Great leader
We all seek a great leader among our bosses, social groups we belong to or even among our friends and family. We want to be led by a great leader in order to learn a become one. Amid thousands of articles on leadership, we want to find something practical and clear that we can apply to our leadership development.
Leadership expert Roselinde Torres
Leadership expert Roselinde Torres sent 25 years of professional life on observing what makes great leaders. She was travelling to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices applied in companies, countries and NGO’s.
21st century leadership
Nowadays leadership is more global, digitally enabled, transparent, with a faster speed of information flow and innovation. Nothing big gets done without the use of a complex matrix. Moreover, traditional assessments can actually give you false positives, showing that you are more prepared that you really are at the present time leadership.
The three questions
Roselinde Torres in her research established that in order to be a great leader you need to answer honestly to the three questions. These questions apply to the leadership of the digital age.
Where are you looking to anticipate the next change?
Are you, as a leader, looking to your business model or your life to anticipate the next change? The answer to this question is in your calendar. Who you spend your time with? On what topic you are talking with them about? Where are you travelling to? What are you reading? How do you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities? The key is to make a decision to do something right now, to be prepared and ready.
Roselinde met a leadership team that does this practice. They bring together each member collecting the trends that impact them. They share these trends and make decisions to course correct the strategies or to anticipate the new move. Great leaders are not head down, they see around the corners shaping their future and not just reacting to it.
What is the diversity measure of your network?
Personal and professional stakeholder network usually includes only people we are comfortable with. Actually, we should develop a capacity to create relationships with people that are very different than us. That differences can be biological, physical, functional, political, cultural, socioeconomic. Despite all these differences, great leaders connect with you, they trust you enough to cooperate with you achieving a shared goal. Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification of greater level and solutions to many challenges. So, include in your network people thinking differently than you.
Are you courageous enough to abandon the past?
We are very attached to practices that have made us successful in the past. Great leaders dare to be different as they do not talk just about risk-taking, they actually do that. The most impactful development comes when you are able to build emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve, reckless or just plain stupid. People that will join you are surprisingly not the one you would consider in your network. Often they think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap.
Continuous development
Leaders continuously invest in their skills and knowledge. The effective leaders use effective systems or processes like Train As You Go or any other customs solutions that keep them up to date with the newest development in their filed. The key advantage of TAYGo is its flexibility and customization. The goal is to keep on growing!
So, let’s answer the above three questions and invest in the most important, in yourself.
