be; managers execute to what is. In most human endeavors, leadership and management skills are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforce with each other. A great manager does need to lead "at times" and a great leader does need to manage "at times," People have to play both roles based on the team or organization's overall needs and maturity.

In today's information overloading business dynamic, leadership integration is about bridging gaps, building trust, practicing visionary and strategic thinking with enthusiasm, and demonstrating unique personal leadership styles. Great leadership manifests respect, caring, core value, professionalism, etc, to reach clearly defined vision and strategic goals of the organization.

Posted in: Future of Leadership,Leadership Master