Innovativeleadership

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.

Digital leaders today should lead by influence, not via brute force. Great leadership is a good combination of advanced mindsets, humble attitudes, unique insight, proficient expertise, and exemplary behaviors, etc.

 Leadership is both natural and nurtured; it’s about trying to determine which competencies or capabilities should be used in which combination, and with what level of weight for each, for different situations, in order to improve leadership maturity. Leadership is intangible, but there are many tangible ingredients to make it shine.

Competency: Competency is a set of cohesive capabilities to achieve. The often described attributes of leadership competency with transcendent skills include such as intelligence, creativity, learning agility, empathy, adaptability, influence etc. Great leaders can integrate their professional competency with leadership vision and influence to create a ripple effect and make deep influence.

Leaders should keep focusing on building the new and nonlinear skills and shaping multi-layer, recombinant core competency for problem-solving and innovation. At the level of leadership competency, people are not only fluent in making professional deliveries, but also becoming more influential on innovating, coaching, and driving transformative changes.

Confidence: Confidence means the right dose of ego, not about egotism, arrogance or complacency. Confident leaders are open-minded, determined, adventurous, experimenting new things and exploring the art of possibility. Being humbled is not a lack of confidence, confident people with a positive attitude do amazing things and make differences. Confident people with a positive thinking and optimistic mental attitude usually focus on strengths, opportunities, and develop professional competency through continuous learning-doing practices.

Leadership is about change and direction. To clear the path, whether that be the elimination of obstacles or to provide coaching and guidance to make an influence. Confident people keep on recreating themselves. Being a confident leader means giving people confidence on where to go via a clear vision and how to get there via a good strategy, supporting them, also stretching them to live to their full potential, both individually and as members of a high performing team.

Consistence: Consistency enhances professionalism, builds trust, increases credibility based on the simple logic: Being consistent means being true to that in every aspect- thinking, saying and doing. Being consistent during the good and tough moments is difficult for leaders as they advance in their career, but it directly impacts leadership effectiveness and maturity. Leaders also look for consistency in their teams, in their organization as well as in the ecosystem, as consistency enforces balance, unlock growth, and harmonizes humanities.

Consistency remains a favorite mantra for leadership and management. Consistency and trustworthiness reflect the very substances of leadership – being authentic, building trust, and making deep influence for advancing humanity. Consistency facilitates efficiencies in operations to deliver a shared brand promise across boundaries, highlight some unique and outstanding ones as a brand and a personal tagline.

Interdependence: As we move forward and upward, we will understand that leadership is an inclusion process as global human society moves to the stage from dependence, to independence to interdependence. People are leaders in different arenas. Leadership can be collectively driven and shared through a connection of situational expertise in order to solve both strategic and technical problems facing in business and overcome numerous challenges.

If an independent thinker is good at critical thinking ability to identify blind spots, compliment diverse viewpoints, and make constructive criticism to make a better world. An inclusive leader views the world as an interconnected and interdependent globe, gains cultural empathy, refines knowledge into abstract wisdom to unify and harmonize. The thorny problems can be solved smoothly when they are the right person at the right time in the right place, demonstrating the right set of competencies to overcome barriers and lead transformative changes under complex, uncertain and ambiguous circumstances.

Congruence: Organizations or societies must build agility for adapting to changes timely and seek processes for collaboration, accountability, and integration to maximize coherence and congruence. The greater the excess of resources and diversity; the greater the need for team collaboration and the greater the need to keep them motivated. An effective leader is a means toward reconciling all the different factors toward a unifying and driving motivation. They practice leadership discipline through agile mindset, congruent attitude, empathetic communication, or exemplary behavior to keep the change moment and sustain change effect.

In practice, great leaders develop great teams, open to criticism, accept others' opinions to improve, evaluate and take corrective actions, give the credit to the team, recognize and value differences. They ask right questions, not get stuck in corporate bureaucracy, become part of the solution, not part of the problem. They harness empathetic engagement, deal with ambiguity and uncertainty via analysis and synthesis, coach next-gen leadership and professionalism, have a sense of urgency to lead progressive change timely.

Resilience: In businesses, every day is a risk, either at the individual or business level, resilience is the ability to respond to changes proactively, stay positive, focus, and flexible, fail over or fail forward. The level of leadership resilience depends on how people can prepare for changes or disruptions on the way, increase learning agility, build multiple core professional competencies to make progressive movement. The level of organizational resilience depends on how they can manage the gray area effectively in today's “VUCA” –Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous business environments.

The key is balance, giving enough autonomy to the people or business to make its own decisions or manage risks effectively, encourage learning from failure quickly and cheaply, avoid having failures that are too frequent or too expensive. It's about a human or organization being able to maintain its recognizable essential characteristics in the face of "disruption"; that could look like "bouncing back" or it could look like "growing around" obstacles to build strength and improve resilience.

Persistence: Leadership is the right combination of vision and communication; character and charisma, thinking and action, consistency and persistence. Some can have enough grit for a long time, others can only do it in bursts. Great leaders have a grit mind that involves persistence and a set of strengths that make difference. Character enhances leadership capability development via continuous discovering innate talent, sharpening professional strength, building courage and showing persistence.

Persistence is not the same as stubbornness. Persistence is about leading in the right direction and doing things worth the effort; while stubbornness sometimes implies inflexibility or even moving in the wrong direction. Achievements require persistence over time which inextricably involves a projected / longer-term goal/outcome. Character and capability mutually reinforce each other. It takes the breadth of understanding of situation and depth of cognitive insight upon circumstances to improve leadership effectiveness and maturity.

The digital era upon us is about hyper-diversity and innovation. 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. Competent leaders reveal character, courage, present the ideas with confidence, pursue the meaningful goals with persistence, show discipline to solve problems and produce expected outcomes effectively.

Posted in: Future of Leadership,Global Perspective,Leadership Master